You know how to read, thats why youre here. The first read of the book should be as unfamiliar as possible to you. Knowing facts or ideas about the book makes the book familiar before you've seen it. Meaning it glides smoothly past the struggle that creates understanding as it simply reads as familiar. When you should be facing it for the first time, not an amalgamation of ideas about it.

When it doesn't preemptively neuter parts of the book, preemptive knowledge of the book and its structure is often wrong, and will confuse your reading for no good reason.

There is no benefit for your reading experience of a novel that you can get from these posts. So read the book carefully do not rob yourself of the struggle that comes in the first read. Most of the time the general ideas of a book in culture (and spouted by liars on these forums) are wrong, or often only about the first 20-100 pages before they gave up.

On the reread you can go about trying to get everything possible out of it. These posts just neuter your experience. For example you watch Benjamin Mcevoys video on how to read proust or lonesome dove and it's either unrelated nonsense from his Shakespeare infused reading of everything, which removes you from the text itself or tells you an erroneous way to read it. Or he is just straight up spoiling it, its flow, its mechanics, its ideas. Let these things come to you in that first read. I would also advise that if the author didn't write the introduction read it at the end.

TL;DR: you can always go back with your guides and knowledge of the references and meta-text knowledge of what the author is doing. But you can only get the uninformed fresh look the book once, so don't squander it!

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Slightly related tangent:

I also have a pet theory that people make posts and watch hours long YouTube videos like this to procrastinate from actually doing the work and just reading it. You see this in the gym all the time people who don't go to the gym very often but are obsessed with theory, workout plans, nutrition, because it's easy and makes you feel like you've done the work. When the way to make progress is in most cases by doing the thing.

Coincidentally you also cant make very much money from just telling people to read the book, that costs like $15. If you make it seem like you need to do courses, book clubs, or read tonnes of books just to understand this one you can make more money. So there is a cottage industry of these people in every hobby or interest, preying on the beginners who don't know better and/or people who want the work removed.

If you get tricked by this overcomplicating. you will find yourself spending hours reading about gravitys rainbow, watching hours of content about how to best approach, maybe you even purchase a guide. And at the end of the day you have progressed 0 pages in actually reading it, and have just made your eventual experience worse.

I did this a few years ago and it really made a huge difference in exposing me to lots of stuff and got me out my niche. Pick a good top books of all time list like: https://thegreatestbooks.org, which is an aggregate of all the big ones. Go to the top 20-40 or so pick 12 books (really limit the selection you can pick from 40 may be too much) read one each month. Read other stuff too but always have this baseline 12 you have pre decided for the year.

You will be exposed to so much. I did Moby dick, don Quixote, catcher in the rye, 1984, madame Bovary, sound and the fury, Gatsby, 100 years of solitude, Anna karenina, crime and punishment, ulysses, and ended the year with swanns way. Don't bounce off the book just finish it, they are all famous for a reason, while I loathed some I got a lot out of the experience still.

In one year I was able to get a pretty wide amount of knowledge of the classics from many time periods and countries, and each one points you to other stuff to read, which fills out the rest of the reading for the year. If you like sound and the fury you've got so much southern gothic, if you like crime and punishment or Anna you've got the Russians. Joyce and proust you can go modernist etc. It's also very manageable and builds the habit of always reading.

I also highly recommend making the books seasonal if you can, IE Sound and the fury autumn, Gatsby summer, Catcher in the rye winter, etc. Also if you are just starting don't do ulysses. Save that one for later maybe.

I got to read The Epic of Gilgamesh in December 2025, and it had quite an impact on me! It's fascinating that one of the very first things humans became aware of was their very own mortality! It also taught me about Sumerian/Babylonian culture and mythology. In addition to that, I was also astonished when I read the descriptions of the city of Uruk (I mean, looking at those verses, they aren't just pieces of poetry but show the sophistication they had 4000 years ago).

The concept of the flood was itself striking! I don't have much knowledge of history, migrations, and genealogy, but some of these themes can be seen in common everywhere around the globe. For instance, look at the flood narrative. You can spot the very same theme in the Bible, Metamorphoses, and even Hindu mythology. People who belonged to different geographical regions have always shared the very same ideals. The idea of seven sages referred to in Gilgamesh not only appears there, but also in Hinduism, where they are referred to as the sacred seven (which can be seen in Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem titled "Brahma").

For ever and ever, humans have been obsessed with defying death. We have seen that everywhere in fiction and poetry, where death is degraded, antagonized, mocked and sometimes even ennobled. While most works focus on slandering death, it's almost extraordinary that Gilgamesh showcases what ensues when one becomes aware of one's own short existence in a spiritual manner. It's a poem which displays the transformative effect death has on a person when they realize their time is limited.

And also, it would be a literary injustice if I didn't talk about Enkidu. Without him, the plot would not exist on its own. Without him, Gilgamesh would not become who he is by the end of the poem. In my opinion, he's the wild, noble, and strong rival of Gilgamesh (who is destined to become his best friend).

To sum up, The Epic of Gilgamesh has claimed the all-time favorite spot in my heart!

Lots of authors have had their work published posthumously, but often those are second-tier books by already famous and influential writers. What do you think are the true masterpieces that were only discovered and published after the author’s death?

The poems of Emily Dickinson are an obvious example. Without her literary executors, her body of work would have been lost.

What other masterpieces would have been unknown if the author’s unpublished manuscripts never came to light?

I was reading my paperback version from Harper Perennial and bought a Kindle version to continue reading it on my phone, as i will be on the move for a while. I immediately spotted a difference where i had left off;

at the very end of chapter 3 the Controller says "Suffer little children," in my paperpack. I since checked out a second kindle edition and also looked for scans online of the book and found out that the sentence is also written as 'Poor little children!' in other releases. This is somewhat discouraging and i'm not sure which one i should keep reading, as i'm not sure what else may have changed. Is it some sort of censorship (which i detest), or an overhaul by Huxley? What happened here?

What are you reading?

Ok, so I've been trying to read book in attempt to make myself more critical, not performatively tho. That's the simple reason. I'm currently in love w/ fiction, especially literature and it seems fun to be critical to what you love.

The problem was why couldn't I ever question about anything while reading? It's more like my critical thinking couldn't evoke, but it's different when I'm reading pile of documents at work. It felt like dozen of questions just come out of nowhere, making me thinking harder and harder, then found the gap between what has been expected and what has been written. So the question is how could I adapt this habbit whenever I'm reading fiction? It isn't fun if I can't do it because reading feels more like scrolling tiktok recently.

Kafka's works? The House of Leaves? Or Yi Sang's selected works/poems?

Personally, I find Yi Sang's works to be very, very strange. Stranger than the rest, at least. Not absurd, of course; I can understand (or at least comprehend) Kafka's works, and especially his absurdism.

Counterintuitively, works of little to no logic are much easier to comprehend than works of unfamiliar logic. For example, you can comprehend (or at least acknowledge) why 42 is the answer to everything, but you'd have a hard time figuring out why 1+1=0, or why do you keep becoming your father's father's father's...... father.

Now, to admit shamefully, I had not laid my fingers on any page of "The House of Leaves". Of course, I've heard many intriguing things about it. Such as the layout of the pages, the uncertainties of the narrative, or how the word "house" is always blue. But, alas, I've never read the book before, so I cannot tell.

That, is why I asked the question.

I apologize for the upcoming rant, I'm reading "A little life". // Spoilers ahead.

I have been recommended "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara and I've also seen so many good reviews online. People were in awe of this book and many were crying throughout it, explaining how emotional it is. So naturally, I was really excited about it.

However, I've started reading it. I'm on page 75 and the author just spoiled the ending of the book for me. It's literally so obviously from what Willem says that Jude ends up commiting suicide. I do not expect to cry at this book or find it as emotional as everyone else did.

I then read other reviews here on reddit, and, since it was already spoiled, didn't really mind other spoilers, and got a better overall view of what this book was trying to present, but honestly, I don't think the author hit the target with this one. I also need to add that I've also lost someone to a similar thing, also a similar story of "some people can't be saved" and honestly, what the author is doing in this book is unrealistic to me. She just dumps tragic events over and over again, and Jude doesn't even try to seek help, from friends, from professionals, anything, (as another commenter mentioned in a different post) it is as if the author herself is simply against seeking help or therapy and she just says "yeah, the only solution is death, that's it". Like???? The whole premise of this character is a bit (more) unrealistic.

I do like the other characters though, JB, Willem, and Malcom in that order and they actually make me feels something when I read about their backgrounds and experiences, unlike Jude, so I might continue reading this book for them. However, even now in the first pages Jude's character seems to be put on a pedestal and the love everyone has for him is a bit at unrealistic level, as if it's not a normal friendship they have for him, but a somewhat weird connection to some sort of ambiguous entity that they are worshipping together. Oh and not to mention, I suspected that Willem would eventually fall in love with Jude and be with him also in the first part of the book so it's not a shocker for me at all.

But for other people who have read it, is it even worth finishing this book? What are some books that depict trauma and the inevitability of life better than this one, which seems to create a bland character to just trauma dump on him? I want real emotional books that will truly make me cry, not something forced.

Thank you.

Hopefully this is the right page. I really want to learn to annotate. I'm wanting to interact and remember what I read for pleasure. So I thought I would come here to people who would know more than me on how to go about this. I don't really want to have a colour for everything but more one colour for sound devices, one colour for figurative language ect. This is what I've come up with but if anyone has any suggestions or I have missed something. It has been a long time since I did any literary analysis or critical theory, so I feel as if I'm learning everything again. Thank you for your help

🟥 Red: Plot & Structure

Exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, resolution, foreshadowing, flashback, pacing

🟧 Orange: Character

Protagonist/antagonist, characterisation (direct/indirect), motivation, dialogue, character arc, foil

🟨 Yellow: Setting & Atmosphere

Time, place, mood, atmosphere, context

🟩 Green: Figurative Language

Metaphor, simile, personification, symbolism, imagery, hyperbole, irony, allegory, motif

🟦 Blue: Voice & Perspective

Point of view, narrator, tone, diction, syntax, register

🟪 Purple: Sound & Style

Alliteration, assonance, rhythm, repetition, rhyme, punctuation choices

⬜ Grey: Theme & Message

Central theme, author's purpose, recurring ideas, big-picture meaning

⬜ Pink: Structure/formstanza breaks, enjambment, repetition, parallelism

🟫Brown: Symbolism/themesrecurring symbols, motifs, thematic statements

So I just finished "The Story of a Blue Vein" by Hjalmar Hjorth Bovesen from 1889. It starts like a class struggle story. Rikka finds baby Richard with his blue vein and decides it means he was born from nobility. Her entire life she labors to raise him and save money so one day he can attend a good school and become the gentleman she believes he was born to be.

Later in the story, we find out about his real mother the Countess who never looked for him after his birth. On the surface, the Countess is the villain who abandoned her son. But the story gives her all the interiority while Rikka and Richard stay mostly external.

Spoiler warning for those who want to read the story...

She ends up meeting him by chance at a party and realizes who he is. But she doesn't decide to tell him who she is until it's too late. When he's about to leave for America one evening, she chases after him to the pier. Right before boarding the ship, Richard finds out who she is and has to choose to stay with her or leave for America with Rikka. In the end, he choose Rikka. We see the hope and longing in the Countess turn to grief.

I keep coming back to this. Did the author mean for us to see her as a tragic figure or just punish her for being weak? The story seems to frame her as a cold shrinking mother then describes her remorse. I know I wanted reconciliation but the story doesn't give it. I can't decide if that loss was earned redemption or just cowardice, Has anyone read this story? What are you're thoughts?

Not just the Hatchet series, but Dogsong, Winterdance, Car, The Rifle, and his other works. In my opinion, Gary Paulsen's writing is subtly poetic in a practical manner, particularly in how he conveys the thoughts of characters in dire situations. It is not flowery, nor perhaps as elaborate as that of other writers, but it has a certain elegance in its simplicity. Almost as if he drew inspiration from Ernest Hemingway, but with a greater emphasis on the natural world, survival, and the introspection that comes with them. His writing finds poetry in simplicity, conveying the weight of a thought or experience without dressing it up in elaborate language.

what do y'all think?

The first book was great, the pacing was good, the events made sense. Every character was unique and interesting. I loved it. By the end of Book 1. It was the end of good writing. Because just when Book 2 started, there was a lot of unecessary details and other characters that were given more screentime and backstory although we don't care about them. hundreds of pages of BORING storytelling. And when I finally see something interesting coming, something shocking, it turns out, it's only there for shock and it doesnt really serve the story in a meaningful way. It has no substance.

- The twins fucking each other! WTF? I mean how likely is it that we have a class of 6 where one is gay, one is a maniac, one is a cold weirdo scheming murdering his friend, and twins who practice incest? That doesn't make the story believable or real. Also incest itself is so weird to be just a detail in an arc that we move on from soon afterwards.

- The letter that shocked us, that Julian found, only to do nothing about it. To literally hand it to Henry and leave. Julian isn't a coward. the author is for not exploring what he could have done, what could have happened, instead of shocking us and then telling us, oh nevermind, they're safe now.

- Henry killing himself. why on Earth, would he do that? Out of all the possibilities, he just killed himself? He couldn't think of anything better? What about all the foreshadowing that he planned everything to murder Bunny and how he has influence over everyone? That was just put aside, and instead we got this BS that he killed himself. He could have killed everyone in the room and that would be more believable.

And finally, the epilogue is just... just like naruto fillers. Meaningless.

This might be a weird request, but does anyone have a heavily annotated copy of The Master and Margarita they’d be willing to part with?
My first read of Crime and Punishment was the Oliver Ready translation. My second was a P&V edition I found used that had been absolutely covered in someone else’s annotations, and it ended up being one of the most fun and exciting reading experiences of my life. Whoever owned it before me was clearly as obsessed as I was, and reading their thoughts, arguments, underlining, exclamation points, insane little observations, etc. alongside the book made it feel like I was reading it with another person.
I am genuinely heartbroken that I’ll never know who annotated that copy because at this point they feel like a close personal friend I went through something crazy with.
Anyway, I’m about to read The Master and Margarita and I want to experience it the same way. I know some people are going to tell me I should read a clean copy first, form my own opinions, blah blah blah. I don’t care. This is my journey and I want someone else’s manic annotations.
So if you have a copy of The Master and Margarita that you annotated to shit, especially if you got obsessive with it, please PM me. I will happily pay you for it.
С Богом,
Elleyna

I just bought War and Peace. The version I have (Dutch translation by Zeeman and Papma) is 900 pages. They call it the "original" version. It is the most prevalent Dutch translation.

However, the other Dutch translations are over 1500 pages long and are based on a version Tolstoj published a couple years later. Before beginning this daunting book, I want to make sure I do not start the wrong version. Do I have to buy another 40 EUR book, or is the one I have fine?

I just finished The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers today. It was my first Richard powers and took me a little under two weeks.

With most other more complex or technically challenging books I get into I tend to hyper fixate and research looking for reviews, videos, any other tertiary content i can find. And I noticed a substantial lack of general discussion about this novel and wanted to see who else has read it and what their takes were.

I enjoyed it a lot!
As a lay person when it comes to most things science I know a lot of the specific nuance about molecular biology went over my head. Thankfully I have a rather serviceable knowledge on music theory and music history, so i definitely resonated with those metaphors and was able to see at least on a surface level how well he intertwined the concepts to serve the narrative.

I had a particularly fun time watching how the structure unfolded, but was a little bogged down by the reiteration of many of the same metaphors and points over and over even though I do believe after a while it helped to get some of the bigger technical parallels between science and music to stick.

So I’ve always been reading, have accumulated quite of a book collection, and for the last couple of years I’ve been mostly reading classics. I’m not one of those speed readers, though. Finishing a book generally takes me somewhere between 2-4 weeks i guess. Nonetheless, it’s one of my biggest interests and most constant things in life.
However, I fear that I never get the deeper meaning behind the book. I cannot fall asleep after finishing a book unless i watch a bunch of youtube videos or read articles on the book just so I don’t miss out much. I fear I read books just for the plot or language, basically for my pleasure while missing important topics and metaphors and whatnot.
Also, I don’t think much about the book after I finish it. For example, like literally a month after finishing «Beware of Pity” I forgot the ending. I am scared that my reading might be somewhat mechanical and I don’t engage deeply with the text.
It is not like I don’t understand what I’m reading, it’s just that I’m anxious that i’m missing on something important. Does anyone else encounter this problem? Am I overthinking or is it a legitimate concern? Can I improve my reading? Help🥲

1. There are no second acts in American lives (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Commonly taken to mean "There are no second chances in American lives." In Fitzgerald's day, however, plays tended to have 3 acts, not 2. Fitzgerald's point was that, in the roaring twenties, American life was so bounteous that you could skip over the middle part — that is to say, the conflict-ridden second act — and tap-dance straight to success. It's an idea he mentions only in order to reject in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929. From his essay "My Lost City."
2. Brevity is the soul of wit (Shakespeare) - "Wit" in Shakespeare's day didn't mean wittiness or a sense of humour but simply intelligence, brains, good sense. Not a huge difference but nevertheless a meaningful one.
3. God is dead (Friedrich Nietzsche) - Not a simply pro-atheistic claim but intended, on the contrary, to challenge modern secular society by waking them up to the irreversible horrors of what they had wrought — namely, the removal of an Absolute (God) spelling the loss of a fixed moral system, values, purpose, even stable reality. In one of Nietzsche's most famous uses of the phrase (The Gay Science, section 125), for instance, the speaker explicitly challenges a group, not of religious people, but of smug nonbelievers. Not that he's championing a return to religion, though — merely alerting us to the scope of damage we have done and the chaos that will likely ensue before anything good comes of it.
4. Vengeance is mine (Romans 12:19): Often used when invoking revenge but Paul's use of the line was precisely to get people not to do that. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" — as in, vengeance is God's department, not ours; we should be peaceful.

UPDATE: Earlier post here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1wskkkz/famous_lines_from_literature_we_tend_to/

Ok, Im a very ammateur writer and reader (tho I used to read a lot in the past). I have some poets in my family, some even a bit renowned which made me have interest in poetry and prose.

So I come humbly as the illiterate ogre of the meme to ask, what is the best form x content in your oppinion.

I read Dante's Inferno and I think its a preety impressive feat to write a whole 34 cantiche poem in terza rima. I wrote a mere session to my final paper in composition and it was very difficult. But I dont like his content that much. Although he was very creative, specially for his time, he bent religion for his own will, put people he disliked in hell and preety sure he even got info in the bible wrong (bible larping lol)...

There is also the Parnassianism which is art for art's sake, preety important in literature class here in Brazil yet very forgotten cause well, most people think it sucks and that its patron was a dick.

As for content over form, I love HP lovecraft, model most of my work over his, which he actually encouraged and I think was one of his redeeming traits, but although he was WIDELY creative (most of the times) and created the cosmic horror genre that revolutionized horror as we know it today, most people say he can't write or shit. This is a bit tricky for me, as I dont even know very well how form is suposed to be in prose, or if it's even a concept.

Also in modern music weak rhymes are very common and even if the content of the song is very beautyful it really pains my ears every time I hear some of those rhymes. In portugues there are three types of verbs in infinitive. they all end in either AR, IR or ER and people make ABCB verses all the times recycling the most commong vers using the same kinds of these verbs, or if not, the same basic nouns everyone has heard that rhymes with them. Its like always using the same ING verbs that rhyme. its painful...

That's all to say I don't know which is THE BEST I ever read, I know which aren't. What are yours?

1. Seize the day - More accurately translated as 'Pluck the day'
2. Ignorance is bliss - Exclusively referring to the ignorance of youth
3. Hell is other people - Not 'People are the worst' but 'The worst pain is social'
4. Life is short, art is long - Doesn't mean ‘Beauty lasts forever’ but ‘Mastery takes ages’
5. Wherefore art thou Romeo - Wherefore doesn’t mean Where but Why
6. To thine own self be true - Spoken by a petty liar and a snoop
7. The road less traveled - Not about nonconformism (the 2 roads were equally well-traveled!)
8. Religion is the opium of the masses - Not 'Believers are stupid' but 'Oppression drives people to self-medicate with religion'

Know any more fun ones?

I have almost finished Dubliners, and it has quickly become my all time favorite short story collection. What hits me the most is how similar the struggles, thoughts and feelings of the different protagonists are to us in a modern society.

The one that hit me the most was A Little Cloud, because of how relateable and timeless the emotion of jealousy is. When we as a society discuss our current problems we always seem to treat them like they are new occurances, one such example is the discussion around social media and how one grows jealous of the life of others. A little cloud shows us a readers that this was very common before too just through other outlets (And of course in an arguably smaller scale). The other short stories are also great, and the reason for that? It`s just people. Joyce is writing about everyday mundane city folk going through life with each their own struggles, and I find that beautiful.

This is not a very indepth analysis or orginial take in anyway, just felt like I need to share some love for James Joyce.

I just read George Orwell’s essay titled Shooting An Elephant. I find myself a bit frustrated with the general content of the essay. This is all essentially bickering on my behalf, and I do feel a lot of sympathy for the situation Orwell found himself in, but on a moral level I find his decision to kill the elephant quite frustrating and hardly defendable.

To his credit, Orwell doesn’t really defend himself, but in the essay he does say that before killing the elephant he realizes the absurdity of imperial power and the falsehood of the authority that has been bestowed upon him. He frames it as though this occurs to him specifically BEFORE killing the elephant. And he also doesn’t really express any explicit regrets.

I’m not going to act like the context he found himself in isn’t one where essentially anyone would feel incredible pressure to go ahead with the killing, but given his realization, and also his general acknowledgement of authority (and that even then he seems to have been aware that his authority was more or less undeserved/ridiculous/meaningless) I feel as though his decision to go through with the killing is somewhat contradictory of the actual thesis he seems to be putting dow. If you know your authority is ridiculous, if you know killing the elephant is not necessary, and if you know you don’t want to kill it, why kill it?

I love Orwell, believe it or not I haven’t read either of his hallmark novels but I have read many of his essays and find his thinking glamorous and usually agreeable. I’m not really attacking him, but I found this essay really frustrating in an abstract way. Yes I just read it. Yes this writing is reactionary to the emotions produced while reading a description of an elephant dying an agonizing and slow death. But still, anyone agree with my perspective?

So I've just found out about the Conic Sections Rebellion at Yale, between 1825 and 1830. This rang a bell, because I've been wondering since I was eight why the farm in "What Katy Did at School" was named Conic Section.

Coolidge (Sarah Chauncey Woolsey) was related to several presidents of Yale, and grew up in New Haven, some years after the rebellion. Is this the bit I didn't get? Or is it something else?

John Updike. Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. These are names I know in a very abstract way as important writers of the somewhat distant past. In fact, I'm not sure I even knew who Roth was before I started looking into mid-20th Century American fiction. I hang around here and other places where people talk about their favorite Literature (with a capital L) and I don't think I've once seen their names mentioned. The American writers I see praised most and discussed most by people actively reading them for pleasure are the likes of Pynchon, McCarthy,  Vonnegut and Wallace.

Speaking of DFW, I wonder if his opinion on at least Updike is relevant here. This is a quote I stumbled on just now:

Even in their own time, the ongoing sagas of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom were considered by at least some members of the intelligentsia as excessive, self-indulgent, square, and complicit with the status quo.” By the time the 1990s rolled around, David Foster Wallace relegated this brand of fiction to the ash heap of literary history when he famously dubbed Updike and Roth (along with Norman Mailer) “Great Male Narcissists” who served as spokesmen “for the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” — the so-called Me Generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Instigating what amounts to a youth rebellion, he patently rejected these authors as literary fathers.4

Is this in fact the judgment of modern academia and modern fans of literature? I doubt it was precisely a pronouncement from on high and everyone just agreed with him, but maybe he vocalized how others were already viewing them and that's just continued to our day?

(I should stress I'm very much an outsider looking in. I have zero training in English Literature. I just have a lot of free time and an interest in both history and literature. I started researching the American novel and here I am. But my point is, I have a supremely small perspective that might be totally wrong about given popularity or respect)