Saturday Miscellany—1/13/24

A quick apology to those who get emailed my posts for littering your inbox with trash earlier today, but I wanted to grab this image.

This Miscellany marks 1,000 days of posting here at The Irresponsible Reader.

Bob laid down the challenge, and I made it. Not always with quality or quantity. But I got it done. There’s part of me that wishes I had something more monumental to mark this occasion, but I think I prefer it being just my regular thing.

Odds ‘n ends about books and reading that caught my eye this week. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:
Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon
45 Years Ago, One Kids Book Series Taught A Generation How To Make Bad Decisions—a look at the beginnings, end, and rebeginnings of Choose Your Own Adventure books.
11 Books That Prove There’s Nothing Wrong with Self-Publishing —I’m not crazy about the headline, but this is a nice listicle about some of the self-pub success stories
7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books—I have started 2 of these (multiple times)
An Ode to Acknowledgements: Sarah Wheeler on the Joy of Learning About the Village Behind a Book
Celeste posted her 2023 Book Blog In Review for A Literary Escape. Looks like a pretty good year.
2023 Peaties—other than its description as “fantasyland’s worst awards for characters,” this is a really good and insightful post that should feed your TBRs and make you grin while reading.
Mark Each Year in Books: Thoughts on Reading Traditions
FanFiAddict’s TBRCon2024 is a little more than a week away.
Top 5 Bookish Resolutions for 2024—Books are 42’s resolutions may inspire some for you
Reading Less in 2024—this is really healthy and wise. Good reminder/thoughts from Bec.
Are Reading Goals Worth It?—Worlds Unlike Our Own has some along the same lines.
The Joys of Backlist Books
Cocktails to Pair With Your Favorite Fantasy and Horror Books—Beth Tabler has updated this list from a couple of years back. Some of these look great. (I am too lazy for these usually. My adult-beverage pairing is typically a neat whisky or bottle of beer)

This Week’s New Releases that I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire—A mutli-world adventure that connects several students to the worlds on the other side of their Doors. This is one of the stronger entries in this series, as I talked about recently.
California Bear by Duane Swierczynski—”follows four unlikely vigilantes who pit themselves against the villain behind California’s coldest case when they decide to take justice into their own hands.”
Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life by Matt Hay—A “memoir of a young man who discovered he was going completely deaf just at the moment he’d fallen in love for the first time.”