one of the things i love most about this app is its being anti-AI. most of the users seem to be as well and considering how hard it is to find artistic communities free of AI now, it’s very refreshing. (side note: i am truly grateful to the founders for this delightfully cosy space they’ve made). so, i think (more accurately; hope) we can agree AI-written books are an offence to the writing and reading community and not real art. however…they still exist. despite my best efforts to avoid them i’ve come across a few now—such as the truthspoken heir—and i really would rather not. which brings me to why i’m writing this; i would like to avoid AI books as much as possible. so if you know of any, please give me the titles to i can know to run away if i come across them. (i also might make a list of them if people are interested.) and one more thing! this is something i would post in requests if i wasn’t broke and had pb royalty BUT what if there was a way to tag books as AI? like, if people could “report them” and staff could confirm and leave a mark on the book’s overview? alright! i’m done, sorry 😭 thanks for reading my rant, have a good day <3

Details, actions or mindsets that makes you think: nah, what the hell.

I go first: calling no-spice fantasy "Clean Fantasy"

When I go to look at the new lists, there's almost more with negative votes than positive ones 💀. I think this tendence can be intimidating for new users.

Is it just me or have more recently been way more controversies with authors in the booktube, booktok, bookreddit community? The time between the examples is not that close I suppose but the attention of each case definitely gets bigger and louder as time goes on

The most recent one I can think about is the use of the word "dirt" in an Elsie Silver book to describe tan skin. It was exposed by a creator and now my feed is full of commentary about it, a lot of opinions if that was a phrase out of context or a racist comment

Then there was the case of Coby Wilkens, an author who pretended to be native American and got exposed after publishing a native American character centered romance book, if I stopped haunting you. An author with the writing name KimChi who also faked their nationality, Cait Corrain who sabotaged and used bots to downvote and bash other first time authors while she faked good reviews for her own debut (pretty sure some were her real life friends so that went pretty bad however you see it) And the worst one this year that was the "daddy's little toy" book which pedophilic themes and the private comments of the author about even her own children ended up getting her arrested

Can this all be attributed to cancel culture? Are we simply noticing because we are paying more attention?

Guys, I just wrote the last pages of my very first book journal 🥹 I wanted to share this news with pagebound community!!!

I started doing this book-journaling thing exactly a year ago, in December 2024, to help myself digest the books I was reading at the time. In the past few years, my reading had skyrocketed, and I’d begun to feel like I was consuming books rather than truly enjoying or understanding them. I also wanted a place to return to whenever I wanted to remember what I’d read and how I’d felt about it.

So, I decided to use a 15-year-old notebook with the ugliest colors and a few pages already filled with random quotes (one from Game of Thrones -the “chaos is a ladder” monologue because I was edgy-, one from Eragon, and one from Fairy Tail -the anime??? because, I guess why not) plus a list of books I wanted to buy.

Choosing this ugly notebook was intentional. I know myself, if I cared about making it look pretty, I would have abandoned the whole endeavor for sure. I aimed for consistency rather than perfection. It was a good decision, because my handwriting is abominable, so keeping a pretty journal was never going to be attainable. And happy to say, it truly worked! I stayed up to date with the books I was reading, writing down my thoughts and feelings. Now I have a nice new notebook, and I’m planning to put some effort into making it look a bit prettier with stickers 🙂‍↕️

Do you keep a book journal? If so, what do you like best about it, and how did you start journaling? If not, do you plan on starting one with the new year?

I'm coming to you, friends of pagebound, and I'm going to be open and vulnerable and admit that I have a bias against the way male authors write romantic relationships within fiction. I can fairly confidently say that I have never read a compelling romance written by a man. I feel like it often leans toward very quick, in and out type scenes, very physical and unemotional. My husband just read me a snippet from the book he's reading right now (World Without End by Ken Follet) and it made him laugh and me cringe. I'm so willing to be proven wrong about this, and I would love recommendations on books written by men where the romantic relationships are believable and loving. I will admit that the majority of books that I read are written by women, and I want to be able to leave this bias that I have in the past! I want evidence that this prejudice that I have is completely unfounded, and I just haven't read the right books yet.

Editing to add that I'm really hoping I'm not coming off as not being genuine in any way, I'm really hoping for recommendations for books that readers love! I love love, and I love reading about love and romance, regardless of the genre too! Some of the relationships that I have personally found the most compelling have been in historical fiction, sci-fi, or fantasy novels! I'm equal opportunity when it comes to reading about romance 💖

This year's Spotify Wrapped is out and I thought it would be a good time to start a little recommendation game based on your most streamed album(/artist/song) this year! I recently saw a post doing a similar thing with the Letterboxd Four and thought it was a super cute idea.

Just post your personal album of the year in the comments and other users will do their best to find a book with similar vibes. (Of course you don't have to use Spotify to participate.)

Ok so Spotify wrapped came out and mine was questionable (it was all specifically Eurovision 2025 with the exception of jpegmafia. I live in America btw).

Now do you think your wrapped kinda matches up with what your reading style is? Ik that question sounds insane. Even though I’m a beats>lyrics most times (because I have music in the background, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate deeper lyrics). I like deeper meaning in my books, I like trying to find something deeper and watching videos on the topic. (I also don’t mind reading just for fun, but something about that music vs books makes it vice versa).

I dont know I thought it was an interesting but weird and confusing question to ask.

I'm usually not one to do something like this but I feel like there should be a space where people can get out all their feelings if they didn't like a book (or of course if you absolutely HATED it) so tell me... What's the most recent book you disliked and why? Spill the tea my friends☕️ And if you feel like it, share a book you'd recommend over reading that one! Please be civil and friendly!!

As I was reading this book, I was thinking of all the examples of gift economies that already exist in the community I live in, as well as some I wish existed. Since many of us are participating in a readalong for this book, let’s lean into the spirit of reciprocity and gifts and gain some inspiration from one another!

1. What examples of a gift economy already exist in your community?
2. What would you like to see created that you think your community could benefit from?

I’ll kick off:

1. In my community we have: Free Seed Libraries (native and edible plant seeds), Buy Nothing Groups, free fridges and pantries, period pantries, Little Free Libraries (books), and a local coffee shop has a used art supplies exchange

2. I did a lot of home repair and rebuilding in New Orleans after Katrina, and right where the levee broke and a lot of homes were devastated, people started a library of tools. All the groups and individuals working on rebuilding could borrow and/or lend hammers, lawn mowers, stump grinders, saws, jack hammers, etc. I’ve thought of this example so often because tools - which we’re not necessarily using all the time - can be really expensive to buy and even to rent, so how cool would it be to have a Tool Library in our communites?