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.
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How was your 2025 in books? Mine went pretty well. Despite finishing 2024 with 172 unread books, I somehow started 2025 with 176 books forming Mount To Read, of which I aimed to read 40. I called it my Year of Reading Independently, because a good proportion of my backlog is made up of books from independent publishers.
The header image to this post shows the 40 books I chose. I managed to read 35 of them.
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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.
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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?
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At the start of the year, I set myself a goal of reading more books on my existing To Read pile than I added during the year. I chose a reasonable 40 books, a mix of short stories, novellas, mid-length novels and absolute chunksters. The To Reads at the start of the year numbered 181. I’ve got that down to 172, a net reduction of 9 books.
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 readingI don’t usually do end of year round ups, but I’ve decided to look back at how I did with the reading challenges I took part in during 2023. Mainly because I’ve been planning what I might read in 2024.
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 readingI went to a literary event not so long ago at which the two authors talked about the risk aversion present among the major publishing houses. David Peace and Tom Benn are both published by majors, Faber & Faber and Bloomsbury respectively. It was refreshing to hear two established authors speak on a subject that has been rolling around in my brain for a while. It got me thinking, and now I’ve committed my random thoughts to the page.
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What I Think About When I Think About Reading 