What I read, and was it any good? Twenty-three books, three years, one degree, and a lot of opinions I am now going to inflict on you. Here is the thing nobody tells you about studying English: the reading list is not a list of books you will love. It is a list of books someone decided you should have opinions about. Some of them changed my life. Some of them I resented every single page of.

Very little has actually been confirmed about the Haunting Adeline film. There is no cast, no director, no studio and no release date. What there is, in enormous quantity, is opinion. Since H.D. Carlton announced in mid-July that her bestselling novel is being adapted, the reaction has been fast, loud and frequently unkind on all sides. Petitions have been launched. Readers have been abused for defending the book, and others abused for criticising it. Underneath all of it si

There is a part in the Wicker trailer when a villager remarks that the new husband in town is as strong as a tree, and just as hard. The joke lands because he is, in fact, a tree. Or rather, a great deal of willow, woven into the shape of Alexander Skarsgård and delivered to Olivia Colman’s door like an enchanted parcel.

Every so often, a corner of BookTok surfaces something so unhinged that scrolling past it feels like a moral failing. This week, that something was The Loch Ness Monster by Siggy Shade, a 128 page paranormal romance in which a newly jilted bride rows out onto a Scottish loch and accidentally gives a cryptid a hand job.

Fantasy has spent the better part of two decades handing us the same person: the one with the prophecy, the birthmark, the terrible destiny and the excellent cheekbones. Rae Carson’s new stand-alone does something quietly cheeky with that. It puts the chosen one in the story, gives him a quest that could reasonably kill him, and then tells the whole thing from the point of view of the girl walking beside him.

There is a particular bookshelf that lives on Pinterest. Floor to ceiling, warmly lit, a ladder propped at a rakish angle, every spine somehow the colour of weak tea. Then there is the shelf most of us actually own, which holds four cookbooks, a stack of cracked paperbacks and a candle that has never been lit.

In August 2021, Canadian novelist Marissa Stapley sat down to what she thought was a celebratory dinner with her agent and editor. There was champagne on the table and a secret to go with it: Reese Witherspoon had chosen her fourth novel, Lucky, as the December pick for Reese's Book Club, making it the first Canadian title ever selected. Better still, Witherspoon's production company, Hello Sunshine, believed the story of a con artist on the run could make a killer television

Somewhere in the last few years, reading quietly became cool again. Actual, physical, dog-eared-paperback reading, not just the Kindle-in-secret kind. Bookshops that were meant to be dying out are opening in record numbers, teenagers are picking Colleen Hoover over their phones (well, sometimes both at once), and “what are you reading” has become a genuine icebreaker rather than something only your English teacher asked.

You know the feeling. Endless fluorescent-lit corridors. Carpet that smells faintly of damp. A room that should have an exit but somehow doesn’t.

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour, IMAX-only, star-stuffed adaptation is finally in cinemas, and there’s a good chance you’re going in having last thought about Homer during a English lesson you mostly slept through. Good news: the actual plot of The Odyssey is somehow both messier and more entertaining than anything a school syllabus let on. Here’s what happens, minus the ancient Greek and minus three years of your life reading it properly (I did so I’m here to explain it to yo