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?).

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 reread:

Is there a book you keep coming back to, reading it more than once?

And ohhhh yep! There’s a lot: I semi-recently talked about some of them in short in a Top Ten Tuesday post.

I’d say each era of my life has had one book I came back to again and again, more than any others. As a kid, it was C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In my teens, it was definitely Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. My late teens/early twenties saw me rereading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (the whole sequence, really) over and over, and sharing it with my wife.

After that, it gets a bit blurrier, since I don’t have as much distance. I know that by the time I got married (in 2016, aged just barely still 26) it was definitely Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and I’d say that’s still in pretty frequent rotation! But I also started reading and rereading Dorothy L. Sayers’ mysteries, and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice…

As you see, I’ve always been a big rereader, and of far more than just those books, though they’re some of the most special to me! I feel like each time I come back to a book, I read it a little differently; I’ve changed, and so it speaks to different parts of me. The best books offer more every time.

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’re a writer:

Do you see yourself more as an editor, a writer, or just a reader?

Setting aside the work I do on this blog (which involves all three, heh), I’m mostly a reader, but I do write as well — even discounting my blogging and the writing I do for my various clients, and my two dissertations (I believe that’s “theses”, in US terms — they were for my MA and BSc), I write stories, usually just for myself (though I have been known to write and post fanfiction when the mood strikes). I’ve also done some science communication writing, but again, informally.

I have done some formal editing work, editing dissertations and theses for people who don’t speak English as a first language. My favourite was on Cappadocian cave churches!

But mostly, I’m “just” a reader with a blog and a backlog of books that’d make a pile so tall it probably is worthy of being called “mount TBR”.

I’m going to start joining in with the Book Blogger Hop, 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 dual-wielding books:

Do you read one book at a time, or juggle a few at once?

I am quite possibly incapable of reading just one book at once! I have a tendency to get fidgety, though this happens mostly with fiction: I get too antsy about how the story is going to turn out, and then instead of finding out, I get hung up on it. Sometimes the best thing to do in that case is just to switch to something else for a bit. I’d say three to five books at once is the sweet spot for me; each of them gets attention, but there’s plenty of variety.

Overall, I think it works best when I jump between quite different books — like, one historical non-fiction, one popular science, one fantasy, and one mystery, or something like that. Then the moods are very different, and there’s no risk of details blurring into each other.

That said, at the moment I’ve got myself into a bit of a hole with it! I have six books marked as “currently reading” on StoryGraph, which is okay… and thirty-two marked as “paused” because I got stalled on them. I’m working on it; I’ve got a bit of a system at the moment where I alternate starting new books and inducting paused books back into the pile — but it has got a bit overwhelming!