Fans pick 100 books like The Marriage Code

I’ve never been to the Galápagos Islands, but after reading Shipped, I wish I could afford to go! In this enemies-to-lovers romance, Henley and Graeme are office rivals who work for the same adventure travel company but have never met in person. When the opportunity for a promotion arises, their boss sends them both on a company cruise to the Galápagos archipelago, where they’ll have to come up with the best marketing pitch for the area. This book has so much going for it: hilarious travel hijinks, sizzling sexual tension, and detailed descriptions that bring the islands to life. By the end of the book, I was convinced I needed to add this destination to my travel bucket list!

This charming, deeply romantic tale about an editor whose big promotion is contingent on her helping a popular author overcome a terrible case of writer’s block reminded me of all the reasons I adore reading and writing love stories.

Working with this author leads Lanie to question her long-cherished beliefs about what she wants (and needs) in a romantic partner. She opens her heart to new ideas and experiences as well as to love, and her journey, both personally and professionally, culminates in such an epically swoon-inducing way that you will be hard-pressed not to shed happy tears (I did!).

Like the book’s heroine, Lauren Kate clearly reveres the written word, and this story is a beautifully composed valentine to all bibliophiles.

I can always count on Melanie Summers to make me laugh, and she did that repeatedly with this delightful story about a newly minted chef who gets stuck cooking for an author on a private Caribbean island.

There’s friction between Emma and Pierce from the get-go as he’s on a deadline and doesn’t appreciate her high-end cuisine. When he has a comical accident that renders his typing hand unusable, Emma steps in to help Pierce complete the final installment of his fantasy series (an affectionate spoof of Game of Thrones with expert world-building!).

I thoroughly enjoyed the organic development of Emma and Pierce’s relationship and was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how they’d overcome the obstacles in their path and achieve their happily ever after!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I crave drama. Like if my boss told me I’d be fired if I didn’t do a podcast with my work nemesis where we gave relationship advice while pretending to be exes? I wouldn’t even be mad about it (assuming that my coworker's nemesis is as hot as Dominic in this book)! 

This is a story that brilliantly combines the drama I crave with humor, tension, and romance, keeping me hooked from start to finish. Watching Shay and Dominic navigate their forced relationship was particularly nerve-wracking since they had to fake it in such a vulnerable manner: they were on air for thousands of fans to consume.

Though the drama initially hooked me, the depth of the character growth and the authenticity of Shay and Dominic’s interactions kept me invested. But please, someone call HR to investigate Kent, the boss who puts… show more.

Anyone in the education world likely hears about STEM all the time.

We know, intuitively, that science and technology matter. But rarely does anyone so beautifully make the case for what great STEM learning can look like.

In What STEM Can Do for Your Classroom, author Jason McKenna provides practical advice; turnkey activities; and helpful, plainspoken research that can help teachers change students’ lives through STEM—just as McKenna’s teachers did for him.

This is a breathtaking exploration of how ideas of time and space changed between the 1880s and World War I. Stephen Kern’s mastery of all genres of the arts and literature and throughout the Western world—Europe, Russia, and the US—is beyond belief. No matter who is your favorite intellectual of this era, s/he is right in the narrative. We learn of the massive changes in culture that we owe to this momentous period of time, changes that are still very much with us today.

But can you fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.

Peper’s novel is about how the technology available in the near future, which seems like a gift, can be used against you. (Sound familiar?)

In this instance, it is being used to potentially change humanity’s fate, and the main character has to decide what to do about it, if anything. The book stuck with me as it involves power, corruption, and the risks of relying too much on technology.

It’s a complex story, trying to encapsulate the threats our future holds, not only in terms of technology but the damage to our environment and how both could impact our survival.

There are elements of my novel in terms of having neural feeds, though the story explores how life would be experienced if you could capture every moment (not that I personally want to capture everything that happens in my own life).

In between other projects, I have been conducting research for a non-fiction book about the particular kinds of parallel universe that every story world creates. And that's how I came across Reality+.

The question as to whether we are living in a simulation is beloved of moviegoers, stoners, and undergraduates (quite a large intersection in that Venn diagram). It's also worthy of serious philosophical and scientific inquiry. David J Chalmers is a philosopher, and his book treats the question with entertaining rigour.

The book goes beyond the simulation hypothesis, though, to examine the philosophical implications of our inevitable colonisation of the virtual realm. At the heart of Chalmers' argument is a rejection of the opposition between the real and the simulated.

Lived experience, Chalmers claims, is real experience, as freighted with value and possibility in the virtual world as it is out here in the probably real, possibly simulated universe.

This book is full of “wow” moments. The author describes the history of numerous inventions to show the ingenuity of Chinese civilization. Some of these inventions are well known, like paper and the compass. But most of them come as a surprise. Until about two hundred years ago, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in most types of technology. In some respects, such as agricultural tools and steel smelting, China was two thousand years ahead of Europe. When you read this book, you will realize that for most of history, Europe was like a marginal third-world society and China was the center of things.