The BookTok canon is getting older, and that is not an accident

There is a particular kind of TikTok video that makes me laugh and then immediately makes me suspicious. You know the one. Someone holds up a book that looks like it could do structural work in a small house, says they were “not prepared”, and then cuts to a string of reactions that suggest the novel has personally rearranged their internal organs.

Sometimes it is a brand new release. Increasingly, it is not.

Reading slumps are not a personal failing

A reading slump has a particular way of messing with your self-image. It is not just that you are not reading. It is that you feel like you are no longer the kind of person who reads.

Which is dramatic, yes. But also understandable, because reading is not just a hobby. For many of us it is a coping mechanism, a joy, an identity, a private home we carry around.

So when the door won’t open, it can feel like something has gone wrong with you.

The setting as a character, and why the places in some novels stay with you

Some books leave you with a plot. Others leave you with a place.

You finish the last page and realise what you miss most is not the twist or the romance or even the protagonist. It is the street, the house, the river, the city at dusk. The particular kind of light that only exists in that fictional world.

Where have all the epics gone? A revisit to Lonesome Dove

I’ve just finished reading Lonesome Dove. Again. Though technically a reread, it felt startlingly fresh – like coming back to a place you used to know but seeing it in a different light. It hit me harder than I expected.

Some novels haunt. Others entertain. Lonesome Dove does both, with a vastness that’s hard to put into words. It’s a story that spans thousands of miles and even more emotional terrain. And despite its 850-plus pages, it rarely drags. Larry McMurtry pulls us along with wit and grit, and a deep affection for his characters – all of whom feel maddeningly, painfully real.