Hi everyone, a quick announcement about Seasonal + Special Event Readalongs:

For those of you that have been around since the summer, you may have participated in our first Special Event Readalong for Pride. This was a huge hit and fostered PB-wide discussion on queer characters and stories (and bonus: the badge was rad). To continue fostering discussions on more niche and diverse books & voices, we'll be hosting a Special Event readalong once a season.

Our second Special Event will run from October 15 - November 15 and will be (drumroll please...) Dia de los Muertos 2025! Head to the Discuss tab and click on the box above the feeds to check out the selections and see the new badge (and if you're new, click the purple info icon next to the Fall Readalong header on Discuss to learn more about readalongs on Pagebound).

Since we're committing to one Special Event a season, we don't want to overwhelm folks with too many Readalong books. While you only need to read 1 book in a Special Event to earn the badge (and there is no "completionist" sparkly badge), we will limit Special Event picks to 3 books. Starting with the Winter 2025 Readalong, Seasonal Readalongs will only include 4 books. This way, you still only have to read a max total of 5 books per season to earn all Readalong badges available.

As for product updates, looks like most of you have already noticed some of the bigger changes on the site but for those that missed it, the following has been updated over the past 2 weeks:

• Discover Books got a little makeover: every day, we feature a new emoji and show you books whose ratings most frequently feature that emoji. Some of the emojis in rotation will be seasonally themed :) we also show you books that were the most discussed/finished/TBR'd yesterday, so the featured books will change daily and will showcase less mega popular titles.
• the Similar Users list got an update. Before, we were showing any user with over 30 points in that list; now, we prioritize active accounts, so you can find people you're more likely to actually engage with. I'll be making further tweaks to this in the coming weeks.
• No more HTML tags in posts/comments, please use markdown instead! See the Pagebound Club post on this for more info.
• We will save your total page count and pre-populate it when you post using Pages to calculate progress.

We're still beta testing the app but are on track for and end of month release!

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy

This book is gonna fuck me up isn’t it

Guys there's more chemistry between Tisha and Eli at this point

I'm begging you Ali, please give Rue some sense of personality

so lately, following the bookish trends and so forth, there's been a great buzz about "dark fantasy" and i find myself wondering what, exactly, is meant by it. is it an aesthetic, all about corvid motifs and decadent tropes? is it meant to signify a mood or a tone? or is it about the content of the fantasy novels?

i am finding myself confused about what makes any given fantasy novel "dark fantasy," as by my reckoning (and let's pls keep spoilers to a minimum overall here) the darkest fantasy book i've ever read is the poppy war by r. f. kuang and it's not even a competition, yet i've never once seen it shelved or listed as "dark fantasy." then again, when i think about what makes a book "dark" for me, it comes down to something a lot like bleakness conveyed through both the events of the narrative and the attitude the book takes towards these events. so perhaps there is a mismatch between how i would define darkness and how the e.g. barnes and noble shelvers do.

so then!! what makes a book "dark fantasy" to you? do you consider it a mood, a tone, an aesthetic, a matter of content, a cynical marketing ploy, a secret other thing, all of the above? what do you think?