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So as the year kicks off and we’ve now done an entire week, I can look back at my reading with a bit of happiness. I ended last year re-reading a series of fanfiction I hadn’t come across in 2 decades, and had finished the second of those by the end of the 2nd of the month and completed the trilogy on the 5th.

After that, I wanted a change from fanfic, so picked out Someone’s Been Messing with Reality, which was a quick young adult read. it was different, I went in expecting it to be American and it was set in Ireland, which was a nice change of pace to be honest.

next, the highlight of the week has to be the incredible technocrime debut In the Blink of an Eye, featuring a grieving cop returning to the workplace and adopting a companion artificial intelligence to help her solve crimes. A fairly standard police procedural outside the AI twist, but what a twist. it hit a lot of important points.

And finally, to end this week, a short science fiction novel from Robert Sheckley, the humour of which would probably have meant more to me if I wasn’t rolling off the crime high at 2 in the morning.

So no DNF’s this week. 2 Fanfictions, 2 science-fiction and a crime to open the year, with a total actual reading time of 27 hours and 14 minutes. I was still off work during the first 2 days of the year, so that probably helped. I’m not expecting any new releases in the coming week, so will continue to pull from my ever-growing TBR pile to feed the reading fires.

Not a bad year of books, all things considered. I can’t say I read less than the year before when my average is up to 1.8 books per week. Given that I’ve changed jobs and had several long-term illnesses, that’s not a bad showing at all.

This years genre breakdown is really a 2-hourse race. About a third of my consumption was science fiction, but just over 40% of it was Fanfiction. I consumed 45 fanfiction titles this year, 44 of them were Harry Potter themed. That seems a crazy amount!

Of the fanfictions, some truly excellent stories. If I had to pick a top 3, they’d be The Second String by Eider_Down, Harry Is A Dragon, and That’s Okay by Saphroneth 5, and The Evans Boy by lonibal.

Other books that I gave good ratings to include The Family Experiment by John Marrs, Life in a Fishbowl by Len Vlahos and the posthumously published Traitor’s Son from Dave Duncan.
Couple of brilliant Star Trek books if you’re a fan, and there was new Douglas Richards too.
Not my best year, but by no means my worst.

The book cover has a vibrant red background with radiating rays emanating from a central point near the bottom. Near the center, there is a small, stylized illustration of a shark made up of what looks like fragmented or pixilated text. The title “The Raw Shark Texts” is written at the top in a bold white font. The overall design is eye-catching with a dynamic, almost explosive composition.

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house one day with no idea who or where he is. A note instructs him to see a Dr. Randle immediately, who informs him that he is undergoing yet another episode of acute memory loss that is a symptom of his severe dissociative disorder. Eric’s been in Dr. Randle’s care for two years — since the tragic death of his great love, Clio, while the two vacationed in the Greek islands.

But there may be more to the story, or it may be a different story altogether. As Eric begins to examine letters and papers left in the house by “the first Eric Sanderson,” a staggeringly different explanation for what is happening to Eric emerges, and he and the reader embark on a quest to recover the truth and escape the remorseless predatory forces that threaten to devour him.

a kaleidoscopic novel about the magnitude of love and the devastating effect of losing that love. It will dazzle you, it will move you, and will leave an indelible imprint like nothing you have read in a long time.

Welcome to my little bookshelf on the internet. My name, obviously, is Sean. And this, hopefully also obviously, is my shelf.
So the first question is why a website? I’ve been reading since I was a child, cataloguing my books on the Goodreads.com website since 2008, and that’s been working well. What’s changed?
Firstly, Goodreads were bought-out by Amazon, and the accessibility to me as a blind person hasn’t gotten any better. Second, the flexibility to use my reviews as I like has decreased, and finally I wanted to extend what I could do with my content. I’ve been pondering exactly what for a while now, and realised one of the things I was missing was being able to share when I finished a book with my friends on the Fediverse. That, coupled with my relatively new hobby of book trailing, meant this website became a reality, not just an idea.
So here we are, a little site of my own. What’ll be here, you ask?
Initially, not much. But there are 3 sections to the site.

Reviews

The reviews will be my largest output, because that is what I do. I read books. I’m still tweaking the layout and the style; I want to be able to add them with minimal effort on my part but make the storage work so that I can eventually do more, such as grouping reviews of series together, having pages for particular authors and so on. Then there’s the backlog from Goodreads to add in, which I want to do sustainably but sensibly. Eyes pealed throughout 2025 for updates.

Trailers

Trailers are one of the fun things I started doing probably about the summer of 2023. I find a book description and a matching bit of music, and put them together.
It’s obviously nothing more complicated than that, but I find that listening to the synopsis of a book with a voice that really makes it sound good and music that brings out the tone is quite nice. And they federate really well, because they’re short and people have easy access to them on mobile. So look out for more of those, not with the regularity of reviews but with the understanding that I do them to both books I have already enjoyed and those I like the sound of and intend to read someday. The idea is you can federate or podcast these.

Blog

Finally, the third strand is posts of my own that aren’t reviews or trailers. Author appreciation commentary perhaps, analyses of how much and what I’ve read in a given period, my general bookish thoughts come under this section. And that, I think, will do for starters.

Joining in

You can hopefully join in by being a subscriber to as much or little of the site as you want. Each of the links in the navigation bar will take you to the appropriate section of the site. You’re welcome to revisit these as you choose, but also subscribe to each feed by email, RSS/Podcast, or follow on the fediverse.

How often will I update?

That’s something I can’t promise. I’ve read fewer than 50 books some years, as many as 220 in others. It’s just me here, I’m not making a review machine or anything, this site is purely for my own thoughts. That said your comments are very welcome and, if I’ve set things up properly, whichever channel you’re receiving through should be bidirectional, that is, if you see a post in your Mastodon client you should be able to reply. If you get something in your inbox, ditto.
So thank you for your interest, and I hope something here catches your eye and you revisit as things appeal.

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