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

once I finish this book I want to read something... idk simpler 🫠

I hate this guy 😤 This is my third reread and I still hate him with burning passion. He disgusts me so much it makes me want to skip his chapters, eugh. Even Regal is better (not by much tho)

Here’s how it works:

Take any book you know.

Rewrite the plot (or part of it) as if a main character was posting on Reddit’s AITA forum.

Keep the AITA style: ages/genders in parentheses, dramatic setup, moral dilemma tone.

Bonus points if you make it sound petty or ridiculous while still being recognizable.

For fun, see if you can figure out other people's!

Edit: These are hilarious and I’m finding books to try. You’re all amazing. I’m living for these.

Beginning to have mixed feelings. While I am enjoying parts of this, there is a hard-to-ignore undertone of, "White Middle Class Educated Man Discovers Class and Social Inequality Plays a Factor in Poverty and Racism More Than We Thought"—when community leaders cough lots and lots of Black women cough have been saying this stuff for decades. Glad a sociologist is using data and pointing out factual information, but it's starting to feel like taking the mic out of someone's hands when they've been talking for years because you like the sound of your voice.

editing to add: very aware that while some of this information feels surface level, it's not also readily available to people not actively in this space nor from the US.

Moving past that obvious rant—I am still find snippets of information fascinating. One quote, "First, even after controlling for other factors, an increase in the number of neighborhood coffee shops is associated with the decrease in the number of murders." This is just wildly ridiculous and funny. Coffee saves lives.

Another section that's interesting is the discussion on how/why there are so less green spaces in a lot of neighborhoods, specifically impoverished or lower SES areas. Basically these "urban developers" thought that more trees and grass caused crime???? THAT'S WHY PEOPLE DON'T HAVE NATURE??? how fucking stupid. and sick. and annoying. and racist. and really really stupid.

I monopolised this forum back when I read the book (which was what? a month ago give or take?) so it definitely drew me in. I read it so fast, maybe too fast, and thinking back to it my opinion of it evolved somewhat. (That's the issue with reviewing books right after you finish them: sometimes your opinion is different in hindsight. Or maybe it's just me and my brain that only starts working after a week sleeping on things.)

Anyway, I feel like the more I thought about this book, the less I liked it, which does not happen with all books. More people will decide to read this, I suppose, since it's part of the Fall Readalong, and I wonder if other people will fell the same?

I put pen to paper (electronically) to try and explain my thoughts, but it ended up being an in-depth review, and I decided to edit my original review with it. But my main point is that, once I moved past the style and the eerie horror, which were good, the rest of this book (characters, relationships, plot) fell flat to me. I went into this specifically looking for a horror romance, expecting a sick but captivating relationship and did not get it. The characters were too bidimensional, their romance I did not really feel, the plot relied a little too much on Andrew ignoring certain hints. This all was already true right after I finished the book, but looking back after a little while it became truer. Fundamentally, I'm sorry to say, this is a book that disappointed me...

Hi all, wanted to give you guys a heads up without sending everyone a notification in Founder Announcements 😅

• HTML embedding is no longer allowed on Pagebound. If you try to embed HTML (so think: any of those fancy tags to post an image or do text formatting) you will get an error. There's quite a few reasons for this, but the most pressing one is that HTML does not work on apps (and we are quite close to launching the PB app!)
• Markdown is allowed on Pagebound now! We use CommonMark, guide here: https://commonmark.org/help/ . This will set us up to have inline spoiler tags in the near future
• In an effort to encourage discussion, we've changed Post & Comment points. Post and Comments are both worth 5 points now to reflect the fact that comments are just as important to discussion as posts. We encourage you to check out the book forums for other posts as you read!
• Also regarding points, we will no longer award points for commenting on activity items in your feed (so things like "jennifer earned a badge" or "jennifer joined a quest"). You will earn points for commenting on Posts and Lists only (and, for responding to comments in posts and lists ofc). We want to make sure all comments and posts on PB are authentic and not for point farming ;)
• Quality of life update: when you make a post from a certain page, we now save the total page count and autofill it next time you make a post. No more flipping to the back of your book each time you want to post!

Thanks all, Jennifer

I hate this guy 😤 This is my third reread and I still hate him with burning passion. He disgusts me so much it makes me want to skip his chapters, eugh. Even Regal is better (not by much tho)