Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022, with Dini at Dini Panda Reads as co-host from February 2025.
Let’s Talk Bookish July 18th:
Reading Beyond Books
Prompts: What do you read other than books? Do you like non-novel forms of literature, like poetry and plays? Do you read a lot of news articles, op-eds, or essays? Do novels make up most of your reading, or is it a mix of those other kinds of writing? Do you ever listen to podcasts in place of audiobooks?
I feel like I spend a lot of time reading – either random webpages (TV Tropes, I still love you) or articles and features, blog and Reddit posts, newsletters/Substacks. I like some poetry, but plays I’ve always struggled with reading – I get why people might enjoy reading plays and screenplays, but honestly, I’ve always done much better getting to see plays, or even (back in my school days) getting to perform them.
News articles, essays and the like – yes! Mainly either through random websites, as mentioned above, or the various email newsletters I’m subscribed to. As also noted above, I do tend to browse Reddit, and sometimes really fascinating articles will crop up there, on a variety of different topics.
I think it’s hard to judge whether novels make up most of my reading, because I don’t tend to sit and read stuff online in one go, unless it happens to be something I came across while on my phone. I would think books make up the bulk, because I tend to be reading multiple books at the same time, and because I always dedicate part of my day to reading books, even if I’ve spent the evening watching TV.
And yes, I listen to podcasts. I tend to mix it up – a few podcasts followed by a chapter (or two, three, depending on the chapter lengths!) of an audiobook, followed by some BBC Sounds shows for a music fix. So there’s always something going on in the background.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic, and definitely feel free to drop a link to your own Let’s Talk Bookish post in the comments!
Unwrapping Words 
I’m not much for plays either and like you, do better watching them! I’m also not hugely into poetry although I do have a few books in my shelf that I want to try reading bits of at least. I think I read a few news articles and other things per day, mostly due to work, but otherwise, reading novels definitely takes up most of my reading time. As you said, I deliberately set aside time to read/listen to them in my downtime but I don’t give that same priority to articles and the like. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and joining LTB this week!
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Thank you so much Dini! And glad it’s not just me with plays and poetry!
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TV Tropes is so fun and useful! 🙂 I love that you subscribe to newsletters and I’ve recently been trying to read some stuff on Substack though I’m not used to it yet. I can relate to always having something on in the background !
Here’s my LTB this week.
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Yeah – I’m actually really enjoying Substack, there’s so much good stuff on there. Thanks for reading!
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I’m so glad 🙂 & My pleasure!
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I think you make a really good point that it’s sometimes hard to judge whether novels are really the bulk of our reading. I don’t track the time I spend on Reddit, for example, or scrolling random articles and webpages and reading it. It’s not something we necessarily generally think of as “reading” (even though that’s obviously what we’re doing), so it almost gets pushed to the background, versus reading a novel feels like more intentionally setting aside time to do something. It’s really interesting to think about!
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Thank you so much! Glad you liked the post
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