Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?

Every January, the same ritual begins.

We all do it. Me included.

As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.

I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.

Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.

On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.

But is it really?

The best books about the Falklands War: Three essential reads and the remarkable story behind Operation Corporate

England's recent World Cup meeting with Argentina has, perhaps inevitably, prompted renewed discussion about the Falklands War. Sporting rivalries rarely exist in isolation, and while football should never be conflated with conflict, moments like these often encourage people to revisit the history that continues to shape relations between the two nations.

More than forty years after the war, the Falklands campaign remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the twentieth century. Lasting just seventy-four days between April and June 1982, it saw Britain project military power halfway around the world to retake a remote British Overseas Territory after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982.

Why do brilliant novels so often fail at the finish?

A disappointing ending to a novel you've been enjoying has a peculiar power over us. At least it does for me. 

You can spend days immersed in a novel, recommend it to friends before you've even finished it, and carry the characters around in your head. Then you reach the final chapter and something doesn't quite land. The ending feels rushed, overly clever, relentlessly bleak, or simply at odds with everything that came before.

It raises an uncomfortable question. Can a bad ending ruin a great novel? I'm asking as I have read a slew of novels recently where this has been the experience.

At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.