This is a question that I’ve asked myself a few times in the past: will reading before bed help me sleep? I find it hard to wind down after a long day of work, especially because I work an overnight shift and my job entails sitting at a computer for at least eight hours straight. Going right from staring at a computer screen to trying to sleep while the sun is up can be a real challenge that results in my lying there awake for hours at a time. This was actually part of a different experiment I did in which I read every day for a week straight, the video for which is on my YouTube channel.

Today, I’m doing something a little weird: I’m judging books I haven’t read. I’m not going off their covers or their descriptions, either. I’m just looking at the titles of the books. Who knows, maybe I’ll find something interesting I want to read by doing this! Or, maybe someone reading this post will find something that they want to read. I’ll have links to all of the books that I mention down below, too, in case one of them does catch your eye. 

Almost every book—at least, every good book—has a purpose within its pages. There’s a reason it was written. There’s a reason the story is compelling or a reason the story has meaning to at least one person. It’s the nature of many great stories for their purposes to shift and change between one reader and another. One person may read a story and find that it teaches them about love and loss while another reads it and finds lessons in empathy. Neither of these readers is wrong in this, even though there is almost definitely an original intent in the work that was behind the author’s first writing.

Now that I’ve hit one hundred videos and six months of content, it’s time to niche down and get focused. I’ve decided that the best way to start doing that is to give you something of a “clean slate” when it comes to all of the books I have reviewed since I started this whole project. If you’re new to my content and want a rapid-fire overview of all the books I have read since starting this, this is the stop for you. Hello. Greetings. Welcome.

It’s time to talk about my channel goals, accomplishments, and future. It’s hard to believe it’s been six months, but… simultaneously it definitely feels like it’s been at least six months since I started this. I’ll get into what I mean by that and more here in this post. More importantly, I’ll be talking about what’s next for the channel and my plans going forward.

Let’s stop pretending that book covers don’t matter. For just a second, let’s all be honest with ourselves: we do judge books by their covers, to at least some degree. When you’re perusing and looking for a book without a recommendation, what gets you to pick up a book is the cover, the spine, and/or the title. Covers matter. They’re important and they absolutely sell books. Okay, now that we’ve all admitted that to ourselves (right?), let’s talk about what makes a cover good, at least in my personal opinion.