This site began as part of my old homepage as a way of noting the progress and passage of my reading. I had become increasingly wary of the corporate surveillance internet, and wanted to have my own "goodreads", albeit without the algorithmic recommendations. Over time, I wanted that to go further, so I wrote an API which I interacted with over IRC, which was every bit as horrible as it sounds.
I rewrote all of it into this site during lockdown in early 2020, and I hope to release the code soon, even if it is a horrible mishmash of php.
This is just a list of novels, which I have either read (along with the dates I have read them) or which I want to read. I trawl the spaces of genre fandom looking for the books that other people are reading or raving about. Pretty much every book I read can be bracketed as either Science Fiction or Fantasy; I long since gave up on "literary fiction", I have little to no interest in Biographical works.
I like twisty complicated books, in the main, although I do also enjoy a lighter confection on occasion, especially where that is done with good plotting or worldbuilding. I am not a huge fan of the trend of (most notably) USAian SF in having A Grand Idea but having paper-thin plotting and dialogue-as-characterisation.
Following a bout of self-examination in 2012, I have tried to read as many women as possible, in 2018 I only read novels by women. I started with these rules:-
8 years later, I'm still trying to improve on that, although I will note that I no longer feel that I "have" to read a book by female writers, most of my contemporary bated breath writers at this point are women, or people of colour, or people somewhere on the LGBTQ+. I read these authors because I want to read them.
I do read non-fiction books, and I do occasionally read novellas and short stories, I just don't count those for the purposes of this adventure.
Sometimes, when I finish a novel, I find that I want to say more about it, to enthuse or (more rarely) complain and decry. When that urge breaks past my defences, I write a review and add it here.
That I haven't written a review does not mean that I didn't like a book. That I haven't done so is no slight on the author or the publisher. It is just that sometimes I am motivated to do so, sometimes I am not. This is also, by the by, why I stopped writing reviews altogether in 2016. I had, for whatever reason, been noticed by publishers, and I was receiving ARCs of books "in return for an honest review", a transaction I found myself unable to fulfil for many reasons, mostly to do with my mental health.
Even when I don't have anything detailed to say about a book, I almost always give them a rating. Behind the scenes I rate books on a 100-point scale, but for presentation purposes these are reduced to a 5-point scale here on the site. Those 5 points mean the following:-
All original content on these pages is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. If you wish to use the content outside the terms of that Licence, then please feel free to contact me.
The cover images for the books are from Google Books, and I extend no warranty or make no representation of ownership over same.
I'm dgold, you may know me from various places on the internet. I like Science Fiction and Fantasy, I don't like corporate surveillance and the loss of data privacy.
In that vein, this site has no cookies, there's no tracking of anyone who might be reading it. Site logging is anonymised, and if you have DoNotTrack set, then the site doesn't even log the visit anonymously.