One of the things I’m trying to be deliberate about again, is intentionally reading regularly and also updating my reading progress on various books in Goodreads. This is part of what I mean by “reading in public.” I also mean writing about, or reflecting on the things that I’ve read now and then – – in public here on this weblog.
If you go to my Goodreads page, you’ll see that I have a dozen or more books that I am partway through or currently reading. This is almost always true, but I’m gonna try to get through some of them this calendar year that have been on that list since even before the pandemic. I seem to almost always have a combination of speculative fiction; religious, theological, or meditative offerings; productivity guidebooks; and very occasionally some regular old literary fiction. (I also read a bunch of smut/romance that I don’t track on Goodreads, because who needs to see all that and, besides, if we know each other and you read the same kind of smut I do, we probably already know that about each other and share recommendations elsewhere! The tropes, people, the tropes are endless! Who knew? Reading modern romance novels is a habit I picked up again during the pandemic, after dropping it when I was about 14.)
Today I finished a speculative fiction novel called The Goblin Emperor. It wasn’t bad. I give it three or four stars — it was definitely readable, definitely enjoyable, but I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll pick up the next book by this author in this world which is why I’m keeping it at 3 or maybe 4 stars.