I've been hesitating to post reviews in here because I think my thoughts are too scattered to make it cohesive. In a way, I think reviews can be an artform, and I never feel I can do them justice.

Do you think about reviews this way? Do you put a lot of time into them or do you keep it simple?

What's one thing you learned this week from your reading? It can be a fact, a random curiosity, a beautiful line, or even something you realized about yourself! My Tidbit: Intentional slow reading is changing how I approach other books too. I started a fantasy novel I hated and wanted to DNF, but I slowed down to the point that I actually reread the opening chapters and found little flakes of gold under the mess. Still up in the air if I'll actually like the book, but I'm glad I looked again.

As for some Pagebound related trivia: I'm reading Algospeak by Adam Aleksic and I learned about Sociolect, a form of language used by a particular social group (pg 31/247), so for us Boundlings it would be like our use of the word 'Yoink'! For those of you who have been on Pagebound longer than I have, I would love to hear some of the other popular sociolects that have been used!

If you could pack one suitcase and move into any fictional home immediately - where are you going?

Drafty castles absolutely count. So do crooked cottages, dramatic cliffside mansions, hobbit holes, chaotic city apartments, enchanted libraries, and suspiciously affordable small-town farmhouses.

Are you:

🌧️ Living your best moody life in a crumbling estate?

🌿 Baking bread in a cozy woodland cottage?

📚 Secretly hoping your house comes with hidden passageways and a mildly concerning attic?

🕯️ Choosing vibes over structural integrity?

Drop the book + the home + one reason you’d survive (or absolutely wouldn’t).

Bonus: what’s the first thing you’re decorating or rearranging when you move in?

Let’s see where PageBound is relocating.

Anyone know best way to do formatting for quotes?

There is this

But I've found that the formatting on that is so incredibly broken and has 0 linewrap so it just floods out of the boxes and off the edge of the page lmao.

Okay I couldn't resist starting this immediately because it sounded sooo interesting and surprisingly from me (I do not like poetry at all), the structure of each of these is so cool that the only reason I'm stopping is that I'm supposed to do something else

This question came to me as I was reading an old, used copy of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It is an old spanish edition, printed in 1971 by Salvat Editores and Alianza Editorial, that I bought second-hand with the pages almost falling off the spine (I only mention this because I renovated it myself and I'm quite proud of it 😌)

While I was reading, I noticed that there was a passage underlined in pencil. This is that quote (imagine this but in spanish lmao):

I learnt something – at first certainly – that had not been one of the teachings of my small smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow.

This quote is something that I would not have ever remarked upon, if not for the fact that someone in the past thought that it was worthy of being highlighted, and it made me wonder: who highlighted this? A certain García Rojas signed their name on the first page of the book, along with "Madrid - 1 Marzo - 1976" in what looks like faded blue ink. Did they highlight the quote? Was it someone else before or after? And for whoever it was, what did that quote mean to them? Did they find it pretty and so decided to underline it, or did they somehow connect with it? What was the life they were living, if they felt a connection to this quote?

I decided to look for more (with a mighty care to not spoil myself), and I also found this quote highlighted:

I’ve been living with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed round me.

The english text invokes feelings of anxiety and fear, but in this spanish edition, "too much closed round me" is translated as defeated me, so the quote in spanish lends itself to be interpreted in a more anguished and sad way. How does this quote connect with the other one? What was the reason the reader felt so drawn to them? They were both underlined in pencil, so I assume they're both by the same person, but what if they aren't?

I love asking myself these questions because I love to think about the lives of the people whose hands have been in the same objects I have, and how their state of mind could've impacted their reading. I also love that there is no answer to them, I'm drawn to the endless possibilities of this insolvable mystery!

So my question for this post is: Have you ever found any highlighted or underlined quote in a second-hand book you bought, or took from a library? And if so, what was it? Did they leave any notes? Have you thought about why those quotes specifically affected a past reader of the same book? Do you have any theories?

I would love to know all of the quotes you guys have found!

Happy Lunar New Year!

In honour of that. What is your favourite book from a country that celebrates Lunar New Year? Alternately who is your favourite fictional horse?