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!