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 genre:

If you had to stick to one genre forever, which would you choose and why?

Noooo!

As anyone who hangs around my blog much knows, I don’t really stick to one genre for long, ever. I’ll hop from a mystery to a sci-fi to a non-fiction… But I’d say the majority of my reading if you look at my life as a whole has been speculative fiction, and I couldn’t give up rereading Ursula Le Guin’s work, or Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor… and speculative fiction is a pretty broad genre — you’ll note I said that rather than fantasy or sci-fi! A lot of romance and even the danmei I read could sneak under this umbrella.

I’d hate to give up my classic mysteries, non-SF romance and the wealth of non-fiction I’ve started reading in the last decade, though, so luckily this will never come to pass!

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 reading speeds:

What’s the fastest or slowest you’ve ever finished a book?

I’m not quite sure how to answer this one, honestly! I’ve read some manga and poetry collections incredibly quickly, like between 10-15 minutes, but… for a 300-page book, I’d say probably an hour and a half is about my usual. Maybe closer to an hour if it’s quite fast-paced and there’s illustrations or something — I’ve read some of my danmei collection pretty fast for that reason!

On the other end of things, it’s usually non-fiction that takes me the longest. I remember The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club took me a while in terms of hours, though I read it in quite big chunks, so I think I finished it within about two weeks.

If it’s in terms of how many sittings/how many days to finish, then one sitting is the fastest and I’ve finished many books on the same day I started them.

As for slowest… that’s more difficult. I have a semi-ongoing reread of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell that’s been ongoing for probably a couple of years now, but that’s because I mostly don’t pick it up, and then some days the whim hits and I’ll read 100 pages at a time.

You’d be surprised to hear though that War and Peace only took me seven days, and I’ve read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings in a single 24-hour period — in both cases, someone bet me I couldn’t do it, and I’m contrary as heck, so I did.