Why I'm shamelessly reading fanfiction

I first talked about fanfiction back in 2017. Back then I was discussing whether it should ever count towards reading goals, despite the fact that I really didn't read it. The post was definitely written with a mocking tone and I can tell from reading it that I didn't think fanfiction should really be taken seriously, despite the length of many stories. 

Sometime in the past year or so, it seems that fanfiction has become more mainstream in the book community. It's very common to see more popular fics included in recommendation lists on BookTok. I've seen Manacled, in particular, recommended and discussed more and more in the past few months amongst many creators, which was my first real foray into the world of fanfiction and I found that I loved it! But then I went back to published works and didn't pick up another fanfic until October... and now I can't stop. 

As you might know if you read my blog semi-regularly, I've been in a bit of a slump for the past year and a half as life wreaked havoc on my mental health. I've struggled to post regularly and, more upsetting, to read regularly. Or at least, as regularly as I'd like. This year I've turned to new genres to get back into the groove, but what's shocked me the most in the past few months is that I've come to absolutely love and appreciate fanfiction. 

I've thought a lot about why this is as I tried to convince myself to read a "real" book in between stories. Why is it so easy and comforting to read these sometimes beautiful stories that people put into the world for free? 

Think about the fact that, when you choose a story to read on AO3, you're probably choosing from a fandom you already love. When you go into a work of fanfiction, you know the characters. You probably love them already, and you're probably already very invested in their lives. You already know the world and can't wait to jump back into it. There's no effort required to understand a new world or understand who new characters are. There's only the effort it takes to fall into a story full of people and places you adore. It brings a whole new meaning to "comfort read." 

While I was wondering if I was just late to the game that everyone else was already playing, I came across this Forbes article discussing the fanfiction boom of 2020, which apparently began around the time of lockdown. Apparently, traffic to AO3, the most popular fanfiction website, increased by 60% year over year in April 2020. 

Obviously, fanfiction has been around forever. I remember people reading when I was in high school, but I certainly was not one of them. The only fanfics I knew about were, frankly, awful. I just didn't know where to look! Some of my absolute favorite reads of all time have been discovered in the past three months, and I'll be shamelessly reading for the foreseeable future. It isn't as if I'm going to run out of material! 

For anyone like me who is interested but has no idea where to start (the AO3 search is intimidating), here's the fanfiction genre page on Goodreads with some popular options! 

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Do you read fanfiction?

What's your comfort genre?

Let me know in the comments!

ARC Review: At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp

Title: At the End of Everything
Author: Marieke Nijkamp
Publication Date: January 4, 2022
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Pages: 400
Add to Goodreads

//I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review//

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends comes another heartbreaking, emotional and timely page-turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist.

Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day...they don't show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There's a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they're stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all.

As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place.

I’ve just finished reading an ARC of At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp and I absolutely LOVED it. This was a great 5/5 star read for me.

One day, the juveniles at the Hope Juvenile Treatment Center, where delinquent teenagers are sent for various reasons, are abandoned and forgotten by those who were supposed to take care of them. A few curious teens break out to get freedom from the center. They are surprised to run into armed soldiers who tell them that an infectious disease, a plague, has broken out and everyone is confined to their houses and they are not allowed to travel without a permit. Stranded at Hope, the teens who decide to remain there are forced to find a way to survive. With their dwindling food sources, limited medical supplies, and with the plague having broken out within the facility, they have to bind together to make it.

There are three main characters and three points of view throughout the book. Each of the three main characters are white. However, the book is full of people of different races and nationalities. There is also a non-binary transgender teenager who was kicked out of their religious parents’ home. Too many authors nowadays are forcing diversity they don’t want into their stories. The problem with this is they write their characters in offensive manners. Nijkamp, however, doesn’t do this. When they describe a character’s skin tone, they do so in such a way that you can tell they aren’t forcing the diversity. For example, a character named Khalil is described as “Dark-brown hair, light-brown skin, laughing brown eyes.” I also love that Nijkamp didn’t try to write about the injustice black teens experience in the justice system. They didn’t want to take away space from a writer of color.

“This is what the plague looks like. It’s not illness, at first. It’s fear. The type of fear that nags at the back of your thoughts, that crawls like a parasite under your skin. It’s like every bruise that brushes against my clothes.” The story itself was slow. Not in a bad way, but in a good one. They took the time to humanize each character, even the worst ones. They make you feel like you truly get to know the characters of this book. Not just the three narrators but the characters who surround them as well. I could write an entire book on how this book made me feel and the profound thoughts I had about life, fear, and COVID while reading it.

It was surreal to read about a plague when we have one of our own going on in real life. The plague in the book was far worse than COVID is but still, it was emotional to read about. I’d say the genre of this book would be YA Dystopian Psychological Thriller.

This book will be published on 4 January 2022 and I can’t recommend it to others enough!

The unexpected ways my reading habits changed in 2021

In 2020 and 2021 I used a reading spreadsheet in addition to Goodreads to track all of my reading stats. In addition to the categories shown, I started tracking categories in 2021 to challenge myself to read more diversely. For the purposes of this post, though, I'll be sharing how my reading habits changed in relation to genre, age range, and book format!

READING BY BOOK FORMAT

Starting off with the least interesting, I wanted to see how I've changed my physical reading habits. For example, in 2020 I read mostly audiobooks, followed by hardcovers. So how did I do things differently in 2021?

This was certainly an unforeseen change! For starters, I read significantly less audiobooks. Despite what I first though, this isn't because I've listened to less audiobooks! It's because I've read more actual books this year than last. While I only read 80ish books in 2020, I'm already over 100 for this year, so the percentage of audio is lower.

The most obvious difference is that I've read over half my books in ebook format! I think this can be largely explained by three things. First, I bought a Kindle Oasis this year and it is my new best friend. We go EVERYWHERE together! Second, I joined Kindle Unlimited and got a hankering for dark romance books that are almost all on KU. Finally, I started reading fanfiction and (obviously) that's in ebook format. My poor physical copies are feeling very lonely right about now. 

READING BY AGE RANGE

Next, I took a look at how I've changed my reading habits by age range. This blog started out and has remained a mostly YA book blog for several years, but that definitely changed this year!

Along with the introduction of dark romance and KU came significantly more adult books. This has definitely shown up around the blog in a way that I'm not entirely sure how to work with. What even is my blog if not mostly YA? I've still read young adult books this year, but not even close to how many I do in a normal year. While YA books made up 57% of my reading in 2020, they were less than 16% in 2021. Honestly, I'm a little worried for myself because I have a TON of YA books sitting unread on my bookshelves and I'm waiting for the inspiration to read them. Still, I've found a ton of new authors to love!

READING BY GENRE

Finally, the category I've been most excited to see as a graph: what genres I've read most. Surely I'm still reading mostly fantasy even if it's adult fantasy, right? 

*laughs nervously*

Well, I guess not. In 2020, fantasy made up exactly 50% of the books I read, while it clocked in at just 22.3% in 2021 (so far). So what else am I reading?? Well, I read 2.3% romance in 2020, but 23.7% romance in 2021. Hmm. That's... something. I've also read more graphic novels and have been introduced to webtoons and fanfiction!

Interestingly, some genres that have stayed roughly the same. Thrillers, contemporary, and non-fiction stayed pretty close, while I read a bit less horror and sci-fi. This isn't visible, but mystery dropped to less than 1% from 11% in 2020. I'm very curious to see how these trends change in the next year! 

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Do you track your reading habits?

How have your preferences changed?

Let me know in the comments!

Book Review: The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

Title: The Husband's Secret
Author: Liane Moriarty
Publication Date: July 30, 2013
Publisher: Berkley
Pages: 396
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My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. . . .

Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.

The Husband’s Secret is another hit thriller by Liane Moriarty. The book starts with Cecilia Fitzpatrick who stumbled across a letter addressed to her by her husband to be opened after his death. Cecilia has a decision to make: to honor her husband’s wishes and wait to open the letter or to go with her curiosity and open it now; to open and read a letter that could change the trajectory of their entire lives by revealing her husband’s deepest, darkest, harrowing secret. This book is told from three points of view: Cecilia, Rachel, and Tess. Even though they don’t know each other well, their lives unexpectedly intertwine, and the repercussions of John-Paul Fitzpatrick’s actions create an avalanche that no one can stop.

My favorite character in this book was Cecilia. She felt like the most three-dimensional character to me. She had so much depth that others couldn’t even begin to imagine, and I also found myself empathizing with her the most. As always, Moriarty’s characters felt real to me. This was also yet another book that keeps you guessing. I found myself not even wanting to sleep because I wanted to reach the end of the book while simultaneously wanting more to the story. My favorite part of this book was the climax. Seeing everything come together was as pleasurable as biting into a triple layer fudge cake. This book made me laugh at times, but I didn’t find myself wanting to cry even though it did get emotional.

The only thing I disliked about this book was Rachel. Without spoiling anything, all I can say is she was one-dimensional to me, and she was also just extremely annoying. I found myself wanting to throw my book across the room, and then I got mad because I it was a library book so I couldn’t. She was an overbearing grandmother, a lackluster parent, a terrible mother-in-law, and she tended to see what she wanted to see and to ignore what she didn’t want to see. For many reasons I found it difficult to care about Rachel.

This book was another amazing five star read for me and I would DEFINITELY recommend it to others!

Top Ten Tuesday #307: Books I loved as a child/teen

Today's Topic: 

Books I Loved as a Child/Teen

Happy Tuesday! This week we're taking a trip down memory lane and I couldn't limit myself to just ten! I split this week's books into books I loved as a child and books I loved as a teenager. I definitely had eclectic (and questionable) tastes! Haha!

AS A CHILD

Midnight on the Moon by Mary Pope Osborne

Karen's Worst Day by Ann M. Martin

The Borrowers by Mary Norton

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle

AS A TEEN

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The Knight and the Dove by Lori Wick

The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

Warrior's Song by Catherine Coulter

The Crown of Eden by Thomas Williams

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

Weekly(ish) Recap: 11/7 - 11/27

HAPPENINGS OFF THE BLOG

Hi, everyone! Another few weeks of reading a ton of fanfiction, but I did finally get around to reading some "real" books too. Shockingly, they were mostly (dark) romance. Who even am I? My friend talked me into reading Ice Planet Barbarians with her and, well, that was an experience. XD For Thanksgiving I ended up doing absolutely nothing but reading and watching the first episode of Wheel of Time (which made me want to finish reading the series because yikes). I'm definitely glad I'll have family here for Christmas! I'm already making plans to go look at lights and drink hot chocolate. 

NEW BOOKS THIS WEEK

  

THIS WEEK I READ

 

   

  

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Book review of Into the Dark

Book review of The Other Woman

I talked about books I've preordered but haven't read

Book review of The Last Widow

I did the Thanksgiving book tag

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

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I'm linking up to Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post!