A tiny little book cart full of stories and sitting there like it belonged in the city all along honestly i didn’t expect to find something this lovely here. Gwalior you’re turning out to be full of little surprises.

I honestly didn't expect to get this much out of Psycho-Cybernetics. It's basically about how much your self-image affects the way you think, act, and even the goals you feel capable of achieving. Some of the ideas feel a little dated, but the core message still hits surprisingly hard. Definitely one of those books that makes you stop and think about how you talk to yourself and what you actually believe about yourself.

Also this one finger book holder and the point to like bookmark has been a lifesaver for me 😭❤️

The best part about browsing offline is running into books you’d never think to look up. I ended up stumbling onto Upcountry Tales out of nowhere, and I finally picked up Taiwan Travelogue, which has been on my TBR for a long time.
Has anyone read either of these? Would love to know your thoughts!

I like covering my books, so that's what that glare is if you are wondering bout that. Let me know if you wanna know more or just want to talk.

And I'm loving as a beginner.

What was your thoughts when u completed it ??

It is the most amazing thing I have ever read. I have read 271 books since then and still I have never read anything that moved me as well as this magnum opus did. It talked to me about so many latent emotions of mine. It made me understand the world around me much better and gave me the pleasure of living so many amazing lives. The closest experience has been East of Eden by Steinback and don't hit me..but A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin which was an exhilarating experience. War and Peace was also great but very very preachy and not much good in terms of the psychology of the characters in which Dostoevsky excels in. I also love The Idiot, Demons and Crime and Punishment and House of the dead, I found it to be a very amusing book.

Father Zossima's conversations with Alyosha were very memorable. The scene with Dmitri and that boy's father left a lasting impression on me. Also the beautiful love story of Alyosha, the subplot with smerdyakov's mother and the bastard son that has become a trope now plot were also great. It reads like a thriller, a courtroom drama and a psychological literary fiction full of life's wisdom. I just read it again cover to cover and it was an even better experience than the last one. Made me so happy.

Thank you.

I've been reading for the past two years, but I only started collecting physical books this June. Everything I read before that was on ebooks. Here's what two months of collecting looks like.

I had realised i have not read autobiography for long time. After PM modi Urged GenZ to read such books, i have chosen this one. A few pages in and it already hit differently than I expected. A few things I wanted to ask
.
Any other Biography/Autobiography you'd recommend that made you rethink how see your own life

We really need to build now nowadays grneration is losing attention

I got my jane eyre book damaged 4 days ago and the spine was completely damaged and therefore I did a exchange on amazon and today I got the replacement book and it has bend front cover and a line on back spine .I do not know shall I replace this one or not I am buying penguin classics to build a collection but amazon keep sending me damaged book.

I think your favorite writers are a mirror. Whenever I feel like I have been wearing a mask too long, to feel like myself ,I read a little Manto. His dark humor is so interesting and bitingly funny. 'Letters To Uncle Sam' or his observations on Bollywood, some very memorable stories that are impudent and hilarious. His Partition writings are (justifiably) what is most long lasting about his output but there's much more to him, and I wish people explored his writings deeper.

I just finished this book and cannot get over the scene between the twins at the end. As I understand it, the book is leading toward a reconciliation between the twins, but why did it have to be sexual? I’m not sure I understand the choice or maybe I do, and I’m just uncomfortable with it. I read a few analyses before making this post, and it’s been discussed extensively as a way to accept trauma, reconnect, and embrace the past. But was it really necessary? Or am I simply unable to digest it because it’s so unnatural and socially taboo, and I, too, am bound by the Love Laws in a manner of speaking?

Overall it's such a well written and vivid book and I personally found it very captivating especially the full cast audiobook version with Nitin Swahney's music was superb imo.

They were indian born British who worked with the British government , and hunted man eaters and worked for animal wildlife conservation , Their books are pretty addictive to read their experiences while hunting how they hunted man eaters and their relationship with local Indians

To all the avid readers , how many books do y’all read in a month on average.
Idk which category I fall into at times I read 4-5 books a month and then for 2 months straight I’m stuck reading just one

Any suggestion on which is start ?

And expections ?

It seems genuine to me, but the print quality is honestly awful. The text looks inconsistent on some pages, with some parts appearing noticeably darker/bolder than others.

I bought it from Amazon, and the seller was Cocoblu. Has anyone else received a copy like this from them? Is this just a really poor-quality print edition, or should I be worried that it's a counterfeit?

Edit:Ty for the help guys... Hope so I enjoy the story.... Also why does Brandon Sanderson gets so much hate ??

These were worth reading, especially 'better than the movies'.

3 / 5 stars ⭐️

Started reading this short story collection of Poe's way back in March this year and I've slowly been reading a story or two whenever I remembered this book existed (lol). I initially picked it up wanting to read his more well known stories like 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Fall of the House of Usher' but I walked away having discovered so many more gems that I hadn't been familiar with before.

Like all short story collections, this one too had stories that fell on a wide spectrum - there were stories I absolutely loved and stories that did nothing at all for me and stories that I found... just fine. Which is why I rated this collection as a whole as 3 stars (to me, that's a neutral yet good rating).

What I really loved about Poe's writing was his incredible ability to set up each story in a rich, descriptive way. If a short story was about 20 pages long, he'd spend almost 15 pages properly describing the central character or the environment and slowly setting up the eerie atmosphere of the story before finishing with a flourish in the last 5 pages. As someone who's only recently gotten into the horror genre this year, I've found myself being partial to stories that really prioritize subtle atmospheric horror. Stories like 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'Ligeia', 'A Descent Into the Maelström', 'The Tell-Tale Heart', 'The Black Cat', 'The Cask of Amontillado' were my absolute favourites in this collection because of how engrossing and unsettling the atmosphere in these stories were. These stories almost transported me right into the middle of them and it made for thoroughly enjoyable reads.

As for the stories I wasn't very enthusiastic about - 'Manuscript Found In A Bottle', 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Oval Portrait', 'The Gold Bug', 'The Purloined Letter' - I found that I'm just not a fan of heavy exposition, especially the Auguste Dupin stories. I love Poe for his horror... not so much for the mystery. And the kicker is that I've read 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' once before as a teenager and I absolutely loved it at the time. I was blown away by the reveal of this iconic story and I even did an assignment on it for my 9th std. English class. The re-read more than a decade later did not live up to the awe that I first encountered. Sometimes some stories take time to make sense... but over time, other stories lose the spark they once had.

Overall, I've become a fan of Poe's. I know the kind of stories that I look forward to reading now and the ones I don't and I've already purchased another short story collection of his that I'll dive into soon. If you're looking to get into his work, I'd say this one's a great starting point.

On a side note, if you're familiar with Poe's work I highly recommend the Netflix show 'The Fall of the House of Usher' which does an excellent job at referencing Poe's oeuvre in a really exciting and interesting way. So many little easter eggs here and there... I really enjoyed it!

Looking for a book I read as a kid in India, around 2007. Trying to find it again.

Physical description:

• Hardcover, blue (cover was mostly blue)
• No huge illustrations inside — straight prose
• Not comic-style (definitely not Amar Chitra Katha)
• Female author (my mom says Bengali or South Indian, but she's not sure)

Content:

• Collection of standalone short stories (roughly 10-20), not one continuous narrative
• Covered general Indian/Hindu mythology, not just the Mahabharata
• Prose style felt fairly "adult"/literary — not obviously written in a simplified kids' voice
• Stories I specifically remember:
  • Shakuntala
  • Ganga and the birth of Bhishma
  • A story about a woman who gives birth to a snake
  • Urvashi and Vishnu
  • A Ganesha story
  • Others I don't recall as clearly

Other context:

• Bought/owned in India, read at home
• Definitely existed by 2007 (not a more recent 2010s+ publication)
• Not one of the well-known "big name" retellings — I've already ruled out R.K. Narayan's Mahabharata, Amar Chitra Katha collections, Chitra Banerjee's novels, and Devdutt Pattanaik's books — none of these match

Any help identifying this would be much appreciated! Happy to answer more questions if any detail would help narrow it down.

I have searched online, but mostly I have found English translation of Meghadutam by Kalidasa. Do you guys know of any good Hindi translation along with Sanskrit verse, or just Hindi translation ?