AKA The Terms of Engagement
I created a Reading Notes tab on my blog page, because I want to write about fiction more, but I think it's wise to set some expectations. I think context is important; fiction doesn't just appear out of the sky, and you don't read it as new as a baby. You bring your own context with you. This is some of mine.
My Reading Notes posts aren't reviews; I'm not reviewing these books. I'm not going to recommend or not recommend books to you. I don't know you, and it's probably best for you to make your own mind up, based on the blurb, what other people are saying about it and your knowledge of your own tastes. Instead, I just want to talk about the experience I had with a given piece of fiction; how it made me feel, whether it was to my taste, other salient issues.
The notes are predominately going to be about fiction, because I adore it, but it might be TV, film, music or video games, too, and what I say applies equally to them. I think.
I don't think that there is good or bad fiction; there is only fiction you like, or fiction you don't, fiction that's to your taste, or fiction that's not to your taste. Even questions of whether craft is successful, as far as I'm concerned, are subjective. Questions of good grammar (at least in fiction) are subjective. Many widely accepted rules of writing are just trends that change over the decades, the centuries. Because it's subjective, the best thing I can do is tell you whether something was to my taste or not. If our tastes are similar, you might enjoy it if I enjoyed it. If our tastes are dissimilar, you might still enjoy it, if I didn't.
Slightly differently, understanding what I liked and didn't like about a book is useful to me as a writer, because it will help me write more things that match my taste, and better understand the gap between my taste and my ability to pull a particular work, to my own satisfaction. That's part of what I'm thinking through here, too.
Fiction is increasingly treated as a solely intellectual or philosophical endeavour with little thought given to its aesthetics. I think this is wrong. Fiction, as far as I'm concerned is an aesthetic project first and an intellectual or philosophical project second, if at all. Fiction can give you factual information, but that's not its primary purpose. It can make a philosophical argument, but that is not its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to make you feel something, and to make you think about what you felt. Stories are sense-making projects; they give meaning to our collective experiences. I think criticism of fiction wholly on the basis that it is factually incorrect, or on the basis that all art is and should be a moral treatise, is both missing the point and kind of facile. Approaching fiction as though it is a series of symbols that can be decoded to unlock The One True Meaning for everyone, is obtuse.
Fiction is about sense making of our collective experiences. Our collective experiences include politics1, therefore fiction is political. Fiction is not political in the way that a manifesto or an argumentative essay is political; it is still first and foremost about making you feel something, but that feeling can be political. I think people who say 'fiction shouldn't be about politics' or 'authors shouldn't be political' are more obtuse than people who are trying to find The One True Meaning of a work.
I don't see a difference in value or inherent quality between genres or publication methods. Romance novels and literary fiction have equal value to my mind. What self-published or traditionally published tells you is how many people's labour has gone in to a work; many people compared to, often, just one. It tells you nothing inherent about the quality of the work. They can all be used for sense-making.
Sometimes fiction makes you think deeply about the thing you've read, sometimes, it doesn't. Sometimes there'll be lots to write, sometimes there won't. I don't know that "I enjoyed this, it was fun!" is any less inherently valuable than, "this made me cry, and think about my past." Imagine a life without fun. Yeah.
I'm unlikely to write anything about books that I actively disliked, unless I can think of a distinct benefit. It's just unproductive. Same goes for books that I DNF2; unless I DNF'd for a particular reason I want to talk about, I probably won't write about them. I DNF books for all sorts of reasons, up to and including 'something I wanted to read more was available.' It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
I get the most mileage out of books that I really liked but had some problems with. Fiction that I have a love-hate relationship with is often the stuff I can't shut up about when talking to friends, so that'll probably appear often.
I will not willingly or knowingly read a book written with AI. GenAI is a scourge.
Sometimes I'll want to talk about something that happens in a book that includes spoilers. I'll mark the sections where that happens. That looks like this:
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Where necessary, I'll include content warnings, or link to the content warnings for books.
If I have some sort of a relationship with an author, or any other kind of conflict of interest, I will say so up-front.
You probably shouldn't read a given note if it references a work you authored. I'm not necessarily going to pull my punches. I'm not an asshole; I know how much work goes into writing anything. I will not shit on or tear down works out of glee. But I am honest, and it is a value that is important to me. Writers please beware; unsolicited critique is rarely constructive to the writer whose work is being discussed.3
I reserve the right in advance, to update, evolve or otherwise change my mind about my opinions and tastes.
I'll update this when I think it's necessary. It's current as of 25.10.26.