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 creepy books:

What’s the creepiest book you’ve read that isn’t officially horror, but gave you chills?

Alan Garner’s The Owl Service immediately comes to mind. It’s a children’s book (allegedly) and marketed generally as fantasy, but it’s full of real menace. It plays with the Welsh story of Blodeuwedd, with the story replaying itself with an unwilling cast, playing with tensions between English and Welsh, between classes, etc.

The cover on the edition I had (included in this post) was kinda creepy too…

I think it was actually Garner’s Elidor that really freaked me out, but I’ve never reread that one. I reread The Owl Service as an adult and… yep, still powerful and creepy. And recommended!

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 designing a bookish escape room:

If you designed a book-themed escape room, what puzzles would be part of it?

I have no idea about anything specific, but I’d steer away from using details of specific books in order to appeal to a range of bookworms, using mostly general knowledge. There might be some puns on the names of authors and titles of books, for example, but they’d be guessable by people with a general knowledge of literature.

I imagine there could be something with organising books, possibly with a clue to how they should be organised (I think alphabetical by author is usually the sensible way, but I know other bookworms prefer to make rainbows, sort by book title, or sort by height)… perhaps to open a secret panel or something like that.

If I were to design something specific, it’d be an escape room based on some kind of vintage mystery, and I’d definitely put some decipherment in — if possible, based on a Playfair cypher, as a reference to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase. I don’t think those need to be too difficult, if you left some way to decipher the key word in the room, and I know I’ve written notes to my wife in Playfair cypher once or twice, and they did get deciphered!

I’m not really very good at coming up with stuff like this, though, so generally I’ll leave it to the enthusiasts!

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.

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 bigging up a book you love and think doesn’t get enough attention:

If you could recommend one overlooked book, what would it be and why?

This sounds quite like the prompt from the week before last, but I’ll pick something else to talk about this time! And I’ll go with a different genre, too: let’s talk about the work of E.C.R. Lorac, a classic crime writer who turned out some excellent mysteries with human characters and vivid settings, but rarely gets spoken about now (and is certainly not considered one of the Queens of Crime).

But the prompt says “one overlooked book”, so I need to pick a specific book — and that’s harder, because my favourite book by E.C.R. Lorac isn’t in the series that I love best overall. So, let’s go with Accident by Design. It’s one of her Inspector Macdonald books which hasn’t yet been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series (yet?), and features her usual ability to evoke characters and settings… and the culprit surprised me because it was someone I really didn’t want it to be.

I generally enjoy all her books, though, and it’s hard to say where to start exactly: I don’t think I’ve even read the first Inspector Macdonald book! There’s a certain amount of continuity between the books, but not so much that you’ll be missing anything if you start in the middle.

Oh, and you wanted to know my actual favourite? That would be Death of an Author, the only one I’ve given five stars, which has been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series.

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 online reviews:

How much do online reviews shape what you pick up next?

I mostly find new books in two ways: other bloggers talking about them, and random browsing in a bookshop.

When it comes to other bloggers talking about books, sometimes that’s just seeing people mention upcoming books they’re interested in, and sometimes it’s based on their reviews — a book I semi-recently picked up that I might not have if it weren’t for reviews was Jarod K. Anderson’s Strange Animals (which was reviewed by Mogsy and Tammy), for instance. If people pick out details that intrigue me, or if certain bloggers whose taste I know well are enthusiastic, that’s usually a good sign.

Sometimes when I’m trying to decide whether to get a book, I look at reviews on StoryGraph, and then I don’t just count on the reviews of people I know; I tend to seek out both very high and very low rated reviews, to get a sense of what people who feel passionately about it (one way or the other) are saying. It’s a pretty good way to quickly root out when a book is actually super racist or something, which helps.

That said, when it comes to books I find by randomly browsing in a bookshop, often I don’t look up anything at all, and just go based on the back cover and a random flip through the pages. I’ve found some real gems that way, and it’s fun sometimes to just throw aside caution and try something solely because it looked interesting and new. It’s also sometimes a terrible idea, of course, but I don’t mind taking that risk, especially since I know the fact that I do also post neutral and negative reviews sometimes helps people find books more to their taste than mine, or avoid books that they wouldn’t like either.

So the answer’s ultimately another “it depends”, I suppose!

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 what grabs you in any given book:

What grabs you and keeps you hooked in a book?

With non-fiction, generally the topic matters most. I’ve found myself interested in food history and fashion history, less because I’m interested in food or fashion per se, and more because you can get a surprising amount of contextual understanding of a given period/culture/etc by reading about its food and fashion. So, when it comes to non-fiction I love books that use things like that to show me a bigger slice of history than you’d expect — like using poems to do a history of England (like A History of England in 25 Poems), or carpets to do a history of the world (like Threads of Empire, although I haven’t finished that yet).

When it comes to science, given my background I’m pretty much always going to be hooked by human biology, microbiology, virology, etc.

I went with non-fiction first because that felt easier to answer, but when it comes to fiction… I think it comes down to something I complain about sometimes with books that don’t convince me: make me believe there’s a meaningful world outside of your story. I often talk about this when talking about fantasy worlds: I don’t need to see the magic schools of the main city of your fantasy, but a few references to them help flesh out your world. I don’t need to see weird creatures in the story, as long as I know they’re there — or might be.

But really, the same goes for any fiction: I don’t need to know who the girl at the corner shop is dating, but I ought to be able to believe she does something other than ring up the protagonist’s purchases — if not because of detail about her specifically, then just because the background characters as a whole give that impression. We don’t need to know the protagonist’s family tree in detail, but the author ought to know it, or convince us that they do in the way they write and the details they do give.

All of these things help give life to the action and help the reader suspend disbelief.

That said, it’s not the only component of a compelling read for me: the main characters are also super important. I don’t have to like them, and they definitely don’t have to make consistently good choices, but I have to believe they are people who have thoughts and feelings, and whose fates matter.

That said, likeable characters help a lot.

In the end, sometimes sheer writing skill alone can hold me: when I first read Raymond Chandler’s work, I barely followed the mystery plots, but I was all-in on his prose and his “shop-worn Galahad”, a phrase which has stuck with me as being perfect ever since (though it’s far from his only great line).

Maybe the key is just doing something really, really well, and demonstrating it early.

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 whether you follow trends or not:

Do you follow book trends and bestsellers, or do you prefer hunting down lesser-known titles?

I don’t specifically try to follow what’s trending; I don’t pick up a book because it’s a hit on BookTok or Bookstagram (I probably wouldn’t even know that it is!), or read something just because it’s a bestseller… but I don’t refuse to read such books, either. A lot of the time they aren’t the sort of book I’m interested in, but e.g. the trend for cosy fantasy and romantasy has been a fun one, and I have read some of those, and sometimes popular books have worked well for me even if they aren’t a genre I normally read. Sometimes then I’ll seek out other similar books (as with romantasy, cosy fantasy, my deep-dive into danmei, etc)… so I guess in that sense I follow trends, since that can be a good way to find other similar books.

Because I don’t actually use stuff like TikTok or Instagram, I mostly come across books through blogging or through just exploring in bookshops, or occasionally via The London Review of Books or The New York Review of Books, so I’m usually well behind on the trends either way. I don’t think that’s a particular virtue, though; there’s value in popular fiction, even if it’s just people enjoying it. Some of what I read is lesser-known just because it’s old, but it was popular fiction of its day even if it’s sometimes treated as “classic” now: my addiction to golden age crime novels is no secret.

All in all, I guess my answer is a bit of a shrug. I don’t particularly do either, I just pick up whatever pings my interest, which may or may not be a bestseller or a less-known book, and might sometimes mean picking up books because they fit the same description as something else I liked, which might happen to be “trendy” (do people still use that word?).