
Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a bobby Christmas and New Year break – no matter where you are in the world 🙂
After working from home continuously for the last six months, it looks like I’ll be heading back into the office within the next few weeks. This means a commute….a frigging long commute. Three pieces of public transport (two trains and one bus) that collectively only run for a total of 35 minutes – but then I have all the faffing about of waiting at stations, walking to the bus stop, etc. The entire trip takes me roughly 1 hour and 20 minutes.
What can I do on this commute you may ask? Well, I sometimes spend the entire trip scrolling through Instagram for images/videos of Jensen Ackles, Misha Collins, Chris Evans to name a few.
Before I know it, I’ve not really achieved anything (except from a lady boner!) and I’m not quite sure how interesting that will be to our audience to read about that….. So, I make sure I have plenty of reading material.
I tend to carry my Kindle with me, a physical book and an audiobook queued up ready. You never know what reading conditions you may find yourself in!
January is my first deep delve into the world of Dark Romance. A genre within Romancelandia that covers many tropes deemed ‘too extreme’ or ‘disgusting’. Taboo romance (age gap, student/teacher), Mafia, BDSM, Serial Killers, Dub/Con – dark romance covers a lot of ground.
If you’re thinking ‘what the chuff is she on about?’ and ‘why the chuff would you want to read that?’ then there’s a great article from Jessica Avery on Book Riot that talks about the very topic and why many readers are invited into this particular genre.
With all that said, I’ve got a stack of books on my TBR to test the waters. See what tropes within DR tickle me the most, what authors I want to read more of. I’m particularly keen to discover smaller authors this year as well as the big hitters.
So with all that waffle out the way – let me show you my physical bag for January 🙂

Featured books/merch for January are;
SUGAR DADDIES by Jade West
DEN OF VIPERS by K.A. Knight
CORRUPT by Penelope Douglas
The ‘Romance Rocks’ tote bag was gifted at a book convention by the awesome team at Mills & Boon
‘Castiel Bookmark’ by indie artist Vinniecha on Etsy
Constellation Book sleeve by Book Buddle on Etsy
What is not featured is my Kindle which has a number of Bully/Reverse Harem books which I’ve borrowed on Kindle Unlimited. Some have been on there since October! So my aim is to also have these read before the end of the month. Less stalking and perving…more reading. I shall be repeating this mantra to myself a lot!
Let us know what’s in your book bag for January. Have you read of any of the books I’ve featured today?
Until February…happy reading! 🖤
[S]