This is just a minor programming note, really, which addresses a long overdue change to the site’s review categories. When I first began doing regular book reviews, I made categories for philosophy, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, classics, and non-fiction. The more books I review, though, the more I’ve realized that these categories are not as optimized or descriptive as they could be. In particular, there are a lot of books I read that are nonfiction, but that can mean anything from a biography to a mathematical treatise.
To address this shortcoming, I’ve instituted new subcategories of nonfiction: biography, history, historical (meaning nonfiction works that are historical, separate from books about history), and science. This will not apply to previously published book reviews, but all book reviews going forward will have these subcategories designated. This should help you find what you want to read if you’re trying to search through our burgeoning review catalogue.
I’ve resisted adding more categories so that I don’t end up with a maze of sub-sub-sub-categories that accumulate one new book every five years. That’s why you won’t find urban fantasy, dark fantasy, swords and sorcery fantasy, adventure fantasy, hard science fiction, soft science fiction, space opera, or any number of other subcategories. I try to address such subgenres through tags on those review posts. With the nonfiction, though, the books can be so diverse that the category itself was becoming too large to be useful. After all, it’s not like I just rely upon a fiction category to cover everything fictional. Hopefully, this change will make our reviews that much more effective.
IGC Publishing 