Catching the last edge of daylight in the west-facing window, while engrossed in a good book.

Quite often I want to read a book with a certain kind of feeling – not a particular genre, nor type of plot. But book recommendations are all based on genre and plot elements and other such parameters that are easy to evaluate but not relevant to me. I could easily find, say, standalone books in the fantasy genre by female authors, and with some reasonable effort narrow it down to, say, books that have or don’t have magic/romance/battles/mysteries/fairy-tale inspiration etc. There are blog posts and recommendation lists galore, on Goodreads and elsewhere.

But I often want books where the mood is of a certain kind, and the writing style is like that, and I can’t even really describe that mood and that writing style very clearly, so it’s very much hit and miss. I’ve come to love the “sample” feature on Kindle and often go through many, many samples before actually buying a book.

That might be the feature that ends up converting me to preferring e-books: browsing physical books has to be done in a book store and there’s a limit to how many hours I can stand in a shop, sampling books, before I get hungry and tired.

But right now I have stumbled upon a series of books that hit just the right spot so I’m glad I have several more days to enjoy them before going back to work.