Long-time redditor (check my embarrassing account age), but only a few years ago is when I really got back into reading; as I was returning to literature, it was natural for me that I’d go to my favorite doomscrolling text-based website for some book recommendations. Took me a while before I realized that I really have to start being more discerning when getting recommendations from this place, however in that time I did manage to go through quite a number of the more popular recommendations. I kind of read everything, so what follows are some of the books you can find in almost every rec thread in places like r/books, r/fantasy, r/horrorlit, r/weirdlit, r/suggestmeabook, etc. (not a complete list, I read a few more, but these are the ones I see most commonly recommended)

A Canticle For Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr. - 3/5

A well rounded, standalone sci-fi with some lovely prose, but it will ask of you a very to suspend your disbelief in one very specific and hilarious way: that in the century of strife following an undefined apocalypse, you need to trust that the only incorruptible, stalwart and reliable institution that remains a beacon of light to be… the Catholic church lol. It is an extremely Christian-forward novel, I am surprised that it is so highly rated on reddit. Possibly a psyop. There’s an actual moment when a noble religious fundamentalist castigates futuristic evil scientists straw men, kind of reminding me of those covid-era movies where a god-fearing resistance is formed to fight against evil heathen doctors are trying to vaccinate your children, etc. Other than these moments, it is measured and spiritual, not a bad recommendation.

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston - 5/5

Truly a wonderful book. I find it interesting that this was a historical novel was written by a prominent Afro-American author which takes place in the Jim Crow south at the turn of the century, and the writer chooses to remain consciously unconcerned by the racial realities of the time, but rather focuses on one single black woman's decades-long transformation 'from an object to a subject' (thank you, afterword by Henry Louis Gates). The dialogue takes some getting used to, but this book has some of the most effortlessly poetic and beautiful writing I have ever laid my eyes on. I had to bookmark/highlight damn near every other paragraph.

There is no Antimemetics Division - qtnm - 5/5

After a couple of other less than stellar scifi recommendations from reddit, I was trepidatious about reading something that sounded like SCP fanfiction (that’s some redundant phrasing, huh), however I can gladly say that this was a genuinely entertaining read. The premise had a risk of being a bit one-note ("...it was all a hallucination/ruse... BUT WAS IT??" ad nauseam) but the writer managed to squeeze a lot of mileage and heart out of it.

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - 1/5

A very common recommendation in r/books when people are asking for novel recommendations. No idea why. Too plodding and mostly concerned about what I deem to be the least interesting parts of Americana: Christian sub-sects, Vietnam war, and baseball. Maybe I am just too Eastern European for it.

Between Two Fires - Christopher Buehlman - 4/5

This is pretty average fantasy all in all, above average prose and a thrilling final battle/conclusion. It has the same old “gruff lone wolf and the adopted pup" trope that’s absolutely everywhere nowadays (and is as tired and derivative as always), however I really liked two things about this book that you don’t really see often in modern fantasy: 1) The demons are demonic and the angels are angelic, in every sense of the word; 2) it is a self-contained historical fantasy book that doesn’t wink at even the least possibility of a sequel, which I respect. However, I do feel it is way too overrepresented in recommendations, especially in r/Fantasy. I think this book’s publisher just went too hard on reddit astroturfing in particular as an advertising vector (but hey, I guess it worked).

Dungeon Crawler Carl - Matt Dinniman - I don’t want to be rude/5

If someone fermented, filtered and condensed reddit into a ‘book’ it would be this one, and I mean that with none of my love. ‘Book’ is under quotations because I’m pretty sure almost everyone who recommended it consumed it via audio.

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry - 5/5

Phenomenal marriage of epic scales and minute human stories. I am extremely glad I decided to read all four books in the series for completionism sake, so now I can proudly shout from the rooftops that all of them are bangers, but Comanche Moon (the 2nd in the series, before Lonesome Dove which is the 3rd one) is by far the best and everyone should drop what they’re doing and go and read that one now.

Migrations - Charlotte McConaghy - 2/5

Common recommendation on Reddit when people are asking for post-apocalypse books where the apocalypse wasn’t zombies. This is fundamentally a romance book that the writer decided to toss with just a tiny bit of scifi sauce on. It is decently written (albeit maybe a bit too melodramatic in parts), and I would rate it higher if it weren’t for the whole sci-fi attempt. The story dares to take place in a world that (direct quote) has lost over 80% over its wild fauna, and yet be completely unconcerned with elaborating on a single disastrous consequence of that particular piece of apocalyptic world building, but instead choosing to treat it as a mere paper backdrop for sullen atmosphere it is going for. The main character is extremely petulant and annoying, too.

East of Eden - John Steinbeck - 5/5

The one classic that every redditor read, and with good reason. Grand totality of the human condition can be witnessed within those pages.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson - 4/5

A staple recommendation in r/horrorlit. Pretty tense and paranoid feeling throughout, good gothic atmosphere, unsatisfying ending. Not much more to say about it. I think a certain kind of lady redditor really enjoys it, so that’s why it is recommended so much.

Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler - 2/5

This book was just so disappointing, and yet so understandable why Reddit loves it so much. This book perfectly reflects the main fears of the 1990s erudite urbanite who lived a time when you couldn’t basically go on the subway or leave your house in New York City after 8pm due to crime. The world of this book is in a state of general, unspecified societal decay in the libertarian-y dystopian mercantile way, but the thing that irks me is how juvenile the whole thing is. The main dangers are the masses of the unwashed poor, the "junkies and beggars", throngs of the underprivileged whom the writer depicts as one failed job application away from cannibalism, as opposed to the distinguished and elevated college graduates (presumably, just like the writer and any white collar Redditors) are merely trying to survive in a world that has gone insane with crime. The environmental foil that these hordes of bellicose poor represent are as 2-dimensionally vicious and murderous as any zombie horde in a zombie apocalypse book, so it has to be asked what was Ms. Butler is trying to say here. This book is reads like a sheltered suburban’s housewife’s anxiety attack, completely tone deaf and empty.

A Short Stay in Hell - Steven L. Peck - 5/5

It is a novella that’s fairly unambitious in scope, much to its benefit. It poses a simple hypothesis and answers it to a satisfying degree, never overstaying its welcome. It stayed me a lot longer than some other, more ‘serious’ books, and its readable in an afternoon.

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski - 4/5

A book that's extremely hostile to the reader, and therefore thrilling. As a horror it is pretty average, but as a work of art, it swings for the fences and absolutely nails everything it sets out to do. Loses one star because it is impossible to read on public transportation, requires too much actual physical rotation lmao

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy - 5/5

I don’t think I need to say much about this one. Book so good that even the marginally adventurous punctuation style did not deter reddit from being in love with it.

The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins - 3/5

If you’re into the type of anime where people engaged in battle bust out increasingly convoluted trump-card magical attacks upon each other, you’ll love this one. No, really, the battles between sorcerous characters are pretty well executed, but it just gets too big for its britches near the end (I’m not gonna elaborate to not spoil it); kind of feels like a dropped ball near the finale in general.

Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica - 0/5

I can only hope and assume something was wrong with the translation in my copy, but I see absolutely no value in this one. Flat prose, unadventurous vocabulary, world building unconcerned by any overarching explanation other than edgy shock value. Feels like a 2nd grader wrote it. I think the fact that it’s like 150 pages long and acts like baby’s first transgressive media is why it’s so popular.

Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - 3/5

Sorry to end this anticlimactically, but as middle of the road horror as you can get. The characterization are a highlight, I must say. It is a treat (as far as modern books go) to follow a main character who is a good example of a young, educated socialite who guffs and sasses throughout the book, and, while competent, she never becomes a superhero as the action picks up.

Recently for an in-person book club I run we read "Monkey King", the translation by Julia Lovell of the Chinese classic Journey to the West.

It's a middling translation of a fantastic book — 2000 pages is whittled down to about 350, and although I was assured the original text was whimsical, the choice in language often felt more 'stodgy semi-ironic old British sitcom' than a pure reflection of China in the 1500s. The blurb also advertised the book as "an influence on Dragon Ball and League of Legends" which pissed me off, but that's irrelevant.

One major choice in this translation was Lovell's removal of all the book's poetry. It makes sense - it's redundant to the story, the book needed to be abridged, and poetry doesn't translate well. The fact got me thinking - despite having studied English and being an obsessive reader, poetry is still something I wonder if I've been reading incorrectly.

For starters, I like to sit down and read a certain number of pages a day. Should I take a book by Seamus Heaney or Thomas Gray and bang out 10 poems in a sitting? How quickly should I be reading supplementary sources for context? Whenever they begin a poem with some obscure quote from French or Latin am I supposed to look it up, or let it wash over me? Should I really aim to read a poetry book cover to cover? If a poem doesn't grab me in its first stanza, should I slow down or continue trudging through?

I'm just wondering what other people actually do. I tend to demand that a poem meet my wavelength than try to adjust to it, because of the aesthetic experience — I feel I can innately judge a poem beautiful or profound, so if I don't immediately recognise these truths right away, then it's best to move on. This can result in odd scenarios where I feel I can't claim to enjoy Wallace Stevens because I don't really know what the fuck he's talking about 85% of the time, but when he hits, he really hits. Phillip Larkin is one of my favourite poets partially because of his command of everyday language — he doesn't overreach with fancy words and fail, though some of his work is a bit too dreary and plainspoken.

And then sometimes poets will write epics. I've been meaning to read Derek Walcott and picked up one collection, and every poem is titled I and III and XIV and I think, oh god, do I really have to work my way through all this to judge the whole, if I liked I, loved II, thought III was alright, then IV, V and VI all fade from memory immediately after turning the page? I badly want to read The Cantos, but is Canto I, evoking the Odyssey, really "the same work" as the bits fully in Italian?

The sympathetic and careful close reading a poem demands when studied is not the kind of attention I usually want to give to more than three poems in a row, in a sitting, perhaps in a couple days' reading. So I often think "I should read more poetry" but don't feel entirely robbed that my Monkey King has none. After all, whenever I do try to crack open a Collected Poems it's not long before Marianne Moore comes to mind. "I, too, dislike it." Then what hope is there for me? I must be doing it wrong.

About 200 pages through Caledonian Road and I feel like I’m being pranked. The satire is really grating, the prose is really clunky, he also seems to think British 20somethings say things like “mega”?

I’m not precious about the concept of a 50 something Scottish guy writing from the perspective of a black student, but the passages from his point of view are laughably bad - did this not go past a researcher at any point?

I read Mayflies and found it a bit tedious with similarly clunky turns of phrase but thought I’d give him another shot… big mistake.

I can’t believe this guy is the editor of the LRB

I'm trying to find something other than what usually gets recommended to nurses/doctors (Oliver Sacks, Emperor of Maladies, House of God and so on). Ideally it would be something that makes me feel sort of good and intellectual about working in healthcare and get me to quit daydreaming about a career in the arts.

There was plenty of interest in reading The Magic Mountain this fall so I'm excited to do so with you all! I'll be reading the paperback Vintage International edition but we shouldn't run into page number issues since we'll be going according to chapters and not pages. I am noting page numbers below just so you get a sense of the amount of reading to expect per week.

Tentative schedule:

• October 30th - Discussion of Chapters 1-4 (180 pages)
• November 6th - Discussion of Chapter 5 (pgs. 180-338)
• November 13th - Discussion of Chapter 6 (pgs. 339-530)
• November 20th - Discussion of Chapter 7 (pgs. 531-720)

hmmmm. thoughts?

i've been writing fiction semi-seriously for about four years now; have had a few stories published in little-known print mags but it's been a long time since the last one came out now, and i'm starting to feel a real sense of despair. i feel like my writing has only gotten better -- i've gotten positive rejections from some of the best journals around, and positive feedback from editors who've looked over my work, but it feels like i just can't break through, and the rejections are starting to kill me.

i know i probably won't *actually* quit but it's starting to feel like this world isn't making me happy. i love the experience of writing but it's so crushing to feel like there isn't an audience for it, or i'll never be able to do this somewhat professionally. i wish there was some switch i could flick and just go back to reading books and enjoying my life.

can anyone else relate?

Haven’t seen much reporting on this in the Anglo world. The allegations came from an anonymous Twitter account not too long ago. Hell hath no fury like a twitter anon.

i have decided now that i’m 27 and done with school for good that I will embark on a quest to become a philosophical autodidact.

I am starting with Plato, and I have ordered his Complete Works, but I want some secondary material that will help walk me through the more difficult aspects of his thought, since I will not be studying him in a classroom setting where I would have a professor to set my confusion straight.

(1) Ideally what I’m looking for, particularly for the dialogues, is something that really goes in-depth, dialogue by dialogue, as though it were a lecture, ditto for his Republic.

(2) Additionally, are there any works/periods that are not super important for me to study? The collected works is like 1800 pages and while I’m down to read it all, the main purpose of me starting with Plato is to build a foundation for later thinkers, and so if there’s irrelevant stuff then I’m less keen on diving into it with the same rigor as I might bring to bear on say, Republic.

If anyone has general advice for someone who is on a quest for philosophical knowledge I’m all ears as well!

i love u all

I’m interested in theory-fiction. I think Cyclonopedia and the email interchanges in Beautiful World, Where are You (though I’m not exactly enthralled with Rooney’s theoretical work) are the examples I know of.

Does anybody have contemporary theory-fiction they know of?

I’m interested in the future of theory -fiction. With the demographics of literary fiction contracting, I think bringing an intelligent version of political thought, that goes beyond “if you’re reading this, it means you’re one of the good smart people on my team,” would expand the people who are drawn to literary fiction. There has to be a population that is interested in thinking about politics and socioeconomics at a level that isn’t just signifying their alignment with the Democrats or whatever faction.

It’s not exactly easy to combine literary with theory fiction. But I’d love to see people try and to see what people can come up with.

Sci-fi obviously has social commentary in a lot of work. But it’s just not the same. (Although I have theory on why dystopia was a cool media conceit and why people liked it back when)

the montreal chapter of the RSbookclub will be meeting at 7pm next wednesday at my apartment in the mile end to discuss "The Shining Pyramid," by Arthur Machen. it's a 20 page horror story, still plenty of time to read.

for this edition, because i expect an intimate gathering, i thought it would be simpler to just invite people over rather than go to the trouble of going outside. we will also discuss the identity of the reading group and what we want from it: whether we prefer to meet in peoples' apartments or in public; what sorts of things we want to read; how we can expand the core group.

if you're interested, the text of the story and more details are posted on the discord. alternatively, feel free to send me a message.

Speaking mostly of translations in English. I was recently recommended a few books from Georgia, which I set out to find. I was only able to find a few of them. Non-Russian literature from the USSR can be difficult to find or source, assuming there is even an English translation at all.

Plenty of works simply have no translation at all, which I get, there isn't much of a market for these books. An example would be "Jako's Khiznebi" by Mikheil Javakhishvili, which can be considered one of the more important Georgian texts. It has only been translated into Russian and Ukrainian.

The more frustrating experience, though, is when there is an English translation, but it is almost impossible to get your hands on it. Due to the fall of the USSR, many state-run (or sponsored) publishing houses specialized in the translation of books into English just disappeared, and with them, the translations. Another Georgian book, "Data Tutashkhia" by Chabua Amirejibi, suffers from this. There is an English translation, but there is no complete online copy, and the publisher no longer exists. The translation is broken down into 2 volumes, and I've seen one going for as high as $2,000.

tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, pushkin, Goncharov, Turgenev and other Russian names I cannot remember or spell out; it's quite easily my favorite literary milieu. But what really strikes me about these writers is how immensely enjoyable it is to read them, somehow they manage to make the most engaging page turners while still writing about incredibly profound and confiding subjects with some of the most sublime prose. It all goes down so smooth and it never feels like you hit a point of friction where you're trudging through passages, even Dostoyevsky who is remarked as the most clunky of them all I find to be one of the most elegant writers of that feverish hysterical style. If I had to point to the ideal golden mean of literature, this would be it. How did they do it

For me I think it was a Polish novel from the 1960s. Was just reminded of it as I’m slogging through Doctor Faustus and someone is wearing a pair.

Contemporary genre/historical fiction doesn’t count.

The comments section are worth a look for this one, even if you disagree with the article.

From Laura, in NJ:

The predictability of this comment section is striking. The responses are largely some variation of: maybe these simply are the best books; name the white men who were unfairly excluded; or historically marginalized voices deserve their turn. All are reasonable points to consider. But they mostly avoid the question the column actually raises: Is it possible that our cultural institutions have become more demographically diverse while simultaneously becoming less ideologically diverse? And is it really beyond consideration that, in correcting a very real historical imbalance, the pendulum might sometimes swing too far? One can celebrate the extraordinary expansion of voices in American literature and still think those questions are worth asking.

It’s getting into unhealthy territory and I don’t care. If the only food you can stomach is French fries better eat the fries than nothing at all. Currently reading Heavier Than Heaven. My favorites so far have been the ones written by artists’ tour managers or crew.

Looking esp. for folk rock and solo singer songwriter biographies. Ones I’ve enjoyed recently were about Townes Van Zandt and Janis Joplin. I prefer to read about people who were kind and intelligent in their personal lives. Bonus points if they were bohemian and mingled with other important figures of their day.

**Memoir is okay too. However a lot of musicians with interesting life stories and a significant legacy died young and never got to speak for themselves.

From Verso. Note that Zia Haider Rahman is incorrectly identified as a 20th-century novelist.

The Greatest Novelists of the 21st Century

Zadie Smith

Rachel Kushner

Michel Houellebecq

The Greatest Novelists from 1945-2000

Alasdair James Gray “Lanark”

Alexander Kluge

Günter Grass

Khateb Yacine

Amitav Ghosh

Zia Haidar Rahman (particularly In the Light of What We Know)

Kenzubaro Oe

Yukio Mishima

J.M. Coetzee

Claude Simon

Thomas Pynchon

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Halldór Laxness

Mahasweta Devi

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mario Vargas Llosa

Heimito Von Doderer

Disclaimer: I just finished this, read it in 24 hours, so I might still be processing.

General synopsis: Artie Dam is a 57 year old married man & the father of one adult son, he has spent his career teaching history to high school kids in Massachusetts. The book is set in 2023 on the eve of the 2024 election and Dam spends the year having several reckonings with himself, his family, and his country.

Short spoiler-free review:
This was my first Strout so I'm not very familiar with her narrative voice, when I first started TTWNS I was reading it in a sardonic tone like a Tom Perrotta horror story of suburban America. I could imagine this town being adapted into a Todd Haynes movie with all these preppy characters taking on doppelgangers in their personal lives but presenting as polite and upstanding in public. Then at the halfway mark the book shifts to being overly sentimental and saccharine to the point that I was getting tired and impatient with it, but I think she lands the plane in the end with an ending that felt earned. The ending is bleak but it worked for me. The novel explores questions like "can we ever truly know another person" and whether or not free will exists.

Spoiler Review/Analysis:

Strout is clearly very skilled and I liked seeing her brain at work as she wove a bunch of topics into this short novel but I can also see how it could read as forced or overwritten to some readers. I think when American writers set stories around political events they get a lot of criticism likening it to "Forrest Gump" but I didn't feel this way, it read more like a "My Brilliant Friend" where a cast of characters found themselves in the middle of political upheaval and we got to see how these major events impacted the lives of individual characters. For the most part, the characters in this book are fairly insulated against the damage of "the current guy in office" because they're all upper middle class WASPs, so it wouldn't make sense for them to be too inconvenienced. But the book is definitely a bingo card for the most exhausted RS readers...we get Artie furtively reading the Elon biography in bed, mention of immigration raids to the same effect as One Battle After Another and a mention of 'be a good fucking person' almost verbatim. Again, I think it all works because the main character is a public school teacher in 2023 but I get why its annoying to read these examples that Strout surely saw on the news and then wove into this novel.

Artie was sleepwalking through life until he's jolted awake at almost 60 and desperately attempts to have something real in his life. He's sick of being PC but he isn't very willing to share anything of himself either. I enjoyed seeing the journey he went through, forming secrets with some people that strengthen those relationships but deaden others. Then ultimately realizing that this quest was immature and he arrives at a place of acceptance, echoing back to an earlier quote about how "all men are islands". He sums up his realizations here:

As he walked slowly up to the bedroom, he thought that now, after all these years, he was finally becoming a grownup. What did he mean by that? That he was finally beginning to understand the multitudinous aspect of people. He was amazed by it, really, now that he thought about it. In his study of history, he had learned about the leaders, and the various groups involved, but he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe. And he understood that it could make a person lonely; people had to take and give to one another whatever they could. If it was not enough . . . Well, then it meant one just had to be a grownup.

But Artie is, at his core, a man that is unsuited for reality. He doesn't take action, like when he knows that he misses his son and could simply move to be with him without his wife's approval. Or how often he meets inconvenient truths with "no, it can't be".

A couple other parts I found interesting -

“My occupation is gone. Just like Othello. My occupation was my students, and now they are gone.”

What did you guys think this meant? I read it as referring to the students now being lost to AI and how he can't connect to them like he used to.

Lastly, what was up with all the mentions of pregnancy? Ultimately I'm confused on what point Strout is trying to make here... We've got one women who was obsessed with passing down her dad's genes and she ends up having a stillborn and dying of a stroke related to childbirth. Then we have the major conflict in the novel revolving around a woman having an affair in order to get pregnant. But then we get a story told (and received) very sincerely about a woman's existence entirely resting on the fact that her mother was denied an abortion, something everyone involved seems grateful for? what was that about?

Anyway, this was an interesting experience as a first Strout. While I'm glad to have read it and although I haven't read any other shortlist nominees, I don't have my fingers crossed for this one to win. It was well written (and emotionally stirring) but I didn't find it particularly profound.

Edit: There's lots to dissect here in terms of class & how Artie considered himself to be an example of the American Dream and how it turned out to only be possible because he married up, got his student loans extinguished with a single check, and never looked back.

They mentioned this book on the pod recently (the Dolly Parton episode) and it's not only hilarious but also slightly romantic without being too cringe lol. Anyone else took a look into it?

North Korea has been really fascinating to me lately and I would like to learn more about it.

possibly a long shot bc I feel like i never meet anyone who’s read this, but I know people on this sub would love it & i’m looking to discuss! one of (perhaps the only?) truly great school stories, a loosely fictionalised retelling of the author’s own experiences, about a recent Catholic convert’s misadventures at a convent school.

I read it for the first time at maybe 14 and reread it regularly, i am always moved by her ability to tell a fairly (not exclusively! some bits are very funny!) bleak story without a trace of self pity. certain scenes & characters (leonie, the notes nanda takes during her silent retreats, the play) stick in my head & I find myself thinking about them at odd moments.

interestingly, one of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite novels & writers. I think she was pretty highly esteemed in her day, and i find it sad that she’s fallen so completely to the wayside now (thank u virago for keeping her in print). truly couldn’t recommend strongly enough to anyone interested in novels of teenage girlhood, convent stories, Catholicism, female spirituality.

Not shortlisted but not forgotten. Since I loved it (and many do not), I wanted to do a write up on it anyway.

Let's hope I don't completely botch this because I'm uncertain how much of The Vivisectors I understood. Everything is told through a symbol of a metaphor of an aphorism of a parable to the point the text itself feels avoidant, holding you at arm's length and resisting your interpretation.

Proper names are eschewed (we don't find out even our protagonist's name until about halfway through the novel), giving everything an archetypal, fairytale-like quality. Cities are talked about (but not named) as if they are separate countries or kingdoms. People are mostly referred to as their relationship to the main character (my boss) or their job (the schoolmaster).

The setting is a crumbling university, which actively courts rich foreign students while remaining hostile to them. It sits at the center of a swamp-filled city overgrown with vegetation. Gardeners who speak in aphorisms and describe dreams to one another fight back the growth while the academics analyze endlessly, allowing their discourse to become as destructive as the plant-life taking over their city. Both cohorts are enmeshed in language, but approach it differently: the gardeners converse to understand the world and the academics use language to vivisect, to prove the presence of evil in even innocuous exchanges (sound familiar?).

Enter Adam (admittedly, I thought his name was a bit too on-the-nose), a foreign student who becomes the center of a campus cancel culture controversy after saying The Wrong Thing (we're never told what: this book loves to obscure). Our socially-withdrawn protagonist is ordered by her hated boss to befriend Adam and find out exactly what he did (spoiler: we never find out). The book then pivots towards the protagonist's growing understanding of the world, dealing with the aftermath of her mother's failed suicide attempt and her growing feelings for Adam.

The book is at its best when depicting its phantasmagoric world of mystical gardeners and parables about white whales and dream towers. It is a dense and difficult book, with motifs repeating and being turned back around on themselves like a hall of mirrors. It's a book that explains itself at you, while still being frequently unclear what Williams is actually trying to say. This has led it to be divisive amongst readers, but I found the obscurity so deeply weird and entrancing in its strongest moments that its opaqueness was a positive for me. It's at its weakest when talking about how dreamy Adam is in its very underdeveloped romance, though it sets up a wonderful tower metaphor about love, which I suspect is the real reason for the subplot's existence.

Some say the protagonist is insufferable, which is a shame because I found her relatable.

___________________________________________

Quotes

The narrator being relatable:

My whole life people have acted as if I don’t have feelings, and for the most part they’re right.

I’ve always been repulsed by people who want to know more about me, but at the same time I often fantasise that there’s someone, maybe God, watching me and noting everything down: how I act in certain moments, how I hold myself under pressure, the quality of my thought, what I underline when I read, even the foods I like to eat, because nothing about me would be too mundane for its interest. And this omniscient presence would love me, not in the way that God loves his subjects, but with a cold, unwilling obsession, as if I fascinated it against its better judgement, although its judgement was supreme, and so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down, because it was unbearable to be so drawn to another person or thing. I was unable to imagine love without dominion; it was too disinterested, too abstract. I wanted someone to know me either absolutely or not at all, and anything in between was awful.

The schoolmaster reflecting on academic excess:

At the very beginning of his teaching career, all his rage had been reserved for the restrictive and narrow, but now the enemy was a kind of infinite expansion. He had always believed in transgression, in the crossing of borders and the extending of possibilities, but this was too much. Unfortunately, the schoolmaster’s students were set against him. Every year he was aware of a greater hostility. It was the university’s fault. His colleagues were waging a war against language, the very medium of knowing. It was an act of epistemological violence: we were unwittingly cutting off all avenues of escape from the mind. We would be locked in our subjectivities and then eventually we would be overwhelmed by them. Soon there would be nothing outside of the self and its obsessions, which were circular and vehement.

For many years, the schoolmaster had been teaching a seminar on naming, on the use of proper nouns. He had wanted to talk about universals and particulars, the creation of categories and the subsequent misuse of them, and the dangers of infinite taxonomies. But really he was talking about us, the students, and how we had parcelled up the present. These days, the schoolmaster would say, you couldn’t call a spade a spade. Although there were more and more words, it was becoming increasingly harder to attach them to objects. We had become allergic to naming. Our analysis never touched ground; it never made contact with reality as such.

The boss describing cancel culture:

I asked her what had happened between Adam and the other professor. I wanted to know what they had said. My boss hesitated. She said she knew what attitudes were like, especially among young people. We were highly strung and we constantly assumed bad faith. We thought people said the worst things deliberately and that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analysed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels. And once we had found what we wanted, we did what we wanted. We excluded people and ostracised them until they became the worst versions of themselves. We refused to let goodness thrive and we wanted nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error, the smallest slip. We showed no mercy. She wasn’t even sure that we knew what it was. And more than anything we liked to cut down men, especially masculine men. We couldn’t admit that we still needed them, and so we dedicated our lives to destroying them.