If you watched this week's Tails & Tales, you know my reading week looked a little different than usual.

Normally I'm the person who somehow manages to squeeze reading into every spare moment. Waiting in line? Reading. Lunch break? Reading. Ten minutes before bed? Definitely reading.

This week, though, life had other plans.

What was supposed to be a fairly straightforward trip turned into a marathon of canceled flights, rerouted connections, six different airports, and a suitcase that decided it wanted its own vacation. Somewhere between sprinting to gates and wondering whether I'd actually make it home, reading became less about making progress and more about finding little moments of calm.

And honestly? I'm okay with that.

One of the things I think social media accidentally teaches us is that every week has to be bigger than the last. More books. More reviews. More content. More productivity.

But reading isn't a competition. Some weeks you'll finish six books. Other weeks you'll barely finish one because life simply demands your attention somewhere else.

The books will still be waiting.

Ironically, the books I did finish all wrestled with that exact tension in different ways.

The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood asks whether ideals are worth pursuing even when you know they'll eventually fail. Camelot has always represented this impossible dream of creating a better world, and Parry leans into the tragedy that goodness isn't permanent, but that doesn't make striving for it meaningless. That question lingered with me long after I finished the book.

Then The Demon Star explored faith from a completely different angle. Not blind belief, but the choices we make when the systems we've trusted become instruments of control. One of my favorite things about speculative fiction is that it creates distance from our own world just long enough for us to ask uncomfortable questions about it. Strip away the demons, living gods, and space-opera politics, and you're left with questions about power, identity, resistance, and hope that feel incredibly human.

Even Dungeon Crawler Carl (beneath all the explosions, absurd monsters, and dark humor) keeps returning to the same idea: what parts of yourself are you willing to sacrifice just to survive? Carl's journey has never really been about defeating monsters. It's about refusing to let the Dungeon decide who he becomes.

That's one of the reasons I love fantasy and science fiction so much.

People often dismiss these genres as "escapism," but I think the opposite is true. The dragons, demons, magic systems, alien empires, and post-apocalyptic landscapes are simply different lenses for examining the questions we're already asking in our own lives.

• Who deserves power?

• What makes someone a hero?

• How do ordinary people resist impossible systems?

• What do we owe each other?

• What does hope look like when the odds are terrible?

The best speculative fiction doesn't help me escape reality...it helps me understand it.

So yes, I read fewer books this week than I normally do.

But the ones I finished reminded me exactly why I keep coming back to this genre over and over again. Not because I want to disappear into another world, but because those worlds so often teach me something about this one.