Introduction

This leaf is reserved for the Hobbit who keeps the volume.

She reads with muddy boots and clean motives — chasing stories that smell of rain, courage, and the kind of laughter that survives hard weather. Prefer the book that sends you outdoors afterward. Prefer the film that leaves dirt under your fingernails of the mind. Prefer the song you can hum while stacking wood.

Edit this page. Replace these paragraphs with your own biography, preferences, and whatever quiet boasts you will allow yourself. The typesetting will hold.

How the book is arranged. Reviews are the body of the volume, divided into three Parts — Books, Movies and Shows. The Journal sits outside them: writing about reading and watching in general rather than about any one work. At the back, the Appendix lists every work reviewed in alphabetical order, and the Tags index the same book by theme.

Two numbers. Each review carries a chapter number and a page number, and they do different jobs. The chapter number is a position: the newest review in a Part is always Chapter 1, so everything below it shifts down as the book grows. The page number is fixed at publication and never moves — the first thing written here is page 1, and it will be page 1 forever.

Stars. Five of them, halves allowed. They record how much the work earned, not how much it cost or how popular it was.