Why this shelf

A small corner for short notes on what I read. No ratings, no summaries.

For years I kept reading notes in the backs of notebooks, on receipts, in the margins of library books (sorry, librarians). Most of them got lost. The ones that survived were never the clever ones. They were the small observations: a sentence that made me stop, a character I kept thinking about on the bus, the exact week a book stopped being homework and started being mine.

This site is an attempt to keep those notes in one place. A few rules I set for myself:

• No star ratings. I have never once agreed with my own rating a year later.
• No plot summaries. The publisher already wrote one, and it is better than mine.
• Only books that earned it. If I have nothing to say after closing a book, I will not pretend otherwise.

I read slowly, mostly in the evenings, and mostly older novels with the occasional detour into essays and history. Expect a post every few weeks, sometimes less. If you found this place by accident, welcome. There is tea somewhere, metaphorically speaking.