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Ben Reads Good

@benreadsgood

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✨ Ben Acton Williams
📚 Lit fic reader, mainly on YouTube (17k)
✍️ London Library Emerging Writer 2026/27

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Delighted to be part of this fantastic programme with @thelondonlibrary

Currently operating at maximum imposter syndrome, but so very excited to get started ✍️ by @benreadsgood

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3 months ago

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9 months ago

So this deeply surreal thing happened over the weekend…

My tiny BookTube channel!
Mentioned in The Guardian!
Meanwhile, me: 🤯

(Sorry if you’ve already seen this in my stories, but I realised I should canonise it on the grid.) by @benreadsgood

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2 years ago

ok that's as much of @thebookerprizes longlist as I'm gonna get my hands on for now

(unless @penguinhamishhamilton / @chattobooks / @penguinukbooks / @vintagebooksinfluencers / @vintagebooks / whoever's running the show at PRH wants to help out a fan)

many thanks and huge congrats to tagged publishers for sending copies of some of these earlier in the year! by @benreadsgood

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2 months ago

can't wait for these scenes to come true tomorrow @thebookerprizes by @benreadsgood

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2 months ago

guaranteed to be wrong by @benreadsgood

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2 months ago

it's hot by @benreadsgood

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3 months ago

Eight for Tuesday?

The pressure is on. Not just because the air outside is absolutely flipping boiling, but because I haven't done this month's prompt for the Read Good Challenge yet.

The prompt for May is 'May-d to Last' and I need to read a book from before the year 2000.

Plucked some from my shelves that everyone tells me are absolute bangers. But which one should I pick? by @benreadsgood

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4 months ago

just quite liked how the shadows looked by @benreadsgood

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5 months ago

Have you heard of the block universe? The theory in physics that past, present and future are all equally real, always happening, and that time is just our perception of moving through the block. That's how I felt while reading PARADISO 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi.

The story opens on Sufien's deathbed, and as he contemplates his life we step back through it with him; to look at the block from the start. We observe his experience of the 1948 nakba, then follow his movements through countries and states and cities as he searches something that feels like home (though, interestingly, the feeling he seeks isn't one he remembers from Palestine, but from a refugee camp in Kuwait). We get to peek over his shoulder all the way to the end, when he's back in that bed.

So yeah, it's a cradle to grave story, and it's told in a large number of short chapters. Each chapter is titled after its last few words, and at first I found this annoying, a little gimmicky. But the more I read, the more it gave me this sense of inevitability, of the end already having been determined. There was something very satisfying about that when it clicked, and I found myself guessing how those final words would be delivered, already bracing myself for a bad thing or cheered by a happier turn of phrase. Having the ending at the start also chimed nicely with the wider structure of the book, the whole deathbed thing, though I'm not sure what it says about hope.

The prose is decent, written in this sort of dreamy style that took me a while to get into, but I've been reading a lot of very precise writing lately so that's on me. It has some interesting observations about yearning and resistance, about guilt of leaving and never coming back, about ambition and what you feel if you squander it. There is no flattening or simplifying: everything is complex, and sometimes complexity means characters being annoying or mean to one another. Now that I think about it, it has a surprising amount in common with Flashlight, and I think if you liked that book you'll enjoy this too. by @benreadsgood

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5 months ago

I often enjoy strange little books that try to be clever, prodding around the edges of the novel form to test its limits. But I don't always need that. Sometimes it's enough to simply have central characters that I really, really give a fuck about.

Damian Barr's THE TWO ROBERTS is in that latter camp. It tells the story of real life artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun from the (imagined) moment they met on their first day at the Glasgow Art School, through middle age, to the day before a big comeback show. In all that time they stick together, through highs, lows, and I have to warn you: lower lows. These guys loved each other, and I loved spending time with them. I don't think I'd want to hang out with them, and certainly wouldn't let them stay the night, but they fizzed (Bobby) and grumbled (Robert, endearingly) on the page and I couldn't help but root for them.

Importantly it's a story of love which, at the time, was illegal. Bobby and Robert don't bother trying to conform to hetero norms, because that's never a realistic prospect. Instead we get the seeds of modern gay culture, shoots of non-monogamy and cruising in part driven by pleasure, but also by fear. Danger is very real and present in the story: if not physically from others, then the psychic turmoil of being so very 'other'.

The whole thing is brimming with life: real life with all its tensions and jealousies, not just romantically but artistically too. Who receives critical adoration, and who makes sacrifices to allow the other to focus on their work. I believed both main characters as individuals, but also as artists on the cusp of greatness, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Francis Bacon. I found myself really thinking they might make it, that history might be rewritten in these pages. Alas.

In all, a beautiful double portrait.

I'll leave you with an urge not to skip the afterword: the ending left me teetering on the edge of tears, and the afterword pushed me over. by @benreadsgood

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5 months ago

Absolutely cracking Working Class Poetics event at @lyrafest today, where my plan to not come home with more books was shattered by a set of fantastic readings.

Thanks to @mrjohnmccullough @karenmccarthywoolf and Matthew Rice for sharing your work, and to @mlferg for some excellent hosting (sorry for stealing the selfie).

Excited to tuck in. by @benreadsgood

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5 months ago