Akiva Reads

What Kind of Books Do You Like to Read?

Sci fi, nonfiction, and anything queer, trans, or gender-bent. Culture clashes, Jewish stuff, Really Alien Aliens, werewolves, science and engineering, and alternate histories. Indie graphic novels. Experimental, epistolary, metafiction, time travel, unreliable narrators, and other stories with unconventional formats, perspectives, and/or rules. Authors who aren't white men.

Any book involving two or more of the above is an instant contender. I generally avoid dystopias, vampires, miserable people in bad marriages, and zombies. The words "multigenerational," "representation," and "lyrical" are on very thin ice.

I'm not a methodical reader, just a methodical shelver. I am generally in the middle of at least a dozen books at once, some of which I may not have picked up for 6 months.

I don't request ARCs for review because giving myself an Official Reading Assignment turns out to be a great way to ensure I will never complete it.

Other Interests?

Mathematics, geology, printmaking, bicycles, computers, botany, general outdoorsy nonsense

Star Rating Criteria

An extremely exact and scientific function of how excited/infuriated I am right when I finish the book, how quickly I come down from that over the next couple days, and how much intellectual/artistic merit I think it has.

Actually About Akiva

Spent my entire childhood with one finger in a book.

Why?

I've been using goodreads since November 2007 to record what I read and my ever-expanding to-read list. At some point I started trying to write a review for everything I finished because I liked how it made me think about the book more deeply. Time passed, and suddenly I have almost a thousand reviews and a list of nearly 1300 books I've read.

Goodreads, though it's now owned by Amazon, still has the best community. Though goodreads has benefited from neglect by its corporate overlords for the last 10 years, the decision to start including items without ISBNs in 2023-2024 is noticeably degrading their overall data quality and swamping their volunteer data maintenance force. (LLM-generated books aren't helping either.) This isn't going anywhere good, so I'd like to be more independent. One of my intentions with this site is to make it easier for me to mirror reviews to indie sites like LibraryThing and Storygraph. I'm writing some python scripts to convert data between the four formats, which it would be fun to release as a pelican plugin. Meanwhile, happy to share!

I'm a 90s kid, I had at least three geocities sites that I loved working on. Now I'm an adult, I can buy my own domain name with my own credit card, and I don't have to do all my layouts with <table> tags. I'm having a lot of fun learning about 2026 CSS.