The Year Everything Changed I remember the exact moment I realized something fundamental had shifted in how we think about books. It was a Tuesday afternoon in late 2024, and I was standing in a charity bookshop I’d walked past a hundred times without really seeing it. The shelves were packed three-deep. People were lined…
When Speed Reading Lost Its Shine I need to tell you something that’s been brewing in my brain for months now, and I’ve finally figured out why it matters so much. Slow reading isn’t trendy because we’re all secretly yearning for a Victorian parlor where ladies clutched leather-bound novels by candlelight. It’s trending because our…
The Moment Everything Shifted I finished Percival Everett’s James at three in the morning on a Tuesday, and I sat in my bed for forty minutes without moving. Not because I didn’t know what to do with myself, but because I physically could not reassemble the parts of myself that the book had taken apart.…
The Moment Everything Shifted I finished Percival Everett’s James at three in the morning on a Tuesday, and I sat in my bed for forty minutes without moving. Not because I didn’t know what to do with myself, but because I physically could not reassemble the parts of myself that the book had taken apart.…
The Midnight Panic That Started It All I remember exactly when this started feeling real to me. It was January 2026, and I was doom-scrolling through Publishing Twitter at 2 AM like some kind of masochist, and I saw the Atlantic investigation hit. Over 700 AI-generated titles, all dressed up in covers that looked disturbingly…
When the Personal Essay Became the Gatekeeping Tool I finished reading a debut essay collection last month and sat with my phone for twenty minutes, not texting anyone, which if you know me is basically a cry for help. Not because the essays were bad. They were precisely calibrated, intellectually rigorous, emotionally precise in that…
The Book That Won Everything and Nobody Noticed I need to tell you about a book that won the Booker Prize and somehow remained suspiciously quiet about it. Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” claimed the 2024 award, making Harvey the first British woman to win since Hilary Mantel took it in 2012, and yet the cultural conversation…
The Sales Numbers Tell a Story We Can’t Ignore I need to tell you something that still makes me sit with my coffee a little longer in the mornings. The numbers are in, and they’re not small. According to NPD BookScan graphic novel market data, manga unit sales in the United States hit over 30…
The Cruelest Cut: When Style Becomes Substance I made it exactly 127 pages into Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 before admitting defeat. Not because the writing was bad—quite the opposite. Bolaño’s sentences unfurl like smoke, dense and hypnotic, each clause building into something that feels both inevitable and surprising. But somewhere around page 100, as I followed…
When the Machine Started Reading Between the Lines Something weird happened this year on BookTok, and honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. The platform that used to throw endless enemies-to-lovers fantasy at us suddenly started recommending books that felt… personal. Not the kind of personal where you like pretty covers, but…