How has your week been? What are you reading? Last week was a busy one for me, full of travel and early mornings at work, but I managed to get some reading in too.
What I’m Reading
I finished the audiobook of Someone Birthed Them Broken, Ama Asantewa Diaka. 5 stars! It’s a wonderful collection of 13 short stories set in Ghana. The main characters are loosely interconnected and there’s more than 1 story with the same main character. I enjoyed it so much that when I was finished, I also went read through the eBook because listening to the audio, I couldn’t always remember which stories were connected to which main character.
The characters are young and navigating the complexities of life and relationships – with parents, siblings, friends, heartbreak, infidelity, sexuality and complicated decisions. The stories all has a sense of time and place and ooze the richness and contradictions of Ghanian life. The themes are sometimes heavy and sometimes funny and beautiful. You really get to connect with the characters and the author beautifully captures the full, rich lives of each of them.
Up Next -> I started reading the recently released Kin, Tayari Jones. It’s about two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, who have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives.
Audiobook Baddies
2026 Audie Award Winners announced. These awards honor recognize distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. The Audiobook of the Year Winner for 2026 is Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, Narrated by Jefferson White. I loved it and thought the narrator was fantastic. This story of Haymitch is the Hunger Games prequel I didn’t know I needed, but l’m so glad the author wrote! Check out all the other winners.
Spammy
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Reading Culture
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⮕ Could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book? “do yearly reading goals actually help us read better, or do they risk hollowing out the very activity they claim to protect?” I set a super achievable reading goal for myself – anywhere from 1-10 books, mainly because number of books read is not important to me anymore.
⮕ Has Booktok made Romance more Commercial? I didn’t know the sales of romantic fiction are at all time high. “The ‘fast fashion’ marketing trends driven by Booktok and Bookstagram has pros and cons to the industry and the genre. It definitely allows more attention and discussion of romance genre but somehow it has made it a lot more commercial and less about what we readers want, but what sells.” I’m not on Booktok and romance is not one of the genres I read regularly, but it is one of my “comfort genres”. When I’m in a truly deep funk of a mood, nothing beats laying in bed and reading a few romance books – or historical fiction – for me.
⮕ And let me just leave this here … People who read are harder to control (YouTube).
⮕ Plus this is a long read, but so worth it for the discussion of The Orality Theory of Everything, which looks at how the decline of reading and the rise of social media have changed what it means to be a “thinking person”. I don’t agree with everything in the article but it’s a fascinating read.
—- That’s it from me. Cheers to the week ahead!
