It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about fears:

As a book lover, what’s your biggest fear?

On the personal level, that my house will burn down. So many books, and I don’t know if they can all be reasonably replaced, including ones with sentimental value like one of the books I wrote my dissertation on. It’s weirdly expensive to get hold of now, and there’s no ebook edition in sight.

As a book blogger, I fear saying or doing something stupid that hurts people. I try to listen and be careful around sensitive topics and experiences I don’t share, and at the very least to make my good will and good intent clear so that people feel they can tell me if I’m doing something hurtful… but I’m still concerned that at some point I’ll mess up.

On a sort of medium level, I’m scared of the indie bookshops I love disappearing, things going more offline, etc. At the moment, the trend isn’t pointing that way in the UK, and people are passionately protecting the bookshops they love. But there was a time with fewer indie bookshops, and it’s possible — even likely — that there will be again, or at least that the specific bookshops I love will close, as these things wax and wane.

On a macro level, it’s a worry that the rise of generative AI may make it hard to trust and enjoy new books. I’m in that position with gaming, where several times I’ve been burned by fun-looking games which turn out to be AI slop, and by games I’ve enjoyed later adding slop and ruining the experience. I’d truly hate to become as distrustful of the books on the shelves as I am of the games coming up on my wishlist. There’s no way that will be good for books and reading, and people outsourcing their brains and creativity to regurgitated rubbish viscerally offend me.

I also fear the tend toward censorship and away from diverse books, because it’s a symptom of rising fascism. I’m not often vocally political here on my blog, but knowing the impact of section 28 (including on bookshops, as Gay’s the Word suffered police persecution about selling queer books even though section 28 only applied to local government), I deeply fear the direction of the new guidance for schools on talking about trans people, and how it and other similar measures around the world will affect the books available to people.

Given the topics of this post, I’m gonna quickly point toward two of my blog policies to avoid any unpleasantness or confusion: AI policy and commenting policy.