Having a stack of fantasy books on your bedside table make you feel good. Until you look down and see you’ve committed yourself to a thousand pages of world building and still haven’t got out. It’s all well and good getting excited about that boxset of books, but once you own them, then what? They […]

Panic: “I just picked up the third book in this series and I realize I have absoluteley no memory of what happened previously. This can occur with all sorts of long narrativess, from mystery trilogies to fantasy epics. It’s typically a logistical problem, not an interest problem. Rather than thinking about reading as a project […]

This is the big omnibus edition, which you intend to plow through. It’s a hefty volume. There are three novels worth of material here. The print is dense; reality hits fast. Two hours later, your eyes has glazed over and the reading plan have failed. That’s because reading plans assume that time is proportional to […]

Spines make anthologies seem doable. A few dozen tiny items feel like less work then three hundred uninterrupted pages of text, as if it’s simpler to read short bursts than a single long string. As if. Because an anthology breaks focus in a way that a book doesn’t: At each end, you pause. You reframe […]