Category: Blog
What It Takes to Make a Good Book Blog
June 2025 marked two years of me operating and writing for The Steady Read. These past twenty-four months have seen lots of experimentation with this website and its layout, alongside some changes in my writing style, tone, and overall approach to the content published here. Despite the slow start, teething pains, and almost non-existent readership…
Dear Readers, Skimming Is Okay
As someone who runs a book-focused website, the question of whether skimming (also known as skim reading) is okay has lingered in the back of my mind since I started writing reviews for The Steady Read. If you want the short answer, then just know how, when, and why you read are entirely up to…
What Holds Back Aspiring Authors?
Many of us readers, even if not entirely serious about our aspirations or literary future, have probably considered the idea of writing a book, and many of us have tried or started the process. I would estimate that thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands, of non-published people sit down every year and being working…
Why You Should Review Books
Reviewing is a strange phenomenon. Tens of thousands of people, often individuals who have never created anything like the works they are reviewing, sitting around and praising or degrading a work based on particular facets and personal preference. Despite how uninformed or mind-numbing some reviews (and reviewers) can be, I want to take the next…
AI Has Started to Hurt Books
The era of the AI-generated book is upon us, and it is rather ugly. Fortunately, these immensely subpar works are still easy to spot, and are highly unlikely to ever be printed by reputable publishers, such as Faber & Faber, Penguin, or Vintage. But, with the future of entirely human-written books being gradually placed further…
How Many Books Can One Tree Make? (Including Recycling)
This question dawned on me one night when thinking about deforestation, and I felt compelled to write this quick post guestimating an answer. If you’re at least a backseat advocate for the environment, then I think you should care about how many works can be printed from the metaphorical sacrifice of a single tree. After…
The Worst Ways to Mark Your Page
Full disclosure: it is April Fool’s Day and I wanted to have a bit of fun, so this is a riff of my post about miscellaneous things you can use as a bookmark. Please—and I really mean please—do not take any of this as serious advice, or think that I am a complete imbecile. This…
You Will Never Read Every Published Book, Ever
Many of us like to imagine we are regular, adept readers who get through thousands upon thousands of pages per year—and we are! Various sources suggest that reading anywhere between ten-to-twenty standard length books per year places you well above the average person, so well done with that. But, as I outlined in an older…
My Favourite Fonts for Writing & Design
Fonts have always been something that I’ve had a secret fixation with. In a similar fashion to how someone’s handwriting can often tell you a lot about them, choice of font is crucial to shaping the aesthetic, tone, and overall quality of any piece of writing. Typically, I enjoy neat or slightly stylised serif fonts,…
My Top Five Reads of 2022
Top fives are something I’m on the fence about. They tend to be lazy content, but they can also be rather informative and entice a lot of people to check out whatever is featured in that list. Given that I have increased the amount of works I read per year since 2020 (see here for…
