2026 october reading roundup

generated by thestorygraph where my username is also hooksforeverything

the kobo syncing to storygraph is absolutely gamechanging. about half my reading is Overdrive library loans on the kobo, and those sync to storygraph, which makes me more likely to fill in my 'sideloaded' epubs that I get from project gutenberg and the anarchist library and so forth.

that being said, it's been an extraordinarily low-rated month. No five-stars AT ALL, ten 4s (good use of my time), seven 3s (harmless and sometimes enjoyable), five 2s (wish I hadn't read this) and THREE 1-star books, which, 1 star means I wish this hadn't been written/published. Three books I would like to unhappen in a month is astonishingly bad.

On drilling down, though, two of them were nonfiction and published in the last 18 months, so whatever the genre is called of 'harmful oversimplifying tosh that began in a substack echo chamber'. & the third was The House Of The Witch.

For which my review included "appalling prose. all the melody and grace of the elephant's foot at chernobyl. sentences slip off her pen and into the book like trowelfuls of over-wet sand." & I'm not sorry.

On the topic of prose, I realised while journalling the other day that I am actively avoiding rule of three and not-X-just-Y these days because the agreement engines have poisoned them for me. When I need to list items to illustrate a category, I will now pick five, or seven, or twelve, or four rhymed pairs, or six and a half with a clarifying parenthesis, or some metastasising Borgesian (?) list that runs the rest of the paragraph. If real writers are also pulling away from those structures it ought to help us as a culture break free of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis Baby's First Dialectic we've clearly been overusing.

I have also resurrected my use of rss-to-epub on Calibre, so articles come through to the kobo instead of being read on a glowscreen. I had drifted back into checking the news over the summer because it seemed so likely that it would happen, you know. Of course it will happen. Time only goes one way.

(What do you want to be doing when you find out it happened? I know that has awkward eschatological parallels, but ignore that for a minute. It's going to be the topic for years; what do you want to be able to say you were doing when you heard?)

I should really use this site more; it's such a nice screen to write in. Anyway, yeah, stay warm, catch you next time.