You’re just a reader, standing in front of a bookshelf, asking it to tell you what to read.

Luckily, it has answers — or at least we do. The last days of summer are the perfect time to check out a romantic comedy, whether on a still-warm (for now) beach or at a coffee house where you might just experience your own meet cute. 

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We compiled a list of novels that are either out now or coming soon — but we needed a little help, so we turned (once again) to Leah Koch, the co-founder and co-owner of The Ripped Bodice, the romance bookstore in Culver City (and Brooklyn). Read on to discover a list of our, and Leah’s, picks for light-hearted rom-coms to get lost in this summer (or, if you prefer, in the wintry holidays).

We hope they’ll complete you.

“The Bump,” Sidney Karger

Love goes on the road in this rom-com from “Best Men” author Karger. In his latest, TC commercial director Wyatt and his partner, actor-turned-journalist Biz, decide to drive a ‘92 Volkswagen from Brooklyn to California to pick up their baby, who is being delivered via a surrogate. Things get … well, bumpy.

“Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream,” Tehlor Kay Mejia

“A heartwarming Queer romance set in a tight-knit small-town community, where long-time friends navigate the transition from friends to lovers, all while on a quest to save their bar,” says Koch of one of her summer favorites.

“The Design of Us,” Sajni Patel

Bhanu is sunny. Sunny, despite his name, is not. The two tech co-workers have opposite temperaments, and do not get along at all — but they’re forced to pretend to be lovers thanks to Bhanu’s impulsive lie when the two encounter each other in Hawaii. This is an enemies-to-lovers story with a tropical twist.

“Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous,” Mae Marvel

Leah Koch describes this novel as a Queer love story about childhood friends, one of whom is now a famous actress. She says of the author, “Marvel’s great writing brings to life the irresistible chemistry between characters, making it a must-read rom-com for the season.”

“The Friend Zone Experiment,” Zen Cho

Renee Goh seems to have it all — her own women’s clothing company in London and a pop-star boyfriend. After she gets dumped, her father offers her the chance to run the family business in Singapore, but there’s a complication — she reconnects with her college boyfriend, Ket Siong, throwing her future into doubt. 

“Hot Summer,” Elle Everhart

“Wanderlust” author Everhart’s latest follows Cas, who finds herself a contestant on a British reality dating show. She wants to win the series in order to gain a promotion at work, but her plans go awry when she falls for Ada, a contestant who pines for a real relationship.

“Just Some Stupid Love Story,” Katelyn Doyle

The latest from L.A. writer Doyle (who writes historical romances under the name Scarlett Peckham) is a meta-rom-com: It tells the story of Molly, a rom-com screenwriter who thinks love is actually a sham, but might have to change her mind after she reconnects with her high-school boyfriend. 

“Lavash at First Sight,” Taleen Voskuni

The second novel by San Francisco author Voskuni follows Ellie and Vanya, two Armenian American women from rival Bay Area families who can’t help but be drawn to each other. Expect some mouth-watering food content in this one.

“Let the Games Begin,” Rufaro Faith Mazarura

The games might be over, but you don’t need to let go of your Olympics fever just yet. Mazarura’s debut follows two strangers who (literally) run into each other at the summer games: Olivia, an ambitious intern, and Zeke, a star runner for Great Britain’s team. Talk about carrying torches.

“The Lost Story,” Meg Shaffer

“A fairy tale for grown-ups!” raves Koch. “Inspired by C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Chronicles of Narnia,’ best friends Jeremy and Rafe, once lost in a magical realm, must confront their mysterious past to help vet tech Emilie find her missing sister, with Schaffer’s masterful storytelling weaving together enchantment and adventure.

“Miranda in Retrograde,” Lauren Layne

The latest from “Made in Manhattan” author Layne focuses on the title character, a young physics professor who, after losing out on a promotion, decides to spend a year following her horoscope. She ends up meeting two intriguing men — but which one do the stars think she’s fated for?

“Name Your Price,” Holly James

In the latest from Southern California author James, a public fight between actor Chuck and Hollywood scion Olivia leads to the couple’s breakup — and lands them on a reality show where they’ll have to live with each other for a month for the chance to get a million dollars each. Of course, there’s a twist: they’re not allowed to touch each other, and the house only has one bed. 

“The Royals Upstairs,” Karina Halle (out Sept. 10)

Prolific author Halle, who lives in L.A. and Canada, returns with a rom-com about James, who takes a job as a protection officer for a Norwegian prince, only to find that the nanny for the royal children is his ex-girlfriend. Sparks fly, even in frigid Scandinavia.

“Sunshine and Spice,” Aurora Palit (out Sept. 10)

Palit’s debut novel follows brand consultant Naomi, who agrees to fake-date Dev, whose mother is desperate for him to get married as soon as humanly possible. It doesn’t take long for the faux couple to realize they have actual feelings for each other.

“The Truth According to Ember,” Danica Nava

The debut novel from Southern California-based author Nava follows a Chickasaw woman who pretends to be White in order to score an accounting job. She meets and falls for a fellow Native coworker, Danuwoa, but their employer forbids intra-office dating — which sets the pair up nicely for a blackmailing colleague. 

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By MATT O’BRIEN

Artificial intelligence researchers said Friday they have deleted more than 2,000 web links to suspected child sexual abuse imagery from a database used to train popular AI image-generator tools.

The LAION research database is a huge index of online images and captions that’s been a source for leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

But a report last year by the Stanford Internet Observatory found it contained links to sexually explicit images of children, contributing to the ease with which some AI tools have been able to produce photorealistic deepfakes that depict children.

That December report led LAION, which stands for the nonprofit Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, to immediately remove its dataset. Eight months later, LAION said in a blog post that it worked with the Stanford University watchdog group and anti-abuse organizations in Canada and the United Kingdom to fix the problem and release a cleaned-up database for future AI research.

Stanford researcher David Thiel, author of the December report, commended LAION for significant improvements but said the next step is to withdraw from distribution the “tainted models” that are still able to produce child abuse imagery.

One of the LAION-based tools that Stanford identified as the “most popular model for generating explicit imagery” — an older and lightly filtered version of Stable Diffusion — remained easily accessible until Thursday, when the New York-based company Runway ML removed it from the AI model repository Hugging Face. Runway said in a statement Friday it was a “planned deprecation of research models and code that have not been actively maintained.”

The cleaned-up version of the LAION database comes as governments around the world are taking a closer look at how some tech tools are being used to make or distribute illegal images of children.

San Francisco’s city attorney earlier this month filed a lawsuit seeking to shut down a group of websites that enable the creation of AI-generated nudes of women and girls. The alleged distribution of child sexual abuse images on the messaging app Telegram is part of what led French authorities to bring charges on Wednesday against the platform’s founder and CEO, Pavel Durov.

With each erosion of its amateurism, each time it takes a sandblaster to everything that makes it great, college football has a way of pulling you back in.

Part of that is because it’s so entertaining, a way for excellent athletes to do extraordinary things against good but decidedly less-excellent athletes, and for good coaches to outwit bad ones. Because the talent level is so disparate, the game’s mechanisms are easier for most fans to actually understand what’s going on, and upsets become more likely.

The other attraction, of course, is pure spite. A Minnesota college football fan, for instance, won’t just root against Wisconsin or Iowa when they’re playing the Gophers; if they see on the score feed at the bottom of the screen that Purdue or Northwestern is beating the Badgers or Hawkeyes early, they’ll scroll the channel guide to find that game and hate-watch it.

College football has abandoned virtually everything it once pretended to be about, but it doesn’t matter — at least not until it begins killing programs outright — because the old canard of amateurism and the old college try isn’t what made college football so irrepressibly endearing to the majority of fans who aren’t yet inveterate gamblers. It’s the fact that we’re all from somewhere and in major college sports, there is always — always! — someone to root against.

And here comes Deion Sanders.

Colorado hasn’t been a consistently relevant program since the mid-1990s, yet the former Dallas Cowboys cornerback has found a way to unite college football fans in 49 states against the Centennial State’s only Power 4 football team.

North Dakota State has a good program and a rabid following at home, but when they played the Buffaloes on Thursday night, that fan base grew exponentially. There were a lot of college football fans rooting for the Bison, and whether they were from North Dakota or Hawaii, they were disappointed when NDSU fell just short in a 31-26 loss.

This in itself isn’t a problem for Colorado. Even people inside Michigan hate Michigan, and neither that nor a cheating scandal stopped the Wolverines from winning the NCAA championship last season. Right now, Sanders is more embarrassment than boon for Colorado on the field — one game into Coach Prime’s second season, they’re 5-8 under his auspices — but off the field, the money and five- and four-star recruits are rolling in. Right now, his 2024 class hasn’t cracked the Top 50 for Rivals or 247sports, but if Sanders can prime the NIL pump and get out of town when either his kids go pro or he wins eight games, this might be a worthy gambit.

Might be.

Because Colorado’s program — and the school by extension — has become a disgrace in the wake of its stance (LOL) on Sanders’ availability to reporters covering the team. In short, Coach Prime and his players answer questions only from media members approved by Coach Prime (it’s in his contract). The current narrative is that Sanders can’t coach and the school is spineless.

The former is up in the air. Most coaches’ first seasons after taking over down programs are rough — Kirk Ferentz was 1-10 in his first season in Iowa City — and Sanders was 27-6 in three seasons at Jackson State. The latter, however, is unmistakably true. And we can go ahead and add the Big 12 Conference, which took the Buffs back in after the Pac-12 crumbled under the weight of conference expansion.

Neither the school nor the Big 12 have so much as sent an email to Sean Keeler, the Denver Post columnist now verboten to Sanders and his players, to explain themselves. CBS Sports also is disallowed from asking questions during team access, and it apparently doesn’t matter which representative is asking — a valuable life lesson for Coach Prime’s players.

Imagine running a taxpayer-funded institution of higher education and selling out your school and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for a football coach of unproven merits who not coincidentally has the emotional intelligence of a teenager.

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By Julie Myhre-Nunes | NerdWallet

I had never driven an electric car before, so, naturally, I made sure my first drive covered 500 miles across two states in one day.

Although public opinion on electric cars is still mixed, facts suggest these cars are not a passing fad. Electric vehicle sales in the U.S. topped 1 million for the first time in 2023, quadrupling the figure three years prior. And although demand has slowed, a recent study by industry group Cox Automotive found that more than half of shoppers previously identified as skeptics are poised to enter the EV market in the second half of the decade.

While my first experience with an EV was unusual — I rented one to drive from San Jose, California, to a work event in Las Vegas — it included many situations a prospective buyer would want to consider. If you’re new to EVs or just curious about what a road trip in one is like, here are the lessons I learned.

Maximum range isn’t the actual range

The 2023 Chevy Bolt EV 1LT that I drove has a combined miles-per-gallon equivalent (MPGe) of 120 and a maximum range of 259 miles, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. These totals didn’t translate to real life.

That’s because an electric vehicle’s maximum range doesn’t take into account the use of anything in the car, including air conditioning/heater, the infotainment system, charging your phone or the terrain you’ll drive through. It’s just a measurement of what the 100% charged battery is capable of.

It turns out, though, that an electric battery functions best when it is between 20% and 80% full, because going over that exposes the battery to high voltages that can accelerate degradation over time. (Think of your phone battery and how the battery dies faster as the phone ages.) So if you’re keeping the car’s battery between 20% and 80% most of the time, your battery should last longer.

When I picked up the car, the battery was at 80%, which gave me a minimum of 151 miles. I had mapped out my trip based on where I could find public charging stations, and I knew the first leg of my trip would cover about 150 miles while driving through a mountain pass. Before heading out, I decided to top up the charge to a minimum of 163 miles — but, happily, I got to the first stop with 60 miles left, mostly due to regenerative braking that takes the energy usually wasted with braking and puts it back into the battery.

Charging isn’t always available

I charged the vehicle four times on my trip, using three of the four largest public charging companies: Electrify America, ChargePoint and EVgo. Because all three charging companies function differently, this meant that each time I was figuring out how payments and plugging in worked. It felt like I was 16 again and learning how to fuel up my car for the first time.

Depending on your area, you might have a plethora of charging options or not many at all, and it’s not always predictable. Consider two California cities of comparable size: Fresno with a population of 542,107 and Sacramento with a population of 524,943. When it comes to charging stations with Level 2 and direct-current (DC) fast chargers (the two fastest charging options), Sacramento has more than double the number of chargers in Fresno — 359 and 174, respectively, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. And there’s even more of a divide in different areas across the country.

Keep in mind, too, that not all of those chargers work for every car. Tesla has the largest network of charging stations by far, but while the company is opening up that network to other manufacturers and charge-point operators, that process is very much in-progress. What’s more, at any given station some of the chargers may be out of order (two of the four stations I visited had chargers that weren’t working), and if you get to a station and it’s full, you may have a wait ahead of you.

Charging may take a long time

Enter a drive from San Jose to Vegas in your favorite mapping software and it’ll say it takes about eight hours. My drive required 11 and a half.

Travel time in an EV depends on the vehicle you’re driving and what kind of public chargers you use. DC fast chargers can fill a battery electric vehicle to 80% in as little as 20 minutes or as long as an hour, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. When I stopped at the ChargePoint in Coalinga, California, I had a minimum of 60 miles left in the battery. I used a DC fast charger for 1 hour, 9 minutes to gain an additional 103 miles.

But most plug-in hybrids and many electric cars are not yet equipped for that type of fast charging, and so realistically it may take longer. I didn’t do any Level 2 charging on my trip, but that technology can charge a battery electric vehicle to 80% in four to 10 hours and a plug-in hybrid in one to two hours.

In total I charged for 3 hours and 6 minutes over my 529-mile drive. For comparison’s sake, I drove a gas-powered car back from Vegas and had to gas up only once for eight minutes.

Charging anxiety is real

Awful. That’s how it feels to be on a long drive in an EV wondering if you’ll make it to the next charging station.

I experienced this twice on my trip — when I reached Mojave, California, with a minimum of 20 miles left, and then pulling into Las Vegas, with a minimum of 32 miles left. Both times I was genuinely concerned that I wouldn’t make it to my next stop. I turned off the air conditioning, stopped listening to my audiobook, unplugged my cell phone and tried to remain positive.

I started to plan out my options for what to do if the car died. I looked up charging stations near me using my phone, but had no luck. Worst case, I was ready to use my AAA membership, although I don’t know what they could do other than tow the vehicle to a charger. Of course, this was first timer’s nerves, but in survey after survey, anxiety over charging and range is among the biggest blockers to widespread EV adoption, with one noting that some 40% of current EV owners still report having a little.

A smartphone is essential for EV drivers

When you’re driving a gas car, there are plenty of opportunities to stop. In fact, you’ll see road signs along the highway to let you know when you can stop. This isn’t something you can rely on in an electric car. Instead, you’ll have to rely on your phone or previously mapped out charging stations. Despite mapping my stops ahead of time, I ended up looking for stops when I started getting charging anxiety.

Additionally, paying for charging may require your cell phone. Gas stations generally have two payment options: at the pump or with an attendant. None of the charging stations I visited had an attendant working, and ChargePoint didn’t let me tap or pay at the plug. Instead, I had to pay using its app, which isn’t ideal if your phone is dead or you can’t get the app to work.

Would I buy an EV after this trip?

Yes, but there are some caveats. I’m fortunate enough to be a two-car household, and if we were to get an electric car, it would replace one of the gas vehicles. I suspect electric cars are great for short trips, like a daily commute, but I’m not ready for one on a longer journey. And if I did buy an electric car, I don’t think I would rely on public charging. I would install a Level 2 charger in my home, which costs extra for the charger and the electrician but gives peace of mind that I could quickly top up every night.

Julie Myhre-Nunes is an editor at NerdWallet. Email: jmyhrenunes@nerdwallet.com.

The article What I Learned From My First EV Road Trip originally appeared on NerdWallet.