Books

Every piece on this site, gathered under the four standing sections.

Tropes & Terms

The vocabulary readers use to describe a book before they describe its plot.

Tropes: a working glossary — A trope is a pattern readers recognise before a book explains it. Naming the pattern is the fastest way to describe a story to someone else.
What slow burn actually means — Slow burn describes pacing, not temperature. The central pair spend most of the page count circling a feeling neither of them has said out loud.
Found family and why it recurs — Found family is the arrangement in which a group of unrelated characters take on the obligations fiction usually assigns to relatives.
Romantasy: a crossover label — A shelving convenience for books answering to two sets of expectations at once. It is worth being precise about which set does the structural work.

How stories are divided into volumes, and how those volumes get filed.

Standalone, duology, trilogy and beyond — The number of volumes a story occupies is a promise about where its ending sits. Readers who know the shape argue with the pacing far less.
Reading order versus publication order — A long series can be read in the order it was written or the order its events occur. The two routes produce genuinely different books.
What a companion novel is — A companion novel shares a world with another book without continuing its plot, which is why it can usually be read first, second or alone.
How imprints and lines work — An imprint is an editorial address inside a larger publisher. The name on the spine says more about a book's intended shelf than the publisher's own name.

Print, screen and audio, and the practical habits that sit around them.

Ebook, audiobook and print compared — The same text behaves differently in three formats, and the differences are practical rather than a matter of which format is more serious.
Annotating and tabbing a book — Annotation turns reading into a record, and tabbing turns that record into something you can find again a year later.
Building a TBR you will actually read — A to-be-read pile stops working when it becomes a catalogue of intentions rather than a short queue of the next few books.
Slumps and what follows them — A slump is the stretch where books stop holding. It is far more often a mismatch of book to moment than a loss of the habit.

Reading with other people: pacing, questions and keeping a record.

Discussion questions that open a book up — A good question cannot be answered yes or no, and it points at a decision the book made rather than at whether the reader enjoyed it.
How a buddy read is paced — A buddy read is two or more people reading to an agreed schedule, and almost every problem with one is a pacing problem.
Content notes and how readers use them — Content notes list what a book contains so a reader can decide before they begin rather than halfway through a chapter.
Keeping a reading journal — A reading journal is a private record of what you read and what it did. It is most useful when it stays short enough to keep up.