My favourite type of book is a charming novel with lots of wordplay.

My least favourite book is a nonfiction pop-productivity book that tries to widen its market so much and offend people so little that it ends up as 160 pages on nothing.

My second favourite type of book is someone passionately arguing a position that is wild with zero regard for their market. The type where 80% of the content is entertaining nonsense but 20% makes you think quite deeply. Often the creators have loathsome opinions but that’s largely the charm.

I’m currently reading Emotional Vampires (I picked it up on my birthday bookshop crawl). It’s from 1998 and by two people who are both called Rhodes. One of them is a psychologist who is writing from the perspective of “emotional vampires are an interesting metaphor to look at certain behaviors” and the other is a novelist who is writing from perspective of “emotional vampires are REAL and have POWERS.”

It’s great.

The majority of it is wild, but lots of it has made me really rethink some relationships. Books like this don’t tend to sort neatly into 2024’s political divides; there are ideas/positions that look quite right-wing, and a bunch of things that one might consider very left wing, and it’s interesting to see the ways that the writers connect them together.