Today is the first day of March and I’m pondering my first book for Reading Wales ’26. I have two books lined up – one from the reading list I put together for my Year of Reading Women and one from my wish list that links to one of the buddy reads chosen by this year’s challenge co-hosts. Which to choose first is the question.
Continue reading
Despite checking the ‘Prevent third-party sharing for this site’ and ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ options in my blog settings, and adding obvious AI accounts to spam and blocked account lists, the AI scraping bots are back.
Continue reading
With apologies for introducing an earworm from my twisting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 dubious classic in the title to this post, I’ve noticed a couple of the blogs that I follow mentioning a new reading challenge: Doorstoppers in December. It has sent me scurrying to my LibraryThing catalogue to see how many unread books I have that fit the bill.
Continue readingSince I posted my thoughts on the collapse of Unbound, author, journalist and drinks historian Henry Jeffreys has written about his experiences as an Unbound author in The Critic.
Continue reading
This is an opinion. I’ve provided links to information available online, most of which is open to interpretation due to a lack of transparency on the part of the main actors. I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just trying to understand what went wrong at Unbound and asking questions that could do with some honest answers instead of the obfuscation I’ve found in the reporting around this sorry situation. I’ve updated some of what I originally posted for clarity.
As context, I am an unsecured creditor of United Authors Publishing Ltd. I’m one of the 7,894 pledgers owed an estimated total of £390,564.82 in pledges that won’t be refunded. My share of that total is £32.14 (I got a discount for being a loyal customer—the irony). I submitted a claim to the administrator, Opus Restructuring LLP, because I wanted the debt owed to me to be included in the official reporting. I have never expected to see my money again. £32.14 doesn’t seem a lot, compared with other debt figures that have come out in this story. For me personally, it’s not a lot – the equivalent of a meal out at a good restaurant, perhaps. Treat money, anyway. For some pledgers, though, what they are owed will be money they can ill afford to lose. Unbound traded on reader loyalty, including mine. Why wouldn’t we want to know what happened?
Continue readingI’ve been thinking about my review of Americanah since I posted it and trying to unpick why I am conflicted about the book and my response to it.
I was looking forward to reading it because I’d enjoyed other books by Adichie. And then it wasn’t the book that I was expecting. And I feel bad about it.
A book that isn’t what I was expecting doesn’t usually bother me too much. Sometimes badly written books make me furious, but I’m generally not someone who wants the writers I enjoy to write variations of the same book over and over. I like fiction that challenges me. I want stories to teach me about the world and the different ways of being in it.
I watched the film American Fiction a few days after finishing Americanah. It’s based on the Percival Everett novel Erasure, which I haven’t read yet. It makes a similar point to one Adichie makes, but more bluntly: that white people prefer to read about Black lives in ways that don’t necessarily match the reality of those lives.
It made me wonder whether this is a contributing factor in why I didn’t enjoy Americanah as much as I was expecting to. And maybe why I feel bad about criticising it.
Continue readingMr H and I watched a bit of a new quiz show last night. It’s called Puzzling. It felt like it was trying too hard, somehow, with its complicated rules, and it didn’t grab me from the off like Only Connect did.
But that’s by the bye. There was a contestant on the show who, during the awkward ‘getting to know you’ bit, revealed that she has challenged herself to read the works of Agatha Christie in chronological order.
Meanwhile, over on Instagram, an artist I follow is reading his way through the works of Stephen King. In amidst his art, the only books he posts about are by King.
It made me wonder whether both the woman on the quiz show and the artist that I follow are only reading the works of their chosen author. And then I wondered how that might feel.
Continue reading
Women in Translation Month was started in 2014 by Meytal Radzinski. Meytal has a page on her website dedicated to the annual celebration of women writing in non-Anglophone languages, and every August she encourages fellow readers to pick up a book by a woman in translation. Through her @Read_WIT account on Twitter, Meytal provides links to authors and asks other readers to recommend books using the hashtag WITMonth.
Continue readingI don’t know why I’ve chosen the title of a film I’ve never watched about a band I’m not that bothered about as the heading for this post. Perhaps because I don’t think meeting people is easy. And yet here I am about to pretend to meet people by answering some questions about myself. Thank goodness we’re not in a room together.
I don’t often do things that involve tagging, but Chris over at Calmgrove’s recent post in response to a new tag #goodtomeetcha invented by Mayri at Bookforager sent me off to the origin post.
I enjoyed both Chris’s and Mayri’s answers so much that I’ve decided to have a go myself. The questions are all as they appear in Mayri’s post.
Continue readingMy reading life is in a minor slump. I’m enjoying Frankenstein Unbound, but not enough to feel compelled to pick it up each day and finish it. Today I read an interview with the actor Rafe Spall that I’d missed when it was published back in May. I wouldn’t have had the same response to it back then, mind you. It was one of those serendipitous stumblings that spoke to me in a particular moment.
Continue reading
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 