I don’t know how many of you have seen it but apparently the author has posted something online about how nothing in his books are social commentary and he doesn’t want it to be social commentary and if you are seeing some sort of political underlying themes then it’s because you’re reading too much into it.

I think that’s very interesting when you consider how much of this book is a social commentary because even the climate change thing in the classroom where some people told their child that the climate change isn’t real is a good example and on top of that the way that Grace was used for the purpose of humanity despite him not wanting to is social commentary and ultimately the way that strap knew that because people are going to get restless in the coming years she was very likely going to go to jail or become a scape goat for the government that is social commentary and it’s a commentary of how political leaders treat the people who are trying to do good things because of their own self interest. All literature has an underlying message because literature is meant to portray a person’s character.

Everything exists in a political context - Aristotle

When I was a teenager, I collected pretty copies of Alice in Wonderland because it was one of my favourite books and I found quite a few lovely versions with different illustrations (I’ve also ended up with three different versions of Pride and Prejudice but I think that’s more of an accident, I just kept forgetting I owned it already 😂)

So, now I’m curious to hear: Do you have a book (or books!) you’ve collected several versions of over the years? Why that particular book and what draws you to buy a new edition to add to the collection?

One of the best quality-of-life changes that Pagebound implemented that I ADORE is the ability to remove books from the yearly challenge. One of the first things I did when that was introduced was remove all of this year's re-reads from the challenge (I had challenged myself to finish some series I've kept on hold for years now, but before I could do that, I wanted to re-read ). I've just removed a couple more, which made me wonder - what customization do you do for your challenge, if at all?