Happy Friday, everyone ! I have a post that could be intriguing/interesting .

What's a book or author that has always been reccomended to you but you won't read ?

Or

if that will start fights here's one or two that you could answer if you wanted:

What's your perfect drink and reading spot to read/listen your absolute favorite book ?

OR

What's a genre you absolutely love or hate?

I have a few answers for all but I want to hear everyone's opinions

Happy Friday, everyone ! I have a post that could be intriguing/interesting .

What's a book or author that has always been reccomended to you but you won't read ?

Or

if that will start fights here's one or two that you could answer if you wanted:

What's your perfect drink and reading spot to read/listen your absolute favorite book ?

OR

What's a genre you absolutely love or hate?

I have a few answers for all but I want to hear everyone's opinions

Note: I'm using Bridgerton as an example because it's the most recent and widespread phenomenon and it can be applied very broadly to other stories too — that's why I didn't post this on the Bridgerton forum.

Okay, I feel like this is the only place I can come to for a good-faith discussion. I can’t have this conversation over Instagram or Twitter without people thinking I’m trying to attack them. But I’m genuinely curious—and maybe a little bit miffed—but I promise I’m trying to understand.

So, as you know, Bridgerton recently announced that Francesca’s story will be the main focus of season 5, and a lot of people don’t like that—especially a lot of straight women. And this just makes me question everything, including what allyship actually means.

Because these straight women are the same women who were—okay, “frothing at the mouth” is not the right phrase—but who really, really enjoyed Heated Rivalry. They were sharing it and supporting it like nobody else. But when Francesca’s story is changed to be a lesbian romance, suddenly people don’t like it.

So my question is: why?

And I already know some of the arguments. One is that she needs time to grieve. But Bridgerton has said there will be a two-year time skip. Another is that she’s dealing with infertility, and that somehow doesn’t “make sense” in a lesbian romance. But queer people also experience infertility. That’s a very human experience—it’s not different for queer people versus straight people. Then there’s the argument that they’re changing too much from the books in the name of inclusivity (changing Michael to Michaela) and that changes how Francesca's story will play out or how they will miss out on the things that Michael does as a man (and that, to me, feels like misogyny). But Bridgerton has always changed things. Sophie isn’t Asian in the book. Neither is Kathani Sharma (Changed to brown from a white woman). Every single season has made inclusive changes. Even Benedict is queer in the show, and that wasn’t in the books—at least not from what I’ve seen people say online.

And people—especially straight women—were very supportive of Benedict’s queerness. So why is Francesca’s storyline so controversial? Why?

I’d genuinely like to know your thoughts, especially if you're someone who’s straight and also enjoyed Heated Rivalry. Why do you think you—or other straight women—feel this way about the storyline? Because to me, it feels like there’s a kind of cognitive dissonance: enjoying and consuming gay romance, but not giving the same love to lesbian romance. I’ve seen people say, “Well, I’m straight, so of course I’ll enjoy gay romance more—I want to view men’s bodies.” And honestly, that feels like it might be tied to internalized misogyny. I’ve also heard people say that gay romance gives women space to explore sexuality without without the pressure patriarchy puts on women’s bodies. But gay romance is still a story about men, from men’s perspectives. You can’t really get more patriarchal than that—it’s still centered on men.

If anything, I feel like consuming women-centered romance would be less patriarchal.

Another argument I saw was that in gay romance, you don’t have to deal with the concept of pregnancy. But that’s also true for lesbian romance. So I’m just… I’m genuinely curious. I know some nuance and tone might get lost in a post like this, but I really do want a good-faith discussion.

Why is it such a big deal to straight women that this storyline is different from the books, when previous seasons were also incredibly different—and were given so much love? Why do straight women enjoy gay romance more?

I'm only putting forth my counter arguments here for the arguments I've already heard, so you know that I've researched about the topic to form my opinions. But maybe you can go ahead and give me another perspective?

So sad to see a lot of book covers generated by AI nowadays. I would rather have a random human face on my book cover than these ugly AI covers 😭 Not judging a book by its cover is becoming harder and harder these days.

I honestly would love to hear everyone’s thought on this as well though.

I noticed you can only add a percentage to a post if the book is marked as “reading”.

Because of the five-posts-per-day limit, sometimes I want to make another post about a book I have already finished, or even older books that I still have annotations/quotes for. Right now, to add a percentage, I have to temporarily mark it as “reading”, post, finish it again, and then delete the reading dates from my history.

It is not a huge deal, but I am curious if anyone else finds this annoying. If you have found a workaround, please let me know in the comments!!

Edit: I just learned we are not supposed to ask others to submit requests, which I did. That is my mistake and I apologize. I am still curious about other people’s experiences with this!

Hi everyone, we've been quietly releasing new features and quality of life updates over the past month on all platforms, please make sure your app is updated to see the latest improvements!

One of the biggest updates is moderation improvement. We have new tools for both our moderators (who run the PageboundGuide account) and for the community:

• You can now report a post, review, or comment for spoilers
• You can send a post or comment to PBGuide for Content Guideline violations
• Of course, you can still flag a post, comment, review, or user profile for hate speech, harassment, self-promo, etc

PageboundGuides will review all reported content and either:

• add a spoiler tag to posts & reviews
• flag comments with spoilers
• approve flags for posts/reviews/comments/profiles that violate the Terms & Conditions (hate speech etc)
• archive Posts that do not meet the Posting & Content Guidelines

What is archiving? When a post does not meet the Content Guidelines (link here, quick version under Account & Settings -> Posting Guidelines in the app) PBGuide can archive the post from the book forum. The post is hidden from the default forum view but stays on your profile and book journey. You can include archived posts in your forum view by changing the forum filter from "All Posts" to "Include archived posts"

The PBGuides have been working hard behind the scenes to clean up very busy forums (especially the readalong forums). We know this has been a point of frustration for many, and giving everyone the ability to send these posts to PBGuide for review is just one of many ways we will be improving forum quality over the coming months.

Other New Features & Improvements

• Feed filters on your Main Feed and Following feed
• Message on your Yearly Challenge letting you know if you are ahead or behind on your goal
• Streaks! & editing past reading progress (click the streak widget to edit and view historical progress)
• Navigation changes on app: Profile is it's own tab where More menu used to be. The More menu is now on the top left next to the Pagebound logo
• Block & Report users from the profile page
• Reading progress bar added to the Book Page for currently reading books

Right now we are working on a huge, exciting project: Format tracking, stats, and monthly wrapups. Goal is to have this out in the next month!

You can always check the Roadmap to see what we're working on. If you want to support the continued development of Pagebound and add feature requests to the roadmap, please consider joining Pagebound Royalty (crown icon in the navbar)! Our Royalty members make it possible for us to provide a high quality, ad-free experience for all 🙏

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy

Hello, friends. The world is burning and many of us are still meant to keep on going to work like nothing’s wrong… But, we still have our books, thank the fucking gods. So, let’s look at some cards together and see if they can inspire some of our reads in the month of March 2026.

How this works

I pulled some cards for us and wrote a little bit about what I’m seeing when it comes to reading inspiration for the month ahead. You are welcome to simply take what resonates from the reading and move on with your day, or, if you think of any specific books that align with what I’m describing, comment those titles down below for people to check out. These readings don’t aim to be particularly predictive, and they aren’t meant to be taken as gospel. This is simply a bit of fun, something to bring you some reading inspiration if you need it, and an opportunity for us to further connect as a community. _

I’m using the Lilifer tarot deck, created by Marion Costentin, published by Little Darkness. The spread is designed by me. Here are the questions we will be looking at, and the cards we got. For a better experience, I recommend viewing the pictures below on the Pagebound website!

To start the reading we have those two cards on the left as a bit of general advice for the month ahead. The King of Swords represents our general potential for the month, and they are our most tactical and rational king that doesn’t shy away from doing the hard things. They’re followed by the Nine of Cups representing potential issues on our reading journey and offering advice on how to avoid them. There’s a bit of contrast between these two cards, with the King leaning heavily on the rational end of the spectrum and the Nine of Cups on the emotional end.

I’m thinking we are being encouraged to look at our priorities in life right now and make a bit of a strategy for ourselves that aligns with those priorities. It’s normal to want to escape into books when things are tough, but we should be cognizant that it can sometimes lean into avoidance, which ultimately leads to more stress in the long term. These two cards are teaming up to say that reading can be a wonderful way to decompress or learn new things on our own terms, but this should be intentional and it shouldn’t come at the expense of other important parts of our lives. This is a reminder to take a few minutes to assess your life and be honest with yourself about whether there are things you’re avoiding. This is tough, especially if you don’t feel supported or don’t know where to start, but it can also be a gentle process if you approach it that way. Sometimes all it takes is small changes, like planning to do just one of the tasks you may have been avoiding and then rewarding yourself with reading or going to the library to pick up new books. Alternatively, if you find you are most receptive to reading and you struggle to break out of that comfort bubble, maybe you can start by finding some books or resources to read that will help you better understand yourself and help you learn how to deal with stress in a healthier way. Pagebound is full of wonderful readers who could give you book suggestions based on where you’re at and how you like to learn, so if this is you, I suggest you make a post asking for book recommendations and see what happens. Forums are a really good help also, because if you’re struggling to understand something, there will be other people who are either in the same boat or who will have some tips for you. _

That’s it for our general advice. I feel like the cards so far have been very blunt… so I don’t know what the fuck that’s about, buuut, let’s dive into specific prompts for inspiration for both fiction and nonfiction books for March and hopefully look at something a little less personal, haha.

Starting with nonfiction, we have the lovely Queen of Cups as our main topic. For anybody that was following this blog series in January, we had this card in the exact same position in that reading as well, so I guess the cards feel like we still have something to learn here. This Queen is a symbol of emotions, intuition, connection and creativity. They’re deeply in touch with non-material things that they believe truly give life its meaning. They are followed by two eights, the Eight of Pentacles, a card that focuses on process over end goal and effort over momentary recognition, and the Eight of Cups which talks about leaving something behind, not because it’s bad or broken, but because it’s not right for us anymore, or it may have never been right for us.

In my mind, these three cards really lend themselves to memoirs, especially those of people who decided to go against the grain and follow their heart. Something about focusing on the messy, imperfect process and leaving behind one life to look for something deeper really reminds me of the structure of a memoir.

If you’re not much for reading memoirs, another thing that these cards could be suggesting is looking into what things you deeply care about that are of the creative, spiritual or emotional nature, and finding some texts that dive deeper into that. The Eight of Pentacles with this beautiful illustration of hands reminds us that developing a skill often cannot be rushed. The journey to this goal will require you to make imperfect things and show up in imperfect ways, and it asks you to accept this at the very start. This leads me to think we are looking at books that don’t undermine the importance of active engagement as opposed to remaining in the observational role. Because the approach is illustrated with the Eight of Cups, I think we are talking about books that take us out of our comfort zone in some way, to see what we can learn by looking at this topic from a bit of a different perspective, or through somebody else's eyes. _

For some inspiration when it comes to fiction books, we are starting with The Fool! It’s the very first card in the deck and thus symbolizes the beginning of a journey into the unknown. The Knight of Pentacles here talks about the issues our character(s) are dealing with in the story, and what I’m getting from that is possibly that our main character’s journey is one of coming out of their shell and breaking free of their past. The Knight of Pentacles is very routine oriented: they like order, predictability and aim for stability over adventure. When this becomes an issue, it can lead to becoming stagnant and suppressing your ambitions. It can also manifest in the form of poor mental health due to excessive isolation, or a scarcity mindset due to negative experiences with money and material stability in the past. That’s a lot of baggage for our sweet main character. The story structure is illustrated by the Seven of Pentacles. This card talks about the hard work that it takes us to get to somewhere meaningful and the time that this usually requires. I’m thinking that means the cards are suggesting books that have a bit of a slower pace, and that give us an opportunity to really put ourselves into the shoes of the main character. Their journey isn’t straightforward, and there will certainly be growing pains, but the rewards are worth the wait and the effort. _

That is our March reading all wrapped up, friends. We got some interesting reading suggestions, and got rudely called out in the process… Fun! If you thought of any specific books while reading this, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. _

Did you have a good time reading in February? I’d really love to know. My reading for February was odd. I was really busy and actually really low on energy in the second half. However, one book that I did read and that really stands out is this wonderful collection of letters from activists called “Read this when things fall apart” by Kelly Hayes. Oh, how I loved that book... It actually lined up nicely with the community-focused non-fiction suggestions we got in our February reading, so that was really neat.

I appreciate you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to see you next month 👋 _

Previous readings: February 2026 January 2026 . .

I know they've had them for a while, but one stop today really knocked my socks off. I know it can be hit or miss in both volume and condition of the books, but hear me out. They have relatively popular romance, romantasy, and mysteries in both hardcover and paperback. I got hardcover copies of The Wedding People and Red, White, and Royal Blue (a collectors edition too) for $15 each. And their paperbacks are between $5-$8.

Honorable mention to Michael's, which I went after with no intention of finding novels and found a copy of Book Lovers in brand new condition for $7. Happy hunting, everyone!

some default covers are really not it and i would like people to see what i’m seeing instead of the default cover. is this in the plans? this is something that really bothers me.

Did you see the latest email from Pagebound?

So many cool things getting worked on!!! Thank you amazing founders for your hard work and these exciting treats!!!! What are you most excited for?

Reading streaks Something mysterious inspired by the amazing azules Monthly wrapped

Did I miss anything?