Book Blogger Hop: The Hook

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about what grabs you in any given book: What grabs you and keeps you hooked in a book? With non-fiction, generally the topic matters most. I’ve found myself interested in food history and fashion history, less because I’m interested in food or fashion per se, and more because you can get a surprising amount of contextual understanding of a given period/culture/etc by reading about its food and fashion. So, when it comes to non-fiction I love books that use things like that to show me a bigger slice of history than you’d expect — liking using poems to do a history of England (like A History of England in 25 Poems), or carpets to do a history of the world (like Threads of Empire, although I haven’t…