I love bookish statistics, and what they reveal about people’s reading habits. I enjoy it when I come across them on other blogs (for example on Magic of Books), so even though I didn’t read a huge number of books in 2016 compared to other people I know, I thought it might still be fun to see what the stats on the humble selection I did read look like… and to satisfy my nerdy appreciation for graphs and charts. Continue reading
Okay, so I’ll get it out there first off: I love Goodreads. I am a Goodreads fangirl. Excepting perhaps Facebook, Goodreads is my favourite social media network. Like so many book-related things these days, it is owned by Amazon (sigh)… but I overlook that because it has instigated such a positive change in my reading life and behaviour.
If you’ve never tried it, and one (or all) of the below statements applies to you, there’s a good chance you’d enjoy using it too: Continue reading
Anyone who reads regularly will be familiar with that feeling of struggling through the first pages or chapters of a book, pushing on because you’re waiting to see if it will get interesting. At some point the book either gets better and grabs your interest, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you have two options:
1) force yourself to read a whole book you’re not enjoying, or
2) give up and start a different book.
Believe it or not, when I was younger I always selected option 1. Continue reading
As a teenager, hearing the word “classic” coupled with the word “book” was enough to make me suspicious. “Classics” were the books I got forced to read in school. They were the books everyone told me I simply must read, the books I thought would surely be great… until I found myself struggling through an archaic tome that was neither interesting nor inspiring. Even more daunting was the fact that this canon of old, famous and important books was seemingly endless. I felt like I might be in the grave before I finished them all. Continue reading
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved reading fantasy novels. I can read and enjoy books outside of the genre, but it’s always been much harder for me to love a book – to become completely engrossed – if it’s not fantasy (that said, I recently read The Help, and it turned out to be one of the exceptions to the rule). Sure, I’ve dabbled in a few other genres, but fantasy is where my heart has always been.
Up until a couple of years ago, however, the spread of other genres I’d sampled had a glaring omission. Continue reading
This is going to be a very brief and non-very-fantasy-focussed post, but I’m curious to hear about other people’s reading and book buying habits.
For interest’s sake, I decided to work out stats on what format I read my books in last year (with the help of Goodreads). Here is the spread: Continue reading
Thoughts on Fantasy 