I read The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood years ago, and I was obsessed with it. So when I heard the movie was coming, I was really looking forward to watching it.
I have seen it now, and of course, there were differences, as usual with book adaptations.
But there was one scene I was actually looking forward to.
That scene where the seats are full and Adam has to carry Olive on his thigh.
And the funny thing is, I didn’t go looking for what was going to be in the movie and what wasn’t going to be in it. I wanted it to just unveil itself to me while I watched.
So I was watching, waiting…
And when I realised that scene wasn’t going to happen?
Heartbreaking.
Honestly, heartbreaking.
It’s funny how you can read a book years ago and still remember these little moments. Not necessarily the biggest scenes, but those little things that stuck with you.
I saw a preview, or maybe just a flash of a preview, on Netflix, and I said to myself, I’ve got to watch this movie. I’ve got to watch this movie.
And then, just as I was about to dig in, I found out it was based on a book by Nicholas Sparks.
And I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it. Neither the movie nor the book. Especially the movie, because the movie starred Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth from like donkey years ago.
So I put the movie on hold and went in search of the book.
I found it, and I started reading.
It is the book I’ve read for the longest time. It took me months. I didn’t know why at first.
But then I found out why.
As at the time I got to Chapter 31, I had even paused to write on my blog about how emotional I had felt reading it and everything. I knew the book was doing something to me, but I still hadn’t fully understood just how much.
Now, I’ve finished the book.
And, my goodness.
It was worth every damn page.
Every single page, from beginning to end.
No word was unnecessary. No part felt like it didn’t belong. It was amazing.
And now, after finishing the book, I clicked on the TV to finally watch the movie.
I watched for a moment and then shut it off.
I literally told myself, Let’s wait. We’ll do this later.
I can’t do this now.
I don’t have it in me.
Because I know I’m going to go through all those emotions again watching it, and right now, I’m just not ready for that.
But strangely, I think I’m looking forward to it.
Because if the book could make me feel this much, I’m curious about what seeing the story come alive on screen is going to do to me.
For now, though, I’m going to let the book sit with me a little.
This post contains spoilers for the The Last Song by Nicolas Sparks
I think I finally understand my relationship with Nicolas.
For the longest time, I have wondered why I struggle to finish his books. This isn’t the first time I’ve started a Nicholas Sparks book and dragged my feet through it. I remember doing the same thing with his book titled See Me.
I have been on The Last Song for some months now. I keep reading it slowly and slowly. I’m at Chapter 31, and I can’t stop crying.
And I think I’ve finally answered my own question about Nicholas Sparks.
He makes you read and read and read.
And while you’re reading, you’re wondering why you’re taking so long. You’re wondering why you aren’t flying through the book. Sometimes you even think, “What’s taking me so long to finish this?”
But I understand now.
He’s building something.
He’s building you emotionally.
He lets you live with these people, he makes you know them and then he lets you see their relationships, their mistakes, their ordinary moments. You don’t even realize how attached you’ve become.
Then, at some point in all that, he just breaks you… Then, suddenly, you feel everything.
Everything.
You feel for everyone.
That’s what is happening to me now with Ronnie.
I’m at Chapter 31 and I’m crying because Ronnie is thinking about how she could have done things differently at the beginning of the summer if she had known her dad was sick.
…oh my God. That thought…
“If I had known…”
If she had known, would she have been kinder? Would she have spent more time with him? Would she have looked at those ordinary moments differently? Would she have held onto them more tightly?
And that’s what is breaking me… Because the tragedy isn’t only that Steve is sick.
It’s the realization that Ronnie is looking back at moments she didn’t know were precious while she was living them.
Now she knows and she can’t go back.
I think that’s what Nicholas Sparks does to me. He doesn’t necessarily make me desperate to keep turning the pages. He makes me stay long enough to become emotionally invested without even realizing it.
I think that’s why I keep going back to Nicholas even when I know I sometimes struggle to finish his books. Because somewhere in all those slow pages, he is quietly preparing me to feel everything… And I love it when I feel. Deep.
My niece called me this afternoon. She wanted to know if I had come across the video of a book club meeting that had become very popular on social media. At this meeting, there was a question that apparently started a whole lot of drama. When I heard what the question was, I wasn’t even surprised by how wild it got.
The question was: Chimamanda or Colleen Hoover — who is the better writer?
And my first thought was… why?
I didn’t think “why?” because I think one of them is better than the other. That In fact, is exactly my point. I don’t understand why we have to compare them in the first place.
One thing I don’t particularly enjoy is comparison. And for me, if you’re going to compare two things, there has to be some reasonable basis for the comparison.
Chimamanda and Colleen Hoover don’t write the same kind of books. They don’t necessarily write for the same reasons, in the same style, or even in the same literary space. Not at all. Not even a little bit. They come from different backgrounds and different parts of the world… Their stories, the themes, approaches and audiences can be very different… Very very different.
So I beg the question, what exactly are we measuring?
Because if you’re going to ask me who is a better writer, my next question will definitely be… “better at what?” Gbam… Did I just Gbam my own question? Haha.
To be honest, this is where I think these social media debates sometimes become unnecessarily complicated.
Let’s take movies, for example.
Would you ask me; “Was You’ve Got Mail better than The Terminator?”
Better how?
One is a romantic comedy. The other is an action/sci-fi film. They are trying to achieve completely different things. I want to believe that I can enjoy both movies without having to decide which one is the superior movie.
Frankly, It’s the same thing with books.
Colleen Hoover writes the kind of books she writes. Her books have their own style, themes and readership. Let’s forget that many people don’t like her for whatever reasons they choose not to. Chimamanda writes the kind of books she writes, with her own style, themes and readership… And I agree, she is a genius. I know she is a genius.
You can prefer one. Yup, of course you can.
You can say, I connect more with Chimamanda’s writing… Or you can say, I prefer Colleen Hoover’s storytelling.
You can even say, I don’t enjoy either of them. Yes… Trust me, this option exists.
All of those options are perfectly reasonable opinions.
So now when we ask, Who is the better writer? we suddenly create this imaginary competition where one person has to win and the other has to lose.
I think out loud and ask you… why?
I think one of the things we forget as readers is that books don’t all have to do the same thing.
Sometimes I want a book that makes me think. Sometimes I want something that teaches me something. Sometimes I want beautiful prose and complicated themes that leave me quizzical.
And sometimes? I just want to lie down and read a story. A simple story. That’s allowed too. It’s just like when I want to lie down and watch a simple movie I go for cheesy, sweet and simple Hallmark.
So seriously, I must say, I find some of these book debates amusing. We take two completely different things and put them in a boxing ring and then get angry because people are choosing different fighters.
Maybe the better question isn’t Chimamanda or Colleen Hoover?
Maybe it’s: What do you enjoy reading, and why? Should I Gbam again?
The thing is, I don’t need Colleen Hoover to write like Chimamanda for me to appreciate Colleen Hoover.
And I don’t need Chimamanda to write like Colleen Hoover for me to appreciate Chimamanda.
There is room on my bookshelf for different kinds of writers.
And honestly, there is room in the world for us to like different things without turning every preference into a competition.
Not everything needs a winner.
Some books by Chimamanda NgoziAdichie: Purple Hibiscus (2003) Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) — short stories Americanah (2013) Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017) Notes on Grief (2021) Dream Count (2025)
Some books by Colleen Hoover: Losing Hope (2013) Maybe Someday (2014) Confess (2015) It Ends with Us (2016) It Starts with Us (2022) Without Merit (2017) Verity (2018) Regretting You (2019) All Your Perfects (2018) Reminders of Him (2022) November 9 (2015) Ugly Love (2014)
That book stayed with me… Still on my mind. It won’t let me be.
While I was reading I couldn’t stop thinking about one moment, that small moment when Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff home. Just like that. He didn’t even give an explanation. Just… “this child has no one, so now he’s mine.”
And look at what that one decision turned into.
It honestly messed with me a bit.
Usually, we like to believe that if you do something kind, it will lead to something good. Right?… Simple. Clean. You help someone, things get better. But that’s not what happens here at all. That one act of compassion ends up stirring jealousy, resentment, and eventually so much damage it spills into the next generation.
And it made me think about real life.
I’ve had moments where I meant well… really well, but things didn’t turn out the way I imagined. Sometimes people misunderstood me. Sometimes what I gave created expectations I didn’t even know I was setting. Sometimes it just… complicated things.
This doesn’t mean I was wrong to be kind… I think people are just not simple.
Everyone is carrying something. Pride, insecurity, pain, history. So when you step in with “good intentions,” you’re not stepping into an empty space, you’re stepping into all of that.
That’s what happened with Heathcliff. The kindness was real, but the environment wasn’t healthy… And that changed everything.
I don’t think the lesson is “don’t be kind.” That feels too harsh and even too defensive.
If anything, it’s this: good intentions are not enough on their own… …What happens after matters. How people receive what you give matters. The space you’re giving into matters…. And sometimes, even when you do everything from a good place, things can still go sideways.
It’s kind of uncomfortable to admit that, but it also feels honest.
So maybe I’m learning to hold my kindness with a bit more awareness… Not to stop giving, but to understand that it doesn’t give me control over the outcome… I guess that’s the hard part, isn’t it?
At the beginning of this year, sitting quietly on my TBR list, was The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros… And I was afraid of it. I was actually very afraid.
By the time I finally picked it up this past weekend, I had already spent months seeing reactions online. TikTok videos of people crying mid-review. Instagram captions, warning readers that the book would “destroy” them emotionally. Comments from people saying they had to pause while reading just to recover.
So I delayed it… And delayed it some more, until finally, this weekend, I summoned the courage to read it.
I finished it in two days.
And strangely enough, when I got to the end, my biggest feeling was not devastation.
It was perspective.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the book is emotional. There are losses that hurt. Endings that ache. Moments where life feels painfully unfair. It definitely did not tie everything up in a neat, perfect bow.
But maybe because I had spent so much time preparing for emotional destruction, I entered the story differently from many people who read it blindly. I wasn’t reading for shock anymore. I was reading carefully, almost cautiously, trying to understand what everyone else had experienced so intensely.
What I found wasn’t a book that ruined me. I found a book that quietly reminded me that life will always be both beautiful and painful at the same time.
There’s a line repeated in the book: “Take your happy.”
And somehow, that became the thing that stayed with me most… Not the tragedy. Not even the heartbreak.
That line… Take your happy.
Why?… Ljfe is unpredictable… Sometimes the future changes without permission… And waiting for a perfect life before allowing yourself to be happy is a dangerous thing.
I think that’s what the book really left with me. Not fear or emotional ruin… Just Acceptance… The understanding that life is not divided into clean categories of “good times” and “bad times.” Most of the time, they exist together. You can grieve and still laugh. You can carry fear and still love people deeply. You can know pain is possible and still choose happiness anyway.
And maybe that’s why the ending did not break me the way I expected it to.
I also realized something else while reading it…; social media sometimes shapes our emotional expectations before we even open a book.
People online prepared me for emotional devastation so thoroughly that I think I unconsciously built armor around myself before chapter one. I expected to be wrecked. I expected tears. I expected emotional collapse.
Instead, I found reflection.
And honestly, I think that is okay too. I told myself that the fact I don’t cry does not mean the story failed to touch me. Sometimes the stories that affect us most are the ones that settle quietly into our thoughts instead of exploding out of us emotionally.
I liked the book… In all the loss, pain and grief, it kept whispering something incredibly human: Take your happy while it’s here.
And maybe that is enough.
The next book I’m bracing myself for is A little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.
I have been reading romance novels since I was a teenager…
I didn’t even know this was a thing.
Somewhere along the way, quietly and without any fanfare… the “why choose” trope found its way onto the shelves, built an audience, and settled into its own space in the world of romance… and I completely missed it.
From what I’ve now come to understand, the idea itself isn’t entirely new. Its roots stretch back into earlier romance (especially in fantasy and paranormal spaces) where a woman might be surrounded by multiple love interests, where each interest offers something different. But in those stories, there was almost always a final decision. A choice had to be made. One stayed, the others faded away. That was the rule…
Then something shifted. I have come to learn, that in the early to mid 2010s, particularly within indie publishing spaces, writers began to experiment. They questioned that rule. What if she didn’t have to choose? What if love didn’t need to be reduced to a single outcome? And just like that, without asking permission, the trope evolved.
My research tells me that by the late 2010s into the early 2020s, it had fully arrived. Not just as an idea, but as a recognized and named trope. Platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Wattpad gave writers the freedom to explore it, and readers responded. Strongly.
Fans of this trope say there is something quietly relieving about it. No tension of “who will she pick.” No sense of loss when a favorite character is left behind. No pressure for one person to be everything. Just… an expansion of what love can look like.
And yet, here I am, only just discovering it.
But when I think about it, it makes sense why I didn’t.
This trope tends to live in genres I don’t naturally gravitate toward… fantasy romance, dark romance, paranormal worlds, academy settings (except the Love Hypothesis 😁)… spaces where imagination stretches wider and the rules of reality are more flexible. That’s where “why choose” feels most at home.
For me, I tend to sit more with quieter, grounded stories. The slow ones. The reflective ones. The ones that feel like sitting by a window in the evening with your thoughts. So yes, of course it slipped past me.
Still, I find something about it… interesting. It challenges something we have long accepted without questioning that love must be singular to be valid. That choosing one means losing others. That fullness only comes in one form. “What if it didn’t?” it seems to ask.
So, while I see why people would like the trope, I on the other hand, believe in choosing. I believe in the weight of it. In the clarity of it. I believe, even in the ache that sometimes comes with it.
I love the deep feeling that comes with “I choose You”… Not everyone. Not everything. Just… you. Even if it hurts. Even if it costs something. Even if it doesn’t come easy. That, to me, is where love sharpens into meaning.
So while the shelves may be expanding, and the stories evolving, I find myself still drawn to that singular thread… The courage and the consequence… of choosing one.
There’s something quietly beautiful about a thrift book. It’s not just the lower price or the softened pages, it’s the feeling that the story has been held before. Maybe someone paused where you will pause. Maybe they underlined a sentence that will mean something entirely different to you. There’s a quiet continuity in it.
I stumbled into the world of thrift books two years ago on Instagram. I had no idea it existed in my location. I gradually began adding to my little library.
Today I walked into one of the bookshops I used to buy books from and found out they had some affordable books… Apparently they are thrifting these days.
I bought True Believer by Nicholas Sparks. I opened it and found a hug inside.
It was a simple picture, two women, wrapped in each other in a quiet, unguarded moment. No names, no date, no explanation. Just warmth, captured and tucked between pages, as though someone once needed to keep that feeling close.
I paused longer than I expected to.
Who were they to each other? Friends, sisters, mother and daughter? Was it a reunion or a goodbye? There’s something about a hug that holds both joy and ache at the same time… and somehow, that feeling lingered even without the story.
The book was second-hand, but the moment inside it didn’t feel used or old. It felt alive.
I’m about to begin Wuthering Heights. I actually ventured into it weeks ago. Somewhere around chapter four, I realized I was reading it wrong.
It had been a very hectic period for me at work, plus the weather had been unbearable… Temperatures over 40° in the day, and just a little under that at night. So I went with In Her Own League and then mostly television at that time.
Now I am ready for Wuthering Heights.
Not just read it… but enter it.
I’ve heard enough and also tried before, so I know this isn’t the kind of story you rush through. It’s not a quick, feel-good romance you skim between moments… It asks for something slower. Something more present.
I’m learning to approach it differently.
Not with urgency… but with stillness.
Like sitting alone, in a corner, on a beautiful day. Maybe with some coffee, maybe just water. Not chasing the story…. but watching it unfold.
Watching people unravel…
There’s something almost comforting about that idea. To read not for speed, but for depth. I want to let the atmosphere settle in. I want to observe, rather than judge too quickly…
So this is me, at the threshold.
About to step into a world that doesn’t promise ease… but promises to be felt, really felt. And that’s why I will take my time… No rush.
I wonder what Gabe Kapler has to say about the recent explosion of his real videos and some AI generated ones too, all over tiktok.
Last June, I read all five of the Windy City Series by Liz Tomforde. It was the perfect balm for a numb month. The series is in Five parts. Each part (Book) focusing on one of the five couples in the series; Mile High, The Right Move, Caught Up, Play Along and Rewind It Back.
Shortly after I had finished reading them, I found out there was about to be a spin off, which was due early 2026. I waited patiently and the day finally came. The sixth book, titled ‘In Her Own League’.
I’m not one to rush a book, I usually take me time… I often pause deliberately just to savour and enjoy a book… And sometimes make notes too. So I wonder why I rushed this one in one day.
To be totally honest, I couldn’t just put the book down. It was what I expected and more. I think it just became my favourite of all in the series.
I bumped Caught up to second place and took In Her Own League straight to number one.
I read almost any genre of books, but Whenever I dive into romance, I have the specific tropes I prefer. Slow burn, enemies to lovers…with all the tension and banter, close proximity, second chance and the likes. Liz Tomforde just nailed almost all my preferences in this last one.
That’s where Gabe Kapler comes in. I believe the main male character in this final book was written with Kapler in mind. Every description just screams Gabe Kapler. So in the booktok world, the Character Emmet ‘Monty’ Montgomery is Gabe Kapler.
There must be thousands of videos of Kapler being used as Emmet. Makes me wonder, does he like it? Is he flattered about this? Is he upset about this? Has he read the book? I wish I knew.
The thing is, when we disappear into romance fiction, we imagine that character and leave him in our heads, but to have to not imagine, but to know that it’s him, that clean, rugged face, the beard (very intentional, very effective), the fitness… man looks like he lives in a gym, and that focused, slightly broody expression, and then that tattoo on the back of his hand… To know he actually exists…
…don’t do that again Liz Tomforde, I prefer them in my imagination.
