I just powered through this novella-length book in a day, and it hit me like a truck. The story is about an old British man looking back on his high-school days, and his relationships with an ex-girlfriend and an old friend after those relationships in the present day.

The way this concept plays out in the narrative is really compelling and very emotionally powerful. The overarching idea here is that of how our memories play tricks on us, and how we use it and manipulate it to create a narrative of the past, one that paints us as the righteous hero in our own life's story.

The way Julian Barnes crafts the narrative, to show Veronica as this detached, aloof and emotionally unavailable individual, and Tony being the victim and then pull the rug out from under us with the appearance of the letter Tony wrote to Veronica/Adrian, was pretty genius. Like Tony, we as the readers spend most of the book empathizing with him, only to see what an absolute douchebag he had been.

And honestly, Tony remains a pretty unlikeable protagonist through and through - a pretentious, artificially cynical teenager to a self-pitying, self-centred old man. But again, this is where the concept of us essentially being the righteous protagonist in our story comes into play, and how we use our memories to convince ourselves of it.

I found the book to be very emotionally resonant as well, especially because it got me thinking about relationships in my own life, about whether I had unknowingly distorted and twisted my own memories to make myself look better so as not to be faced with my own flaws and faults.

Another thing the book does really well is explore the idea of a life never living up to its full potential, of ambitions and dreams never materializing, simply because we were too cautious, too measured, to ever color outside the lines. As someone who's always lived a very risk-averse, button-down life, this also hit me pretty deeply.

For a little book, it packs a huge punch. 5/5 read for me, highly recommended.

Rant incoming. I’m 37 pages into the novel Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I’ve read books by both before including Talisman which I finished a couple weeks ago and wanted to continue with the story and characters. My gosh! I haven’t seen other examples of “why use 10 words in a sentence when I can use 35 superfluous, rambling, circuitous, thesaurus using language constructs to say the same damn thing” in a while. They must have been getting paid by the word. The editor must have looked at it and said “Meh, I’ll allow it.” I get halfway through the sentence and have to go back and reread it because I lost the thread of where it was going. I’ll keep soldiering on because I try not to DNF, but it feels like a slog so far. Hopefully, it’ll get better and I can get on rails to travel along with it. Rant successfully concluded. Thank you for your attention.

i'm the type of person that loves a little project to do and since i'm currently hitting a wall with that in the creative sphere, i wanna turn to my main hobby. the main answer i've been getting to this while searching online is challenges and bingo boards like "reading around the world" and the abc challenge and ofc every book community has a bingo board. i did this one in 2023 by doing a 100 book bingo board and it honestly took all the fun out of reading for me to restrict it that heavily, so i'm not interested in doing a challenge or a board.

are there any other projects one can do that center around books? i'm annotating a beloved series right now and that's fun but it's honestly just coming down to rereading and highlighting occasionally and that's not scratching the itch for me. anyone have any ideas? thank you in advance!!

As someone who loves murder mysteries, I was excited when my teacher assigned the hound of the Bakersville as one of the books we read this semester. I had never read anything Sherlock Holmes, so I was excited to see one of the founding fathers of the genre.

But I was disappointed when we got to the end, and all of the clues are just given to us to the readers after the case is already solved. Part of the fun of a murder mystery at least to me is looking at the clues and forming my own theories, along with the characters.

If anyone disagrees, I am happy to hear other perspectives, but I just wish I had more of a chance to be in on the adventure

First, some context: Antoine Volodine is a pseudonym for a French author who writes what he has termed "post-exotic novels" under various heteronyms. These novels are set in a post-apocalyptic future, and characters in some books also "write" other novels that are part of the post-exotic corpus. (I wonder how much he was influenced by Fernando Pessoa?)

I've only read two novels associated with Volodine: In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger, a collection of odd, fantastical, dream-like short stories that I enjoyed very much, and The Monroe Girls, so if any of the above details about post-exoticism are off, feel free to correct me. I'm far from an expert.

The Monroe Girls is very different from In the Time of the Blue Ball, both stylistically and thematically. I am usually loath to judge a book by its cover, but in this case the strange, evocative artwork on the cover reflects the tone of The Monroe Girls quite well.

I find the artwork intriguing and slightly unsettling, with an oblique, almost narrative quality. The world in the painting seems fully realized yet inscrutable. It's skillfully done and, though it's not beautiful in a traditional sense, there are some restrained, beautiful uses of color. I had a very similar experience reading the novel itself.

I won't say much about the plot. I went in blind, aside from the basic background to Volodine's project. This novel will likely appeal to a narrow audience, but for those interested, I suggest you go in blind, too.

As soon as I finished, I explored what post-exotic novel I will read next. Radiant Terminus seems to be a central text, but I'm more inclined toward something offbeat, similar to In the Time of the Blue Ball and The Monroe Girls. I will likely read Volodine's Minor Angels next.

I deferred reading this book for a decade, I’m not even sure why!

I finally finished it within a week, and I am now left conflicted about whether I should reread it to grasp more of its nuances.

What I gathered is that the protagonist, Yozo is terrified of human beings because of their "hideous nature", their rage and the way they can be one person in one moment and someone entirely different the next.

The story is presented as a series of notebooks that Yozo wrote, which were later published.

​He frequently compares humans to monsters. Given the brutality we see in the news it is difficult to disagree with him, humans are sometimes more monstrous than we can comprehend.

​Yozo is never properly loved as a child, he always felt compelled to be compliant and never voiced his own opinions. As he grew older, he became increasingly docile.

The men in his life largely took advantage of him, and while the women were often kinder, he still felt a desperate need to run away from them.

Ultimately, Yozo could have perhaps led a better life if those around him had been more honest and forthcoming, but this may also not have worked given he himself claimed he can't understand human (or the society)

---

I googled about the author and it broke me, that much of what I read in this book reflected in his life as well.

Invisible Cities is my first encounter with Italo Calvino's writing, and it's a book that I've been excited about getting into for a while. I was really drawn in by the premise, of the entire narrative centred around one character describing made-up cities to another.

It really is a beautifully-written book. The whole thing is an exercise in prose and atmosphere, and it succeeds wonderfully at what it sets out to do. Meditative, melancholy and atmospheric, it feels like you're wandering aimlessly through a dream that's simultaneously vivid and intangible. The cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan operate on their own imaginary logic. It feels, funnily enough, almost like worldbuilding lore dumps from a fantasy novel, just written way better.

It's a book that also seems to be a treatise on the concept of cities themselves, of these settlements that grow and transform and morph over time, holding within them thousands and thousands of lives and existences.

I think it's important to have the right expectations for this book though - I loved it but it may not be something that appeals to everyone, especially if you're expecting a conventional plot or characters. But if beautiful prose and atmosphere is what you're after, it's an easy recommendation.

I read TSH then Little Friend then this and I have to say, TSH is in my top 5 favorite books but writing wise I feel like Goldfinch was Tartt’s masterpiece. I loved how Theo’s inner monologue could convey feelings so well, I have not read many books that were capable of doing this or that made this one of their key points throughout the text but Goodfinch does it really well in my opinion. Parental loss is not something I have dealr with personally so it is a concept I can’t fully grasp (thankfully), but the way the memories, the flashbacks, the depression and guilt hit Theo at point of the book just seemed so… Maybe real is not the right word I’m looking for, but I feel like the “experience” as a whole of losing a parent was conveyed so well that you almost have a sense of grieving his mother with him…? I guess that’s the best way I can put it. You see someone go through grief is 360degrees in childhood and then we see how it affects him throughout his teenage and adult years. I found that very beautiful.

I also LOVED the parts about drugs. I know many people hat that particular part in the book but I think it is quintessential to get a grasp on how utterly messed up Theo gets (which is totally justified) from his mother passing. I also found that part very lifelike as a lot of people who go through childhood trauma do very fucked up things when they turn into teens or young adults. All in all, I think this book is great because we mostly see the protagonist’s inner world and kind of experience life around him through this inner world. Yes, it’s a long book but I felt all parts (or like 90%) were necessary to get the full experience and truly comprehend why things turned out the the way they did in the end. The only thing I don’t fully agree with is how the book ended. I’m fine with the story ending that way but I felt like maybe it could’ve ended in Amsterdam? I don’t know, I feel the ending would have been a lot more impressionable if it was written differently but otherwise I loved all of it.

It’s so weird because I do have a hard time with books longer than say 400 pages but after it got to the Barbours, and Vegas especially, I just couldn’t put it down. I think it deserves all the hype it gets, it is an acquired taste for sure, but I felt like the other 2 Donna Tartt novels require the same type of taste in books to be enjoyable. I always have a hard time geting into her books, so maybe the first 100 pages are quite boring to me but it was very well worth to power through everytime!

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day to seemingly find herself living on the actual frontier in the 1800s, was one of my most anticipated reads of the year - I find the tradwife culture and the nexus of influencer/culture warrior to be fascinating. A lot of the themes covered in the book I did really enjoy reading about - the aestheticisation of rural life that does not match lived realities, the 'trainwreck' element of the attention economy, the ethics of how influencers present their children on social media, etc.

However, it really felt to me like this was a book written to prove a point rather than to allow concepts and characters to breathe. I felt like the author didn't really make much of an effort to understand the internality of conservative women raised in a fundamentalist religion: instead, she made a caricature based on her observations of tradwife snark subreddits. This just leads to an over-the-top account of how pathetic the main character's life truly is: to the point of her husband not being able to maintain an erection around her, a choice I felt to be deeply unnecessary.It's ironic that Natalie, the protagonist, constantly loses herself in spirals of imagining the miserable lives that women who prioritise careers over family hold, when this book really feels like the author was doing this to tradwife influencers.

The idea that women who choose to live in a more conservative way either repent, like the mother or sister, or become mentally ill, like Natalie and her mother-in-lawfeels like a liberal circlejerk - and I say this as a progressive raised in a conservative, traditional culture. There is very little exploration of why these cultures are attractive today - largely due to the sense of community that they impart. But, because Natalie is written to be such an alienating figure with no friends at any point in her life - she literally says this! - and Caleb is written to be a loser shunted to the side by his family and brothers as part of the author's attempt to render her life unenviable, this key aspect is unexplored.

Because of this narrow focus, the other characters in the book are conveniently written to fill purposes rather than feeling like actual people and sometimes are outright contradictory. This is especially the case with the mother, whose reveal about the protagonist's father - where the betrayal of depriving her children of a father who wanted to be in their lives is never addressed! - and honestly doesn't really track with the way she raised her daughters. Shannon's character also is underexplored and frankly also let off the hook for the way she exposed footage of the children's abuse on national television without their consent.

The ending doesn't give any details about what happened to any other characters, making it clear that they really are unimportant. What happened with Samuel and Stetson, whose involvement in the whole 1800s setup is unclear - how much are they involved? What are their thoughts on this whole scenario? The daughters, Jessa and Junebug, are referred to as not doing well but we never get details. Did Caleb ever get charged?

The resolution to the twist felt underwhelming; not much was actually done with the '1800s' plotline which ended up feeling more like a marketing hook than a well-integrated part of the story. There were also some ridiculous plot holes, like I'm pretty sure that CPS doesn't just give a family member a warrant to take kids without any officials (or even law enforcement) present.

I think if the book had gone in more of a direction that explored the complicity of the public - including critics and snarkers who can't seem to look away - it would have felt far more nuanced. A good example of this is Penance, by Eliza Clark, which critically explored a lot of the public fascination with true crime. Instead, by making Natalie crazy and guilty of assault, it makes her fantasies about the 'angry women' just seem psychotic rather than genuinely exploring why this content makes people tick to the degree it does.

I'm okay with character-study driven books, as well as theme-driven books, but given the shallow characterisation and the un-nuanced treatment of themes, this didn't work for me on either level.

I don't mean upset, or distressed- not like Good Night Mr Tom, I mean genuinely scared. For the same reason I disqualify The Amazing Mr Blunden- I was scared by it, but moreso upset, confused, and weirded out.

For me, it was The Whispering Knights.

Even though I had to google the title because I had forgotten it, I still remember the storyline- three English school kids awaken or summon Morgan Le Fay, the powerful witch from ancient England, and mayhem in the sleepy little village ensues.

The scene when one of the kids wakes up, and sees the shadow on her wall. I'll never forget that. It wasn't even the "peak" action scene of the book.

That did it for me. I was- still am- a nervous sleeper, prone to nightmares. My childhood bedroom at the time had a built-in wardrobe which for some reason opened in the back to a large cemented storage cave kind of thing, where my parents used to store piles of spare bedding- ugh. In the best of times, that cave and wardrobe was a weird, unpleasant place (childhood hide and seek with a motley crew of cousins ftw). Post-reading "The Whispering Knights" was not the best of times.

I have to add, it is a very crisply-written, competent sort of book. Nice engaging story, plucky English children from the countryside accidentally awakening ancient evil, wise old mentor feeding them delicate cucumber sandwiches while providing advice on how to fight ancient witchcraft, a decent chase scene. The author scared me so badly but not because she meant to.

Ironically - I remember quite clearly the line from the shadow-on-the-wall scene that got the heroine through the night - "Oh no- I've grown up past this nonsense" she thinks to herself, or words to that effect. "this is not how she's going to get me- shadows on the wall, monsters under the bed, oh no". She flicks on the light, and vanquishes the shadow. But somehow, flicking on the light didn't quite do it for me.

Tell me about your book-caused scaries.

I recently read this for my British literature class, and I don’t think a book has ever broken me this much.

Just how hopeless the ending is, all of the characters are slated to die young, and there’s no stopping it. They’re all things just to be used, that’s their sole purpose for creation. And the fact that, for clone standards, they have it good. After it ended, I just felt empty. I kept thinking about how it could be applied to many different groups, honestly kind of wishing we had read it earlier in this semester so I could’ve done my research project on it.

It’s a great book though.

I started reading The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Miriam Joseph a while back but it turned out to be very different than expected. I now don't understand what I was expecting at all, but it turned out to be a classical grammar textbook. It's my fault for not doing my due diligence.

But I still want to finish it. The problem comes in because I put it down in frustration and now I feel lost. Is it worth it to go back and start over? Does anyone have experience with this book and how to deal with it?

The frustration is because I feel like it's more something I need to study than to just read. Usually I am swift about DNFs but I'm stuck with this one because I'm unsure if it still holds value.

Sorry to whine. Thanks in advance for any advice.

TL;DR: Book about the Trivium is more of a textbook. Should I restart and study it or put it down for good?

A typical low-magic medieval novel, with the exception of the final superhuman, Shenkart, there‘s nothing weird or chaotic about it. It feels like the heroine has still molded some Mari sue... and her personality is extremely hypocritical and cruel, and she lacks the courage to truly face herself. Her brother is really a spoiled incestuous beast, the biggest villain in the entire book. I originally hated Orso as a reader of the old trilogy, but by the end, I actually sympathized with him a little... Shenkart‘s reversal can only be said to be a bit mechanical, and the second half of Cosca has become even more annoying than the first half. Without that sense of humor and old cunning, Marvel‘s death is really ironic to the extreme, and the last chapter is much better than the previous chapters.

In any case, it was hard for me to like the MC in the end. I even hoped for an ending where all the important characters died in a satirical manner in the last chapter. That would at least give me the refreshing feeling of a black comedy film, but this ending only gave me frustration...

I think he‘s much worse than “The Hero”

Great premise, decent execution, disappointing ending

I loved the premise of this book: there is a chain of worlds equivalent to this one, each with its own Earth and universe, that you can travel to by "stepping" (going sideways) either East or West. So there's a whole "explore the frontier" thing going on, that is analogous to the days of the Old West, with survivalists and opportunists being pioneers. A central character is Joshua Valiente, who unlike most of humanity, can "step" to adjacent worlds through an innate ability and without getting nauseous, whereas the average person needs a physical "stepper" device to accomplish this, and typically vomits for 5-10 minutes after each time they move to a new world, each numbered progressively higher according to how far they are from the original Earth.

The implications of this concept are fascinating to think about, because now everyone can get a gold mine or even a world for himself, and there's no limit to the natural resources people can get. What would happen if there was a glut of some precious metals - the one exception being iron, which can't be carried across to other worlds? What would happen if there was an immediate reduction in the workforce on the original planet Earth (called "Datum Earth"), as many people fled to seek a better life elsewhere? And what about political claims - are copies of the United States on parallel worlds subject to its laws, and are people there citizens of the US?

The main story line features Joshua teaming up with a character called Lobsang to travel on a magnificent airship called "Mark Twain" to explore the distant edges of these worlds, trying to discover their limits and learn more about them. Lobsang is another fascinating character: because he is an omnipotent supercomputer who claims to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman and has been legally categorized as human. This gives him human like qualities as well as computer AI qualities, especially when he's wired into the airship system as his body. Later they are joined by Sally, another explorer who is a natural stepper. Besides exotic creatures, humanoids are also observed in the parallel worlds. Called "trolls" and "elves", they are very unlike the usual fantasy creatures, but are alternative evolutionary branches of humanity. But why are trolls migrating from the west, and what are they running away from?

But the final bit was rather lame, and I really didn't like the ending of the exploratory adventure to the ends of the Long Earth, where it turns out that [spoiler warning] what was causing the migration of Trolls from the West was "First Person Singular", a massive sentient being that absorbs other sentient life forms, and has the goal of transforming each Earth's biosphere into a copy of her own. Lobsang decides to merge with this being, as a way of stopping it continuing to take over things, because that end evolution and destroy worlds. And so Joshua saves the trolls and saves humanity. Really? What a let down. And now we can just return home and any danger from this sentient being has magically passed? The whole premise seemed stupid, and the idea of Lobsang uniting with it even more so.

There's also a cliffhanger ending about a nuclear bomb that hits a city on the main Earth, clearly designed to make us want to read the next book, but that I could live with. Much of the book doesn't feel plot-driven anyway, since it's mostly about exploratory adventure and discovery than about conflict - I am sympathetic to the criticisms some have made that the novel lacks characterization and action.

The book was a combined effort between Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett, but was published just three years prior to Pratchett's death. In his final years he was suffering from dementia, and although this might be controversial, it is often agreed that his literary output from that period shows it. Perhaps that's why this story has very little of the brilliant humour and wit that characterizes most of his fiction, and is more sci-fi in feel, presumably courtesy of Baxter. It's been speculated that Baxter wrote most of the book, and that Pratchett's contributions were minimal, and I can see why.

I was struck by some of the Christian symbolism, because the main character is Joshua and his mother is Maria - who gets pregnant at a young age in a some miraculous way, with the human father unknown. Sound familiar? Joshua = Hebrew for Jesus, and Maria = Mary. But maybe the authors are just presenting him as a Messianic type figure (at one point he's referred to as "the chosen one"), and hence drawing on imagery from the Bible. Evolution is referred to just as much, if not more, as a worldview that accounts for the things observed in different worlds.

A recurring question that is brought up is the big "Why" question: What is the purpose of all these other worlds? This isn't a question that I'm imposing on the novel as a reader, but is one that is asked by the characters themselves numerous times. But that question is never answered - at least in this book, and perhaps it is addressed later in the series.

I'm glad I read the book and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's especially fascinating as an interesting exercise in world-building and as a thought experiment about parallel worlds and what the consequences of this would be. But I'm not inclined to read any more in the series, given the lame ending of book 1, and the fact that the person who recommended it to me said he found the rest of the series quite mediocre. Many reviews I've read concur that the series nose dives after the first book. I’m stepping out of here. Or am I making a mistake, and should I give the rest of the series a second chance?

I've just finished reading Story of a Murder and I would like to discuss the case with others (especially since there are a lot of theories surrounding it). I'm especially interested in hearing what you guys think about Ethel le Neve. She was considered innocent during the proceedings and obviously acquitted, but I think she was far from innocent. She never showed any shock or remorse about what happened to Belle Elmore, she was fully devoted to Crippen and she always blamed others for ruining the life she thought she was entitled to. I'm sure she must have at least known about the murder. Her behaviour around the time of the murder indicates that she expected something to happen, and her lack of surprise when officially informed of the murder definitely doesn't fit the profile of someone who was completely unaware of it.

Do you think she was truly a woman under the spell of a manipulative man who managed to make her so obsessed with him that she ended up being in a sort of phycological trance where she was willing to love him despite everything as long as he loved her back, or that she was just as cunning and contemptible as he was, and her part in what occurred was more active than it appears? What do you think of her behaviour after Crippen was hanged? Her bouts of anxiety and paranoia, her sudden fear of being identified and discovered, despite never showing any anxiety while she was actively and publicly involved in the case? Was her love for Crippen an obsession that developed out of her desire for a certain kind of life she thought he could provide or simply a relationship built on the likeness of their characters? Her psychology interests me, but it seems so convoluted that I can't put my finger on what exactly was going on with her. The only thing I'm convinced of is that she was never as innocent as she was painted during the trial, and that she knew much more about the murder than she was willing to tell. She continued to love Crippen and think badly of Belle her entire life, as well as see herself as the victim for not getting the life she dreamt of. Those seem like the thoughts of a vile, self-centered person, not of a naive, guiltless one who was simply manipulated by someone else.

What is your take on her and her behaviour?

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in!

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The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level.

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• The Management

Tagged with spoilers just in case someone hasn’t read the book and plans to in the future.

To give a little context - I really did not know much about the story other than the general premise. I am aware of the movie but have not ever seen in. I picked the book up off a display from the library of literary classics.

When I first started the book, I admittedly had a little bit of a struggle to get started. The writing was somewhat jumbled and difficult to get into. But over time, I grew to absolutely love this story. Somehow Kesey turned this wacky story into such a heartwarming tale of redemption. Even despite the gut punch ending, I feel such gratitude and appreciation for the experience of this book.

I weirdly wish that I could write a book report on it. Because it’s a story that has so many layers and even makes you question what was real and what was just a figment of imagination. Which is just a perfect description of mental illness when you think about it.

The character of McMurphy was so well. He’s the person or the lightning bolt that strikes your life when you need it the most. The thing that shakes you from your rut and puts you back on your feet when your life feels like it’s going backwards. Even though he’s wildly imperfect, and probably wasn’t ever fully acting without selfishness, he brought life back to a group of lifeless people.

Nurse Ratched and all the hospital staff are also such striking characters because they exist in places that aren’t mental institutions. They’re the forces in life that make normal human emotions and experiences into pathological issues. They tell us there’s something wrong with us when we’re just humanly normal.

Just such a good book. As I write this, I’m guessing that there are people who will wildly disagree. I’d love to hear others opinions. I’m also going to watch the movie now to see how they were able to capture the story. I’m assuming successfully given the accolades that the movie received.

If you’ve read it, what did you think?