Sometimes it’s OK to admit you need to care less and let go.

A caveat lector for those who enjoy my reviews: sometimes new information comes to light that changes my opinion of books or authors I’ve regarded highly in the past.

Most of you know I post book reviews on Goodreads. But did you know I’ve been doing this for 12 years, for every book I’ve read, amounting to over 1600 reviews?

If I sound like I’m bragging, I am, because that’s the point of this post: I write book reviews; I write a lot of book reviews; and I’m good at it. So prolific and so good at it that today I’m launching a…

I reflect on writing over 1400 detailed reviews, one for every book I’ve read since joining Goodreads 10 years ago.

As with last year, I’m eschewing lists of top 10 best and worst books in favour of simply highlighting some of my favourites read in the past year.

Social Justice

I want to start with a book that is actually being published this year, on January 16: Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. You must read this book if you want to learn more about systemic racism and the ways in…

Now that I’ve discussed my favourite books from last year, here’s what is in store for this year, hopefully.

I’m not a super organized reader. I know some people make lists of what they are going to read, keep calendars of upcoming releases they want to buy, etc. I am a messy, spontaneous reader. I pre-order books and then forget about them until they show up at my door. I keep saying, “I’ll get…

Oh hey, it’s a new year.

I usually do a round-up of my best 10 (and worst 10) books of the year and post it as a list. I’m fairly proud of the lists area of my site, but I also have ambitions to do a little overhauling this year, so the lists might be evaporating—hopefully temporarily. I’m going to keep it simple and simply blog about my year of reading.

Also, I’m not going…

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but if I did, one of them would be to blog more often. I fell out of the habit last year because I was so focused on finishing my new blog platform. Now that I'm using it, I really don't have any excuse. Look how many posts I've squeezed into January! February should hopefully be even better.

Aside from the rash of depressing celebrity deaths, this month has been…

This post began as part of my review of The Man Who Sold the Moon. I began contrasting Heinlein’s subject matter with what’s hot in SF these days. Gradually I realized I was eliding too much in my attempts to be as succinct as possible, so I was faced with the choice of expanding an already long review … or excising most of the discussion. Fortunately, I have a soapbox all my own where…

I feel the need to make note on this blog that I’m 25 now. Since Saturday.

I started a blog post last week about how I felt to be 25. Essentially it boiled down to “I don’t feel like an adult yet still” and then digressed into morose ruminations on the cognitive dissonance of being Facebook friends with people from high school I never talk to. It was entirely too serious and lugubrious considering…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook have probably heard the story of my epic journey to return to England. I’ll record it for posterity in a later blog post, when I have the time.

For now, I simply wanted to note that I’ve published my annual list of best books I read in 2013.

For the first time since I started making these lists, I’m not doing a companion “worst…

Next March will be my website’s tenth anniversary and also marks the anniversary of when I feel I became a citizen of the Web. I was jealous of my brother’s “MSN account” and demanded one of my own; from there, I taught myself HTML and built a laughable Geocities website. Indeed, you can still read some blog posts from that time. It’s hard to believe I’ve built up such a lengthy catalogue of my…

For the past few years I have paid for the privilege of voting in the Hugo Awards. This comes with access to a voter’s packet of digital copies of most of the nominated texts, from novels to short stories and even some of the related works. It’s much less expensive than it would be to buy all the books individually, not to mention hunt down the publications in which the various shorter works were…

Last Thursday my Twitter feed erupted with people talking about Amazon buying Goodreads. As I read the first few, sporadic tweets, I blinked incredulously. Was I reading that right? I scrolled down and saw that I had missed a tweet from the official Goodreads account making the announcement. I followed some links and landed in the feedback forum’s official announcement topic. Two days and more than 800 posts later, a particularly vocal portion of…

As I’ve done for the past four years, I now present my top 10 best and worst books that I read last year. This was a good year for reading. Although I’m not quite back up to where I want to be, at around 150 books per year, I beat last year’s total by ten books. And once again, I read only four 1-star books—though I gave up on four books, the most I’ve ever…

It’s that time of year again. Took me a little longer to do it, but I did it: I chose the 10 best and 10 worst books that I read last year. You can view their respective lists by following the links below:

• Best Books I Read in 2011
• Worst Books I Read in 2011

Part of the reason for the delay was that I finally decided to bite the bullet and attempt to import…

The year is almost over, and unless I finish a book tomorrow, it looks like I will end 2011 with 115 books read. Not too shabby, I suppose. Far cry from my goal, which was to tie with 2009’s best of 156 books. But still pretty good, all things considered. Indeed, from time to time people exclaim their awe at how much I read. I don’t like to draw too much attention to the quantity,…

Yesterday was the deadline for voting in the Hugo Awards. I submitted my final ballot on Friday. I managed to finish all of the Hugo-nominated works in the novel, novella, novelette, and short story categories. I also voted in the best related work and best dramatic presentation categories, and I voted for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Here's an overview of my picks for this year's Hugos.

I wrote…

Having dispatched the Hugo-nominated works for the short story and the novelette categories, I'm now getting into the big guns: novellas and novels. I love long-form fiction, and so I look forward to reading all of these longer works. Here are my thoughts on the novellas. I wrote this post over the course of several weeks as I worked through the novellas while reading other things, so my reviews begin verbosely and diminish as my…

I continue my reading of this year's Hugo nominees with the novelettes. As with the short stories, all of these are available online, and I encourage you to read them.

"Eight Miles", by Sean McMullen

Although I wouldn't call "Eight Miles" steampunk, it is definitely a cousin of that genre--perhaps we can call it "Victorian chic." McMullen embraces the sense of wonder and pure flights of fancy that recall the science fiction of the…