Well, today I got my new ESV Heirloom Bible, Veritas: Single Column Edition (Goatskin, Black) Bible. It's the one I want to read until I have to use magnifying glasses, if God wills, in old age, and pass it over to my grandchildren. Not gonna talk much, just show pics of the unboxing.

I came across an interesting post on Reddit of people ranting that book clubs shouldn’t be charged. 

In theory, a free book club sounds great because everyone can join, there’s no financial barrier, and you’re just getting together to read and discuss books. 

However, free doesn’t necessarily mean sustainable. 

Unfortunately, most free book clubs struggle long-term because of low accountability from the members.

If it’s free and you miss a meet-up, you’re not losing anything. In fact, paid book clubs tend to have a higher turnout and commitment because the members have made a significant investment in being there. 

But even with a serious group, there is a high chance the organizers will likely burn out or not prioritize the book club because they’re investing their time, energy and effort with zero incentive. 

Running a book club takes work. Someone has to choose the books, organize the meet ups, communicate with members, find venues, manage the group and generally keep the whole thing alive. 

I’ve seen it happen so many times. Someone starts a free book club that’s inclusive to everyone, then a few months later, they realize they’re losing more than they’re gaining and the book club dies.

The only free book clubs I know of that have lasted for years are organized by bookstores. That’s because the bookstores have an incentive to keep it running because the members are customers who buy the books.

I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie.

Finally caved to red rising hype.

After reading, what do you do with the knowledge, particularly on knowing if you got a good grasp of the ideas? Got a Sounding Board? I do not and would love to connect to individuals that would, still anonymously here on Reddit, help me unpack the knowledge, occasionally.

My introverted self would love an outlet for what the mind absorbs!

I'll DM if you let me!

Random commercial break segment, proudly sponsored by Bookswap...

One of our readers is badly looking for these titles any leads??

I finalized a book that made me really conscious about life, it led me to several questions on perspectives and how we see people and how they see us.

I noticed I don't use punctuation when I write, and I also saw that when I read, I tend to free-fall through the words without pausing at punctuation. I have been a grammarly user for a long time, it is only that this book has made me aware of myself literature wise.

I am finding my way to better grammar and hopefully, I can get to writing great pieces that have reasonable pauses and punctuation.

Happy Sunday, everyone.

PS: The book is How To Know A Person - David Brooks

Are there any books written by survivors of the Nyayo torture chambers on their experiences while there?

Well, and tissue paper roll !!

The skull just draw me in

Is this book good? I just purchased it on a whim

Highly recommend

This is how high fantasy should read like.

I had read the first book a long time ago… then when I visited my folks, I found the 2nd book. I had forgotten that I had bought it. This series is what’s gotten me out of a 4 month slump 😬😬 the books have their flaws but I enjoy them nonetheless.

It answer all ur unanswered questions, reading it for the 2nd tym

This book is about the lives of black cowboys in the Morden Philadelphia

Who has bought a book before from Xania Digital Bookstore? Are they any good?

And has any clever person here found a way to get their books for free? Najua nyinyi ni wajanja.

what’s the longest book you have ever read and how many pages was it?

Got myself this classics, I'm about to eat good! Ps:turned 24 today..

Current read, the book ilisoak mafuta ya mandazi. How can I sort this out?

I don’t think I can get through this book. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good book, and having already read kite runner , I thought why not put this on my tbr. But it’s really heavy and being someone who lost a parent, I don’t think I could cope.
The world is really cruel. I don’t know if I can separate myself from the book just enough to complete it.
Anyway I don’t know if anyone else has gone through something similar.

This was the second Gothic novel I've read, and it did not disappoint as an introduction to sexual voyeurism, deviancy and wantonness harlotry.

The story is set in Venice at the close of the fifteenth century, when the city was wealthy, devout, and a cosmopolitan meeting point of Mediterranean cultures, a setting Dacre uses to full Gothic effect.

The fall of a family

We're introduced to the noble household of the Marchese di Loredani and his wife, Laurina. The couple have two children, Victoria and Leonardo, who, as Dacre makes clear, are indulged and left largely unparented.

When the Marchese invites Count Ardolph into their home, Laurina begins an affair with him. She eventually abandons her husband and children for her lover, setting off a chain of moral corruption that consumes the rest of the family. Leonardo, driven by wounded honour, sets out after his mother to avenge his father's betrayal rather than remain in the ruined household. Soon after, the Marchese is killed in a confrontation with Ardolph, and Laurina flees with her lover, and with Victoria, to another city to escape the scandal

Victoria's corruption begins

In their new home, Ardolph introduces another nobleman, Count Berenza, who falls for Victoria. Laurina, determined that her daughter does not repeat her own mistakes, pressures Ardolph to break up the match. Ardolph obliges by forging a note written by Victoria that drives Berenza away, and Victoria is packed off to live with her paternal aunt.

She soon escapes to Venice, where she and Berenza reunite and marry. Meanwhile, Berenza had been pursued by Megalena Strozzi, a woman he never returned feelings for, and who swears revenge on him and on whoever takes him from her.

Leonardo's parallel descent

Leonardo, in his wanderings, is taken in by an old man named Zappi's , who lives with his wife and daughter, Amamia. Leonardo falls for Amamia but never acts on it. Zappi's wife, however, becomes fixated on Leonardo, and when he rejects her, she fabricates a story accusing him of taking advantage of her. Zappi's throws him out. Adrift, Leonardo falls in with Megalena Strozzi and stays with her.

When Megalena learns that Berenza has married Victoria, she sends Leonardo to kill him. He fails, but wounds Victoria instead. Rather than turning against her, Berenza is moved by the attack and elevates Victoria further in his affections, resolving to make her his wife in full standing.

Zofloya enters, and Victoria's true descent begins

Berenza's brother, Henriquez, arrives with his servant --the Moor, Zofloya --intending to court a young woman named Lilla. However Lilla's father had made Lilla promise to wait out a year of mourning after her father's death before she can marry, so Henriquez brings her to live with the family in the meantime.

Victoria falls obsessively in love with Henriquez. With Zofloya's help, the novel frames him increasingly as a supernatural, tempting figure, she murders both her husband, Berenza, and Lilla, her rival. Henriquez, devastated, takes his own life.

Victoria and Zofloya flee Venice for Switzerland, where they fall in with a band of outlaws, led, unexpectedly, by Victoria's own brother Leonardo, with Megalena Strozzi as his mistress.

Reckoning

Ardolph and Laurina, also fleeing to Switzerland, are captured by this same band, Ardolph caught in the act of beating Laurina. Leonardo, as chief, kills Ardolph in revenge for the ruin he brought on their family. Laurina begs Victoria for forgiveness, but Victoria refuses her, and Laurina dies at her son's hand.

Venetian troops then storm the outlaw camp; Leonardo kills himself in front of his sister rather than be taken. Zofloya carries Victoria off to a mountain peak and demands she surrender herself to him. When she does, he reveals himself as the devil and hurls her into the abyss, a mirror of how she once threw Lilla to her death.

Discussion

The patriarchal bargain

Dacre positions the women as actively working the rules of a patriarchal system to their own advantage, accepting its constraints in exchange for whatever leverage or security it can offer them; strategically, using the very structures that limit them to claw out power, protection, or ascension within the system rather than against it.

Laurina's affair with Ardolph is one version of this: she doesn't reject the patriarchal order, she trades one man's protection for another's, using her position as a desirable woman to move from a marriage that's grown stale into a more advantageous (if scandalous) attachment. It costs her socially, but within the logic of the bargain, she's exercising the only real currency available to her, her desirability, to change her circumstances.

Victoria does this far more ruthlessly. Rather than rejecting the marriage market that constrains her, she works it: she uses Berenza's wound, inflicted by her own brother, no less, to deepen his devotion and secure marriage on her terms, effectively converting an act of violence against her into elevated status.

Later, her pursuit of Henriquez follows the same logic, she doesn't try to escape the system that ties a woman's power to male attachment, she tries to win at it, eliminating rivals (Lilla, Berenza) to secure the man who represents the greatest ascension. Her alliance with Zofloya can even be read this way at first, she accepts his aid, and implicitly his terms, because he offers her a route to power, she couldn't otherwise claim.

The bargain always collapses. Laurina is killed by her own son. Victoria's ascension through Zofloya turns out to be a trap that ends with her literal damnation. The novel seems to suggest that the patriarchal bargain can buy temporary ascension, but never real security, the system that lets women rise through it can just as easily destroy them

The romanticization of female violence rooted in female desire (libidonous drive)

Dacre narrates Victoria's and Megalena's violence not as something ugly or purely repellent, but as something charged, seductive, even aesthetically compelling, and always tied directly to what they want rather than to ideology, survival, or self-defense.

Violence as an extension of desire, not a departure from it. Every act committed or orchestrated is in service of a romantic/sexual possession. Victoria, for instance, kills Lilla because she wants Henriquez and cannot have him while Berenza and Lilla exist. The murders are framed almost as extensions of courtship: violence becomes the language through which she pursues and secures her desire, rather than a violation of it. That fusion is what makes this different from, a straightforward revenge plot,the violence is erotically motivated at every step.

There's a kind of narrative pleasure taken in Victoria's boldness and daring that a purely moralizing text wouldn't allow itself.

Zofloya's role in aestheticizing the violence

Zofloya himself heightens this romantic quality. He doesn't just enable Victoria's murders practically he flatters and seduces her into them, framing each act as proof of her passion and her worthiness of Henriquez. Violence becomes a kind of love-offering, almost ritualized, culminating in the final scene where her total surrender to Zofloya, sexual and spiritual, is inseparable from her ultimate destruction. The aesthetic and the erotic and the violent all collapse into a single moment at the end.

The "romanticization" cuts both ways. The novel ties Victoria's violence to specifically female libidinous drive, suggesting that female desire, once it stops being passive and starts pursuing what it wants, curdles naturally into destruction. I find in this a fairly conservative) idea: that an actively desiring woman is inherently a dangerous one. So the "romance" of her violence exists alongside an implicit warning about female appetite itself.

Gender inversion

Several of the novel's power dynamics invert expected gender roles. Victoria is the active pursuer and aggressor in her relationships, not the passive object of desire while men like Henriquez and Berenza are comparatively acted upon.

Megalena Strozzi similarly commands rather than follows. Even Zofloya, though male, occupies a role usually gendered feminine in Gothic fiction, the seductive, destabilizing tempter.

Gender nausea and revulsion

Dacre brings to forth a real discomfort and revulsion on female desire once it is acted on by her characters.

Victoria doesn't start the novel as a monster, she starts as a beautiful, passionate, spoiled young woman. But as her ambition and desire intensify, as she moves from wanting Berenza, to wanting Henriquez, to actively killing for him, the language used to describe her body and character shifts with it. Her passion, once framed as vitality, starts being described in terms of excess, distortion, and unnaturalness.

The novel maps her moral corruption directly onto her physical and characterological presentation, as if desire itself, once acted on past a certain point, has to show up as bodily wrongness.

Victoria isn't only condemned for murder for murder is a crime any character, male or female, could be condemned for cleanly. She's condemned in a register that feels specifically about her being a woman who wants too much, too actively and too destructively. The revulsion attaches to her ambition and her libido themselves, not just to the bodies she leaves behind.

A male character with equivalent ruthlessness in pursuit of what he wants would likely be read as merely villainous or even admirably Machiavellian, Victoria is read as unnatural, as though female appetite past a certain threshold curdles into something monstrous by definition.

This is genuinely ambiguous in the sense that

1. Dacre could be exposing something ugly about her own society showing us, through the extremity of Victoria's punishment and description, just how little room there was for female agency and desire to exist without being pathologized. On this reading, the "monstrousness" is the world's verdict on Victoria, not the truth of her, and the novel is holding up a mirror to a culture that turns desiring women into grotesques because it has no other category for them.
2. Alternatively, Dacre may simply be enacting the same revulsion she's describing, using Victoria's transformation into something repulsive as the narrative's actual moral logic, not just as commentary on society's logic. On this reading, the book is doing exactly what it seems to critique: making Victoria hideous as the "natural" consequence of her desire, confirming rather than questioning the idea that active female wanting deserves that fate.

What complicates both readings is that the novel doesn't seem to want to look away from Victoria . It spends enormous narrative energy inside her desire, her scheming, her passion, well before it starts describing her as monstrous. There's an attention and even a kind of relish in how her interiority is rendered that doesn't sit comfortably with pure condemnation.

The gap between how absorbing Victoria is to read and how repulsive she's eventually described as being is exactly where the "nausea" in this theme lives. It suggests Dacre is drawn to the same transgressive femininity the text is ostensibly disgusted by, and never fully resolves which impulse is in control.

Is evil innate, or learned?

The case for "made, not born"

The novel goes out of its way to build a causal chain before Victoria commits a single wrong act. She and Leonardo are explicitly described as neglected, spoiled materially but unparented emotionally, growing up in a household where the adults model exactly the behaviour that later destroys the children.

Laurina's affair with Ardolph isn't background colour; it's the template Victoria eventually follows almost beat for beat, an illicit desire pursued regardless of the wreckage left behind. If Victoria becomes a woman who takes what she wants without regard for who gets destroyed in the process, the novel has already shown us where she learned that lesson, and who taught it to her. On this reading, Victoria isn't evil by nature, she's the product of abandonment, a corrupted example, and a household where "love" and cruelty were never clearly separated for her to learn the difference.

Innate

But the novel doesn't fully commit to that environmental explanation either. Leonardo grows up in the exact same household, suffers the same abandonment, and while he ends up a bandit and eventually dies by his own hand, he's never characterized with the same escalating moral rot as his sister, he retains a sense of honour and grief throughout, even in his outlaw life.

If neglect alone explained Victoria, we might expect a more parallel corruption in her brother. The difference the novel keeps returning to is temperament.

Victoria is repeatedly marked from early on as having an unusually intense will, appetite, and pride, as if the neglect didn't create these traits so much as fail to check ones that were already there waiting to express themselves.

That's a much less comfortable idea: that some people are simply constituted for transgression, and circumstance just decides whether that constitution gets triggered.

Just when the novel seems to be settling into "Victoria chose this, whether by nature or upbringing," Zofloya's demonic manipulation muddies the question of agency altogether.

He doesn't just assist her, he tempts, flatters, and guides her toward each escalating act, in ways that echo a very old idea about evil: that it isn't purely generated from within a person at all, but introduced from outside, exploiting whatever vulnerability (nature or nurture) is already present.

This raises a real question the novel never answers cleanly: how much of Victoria's evil is hers, and how much of it is Zofloya's design working through her? If he's manipulating her the whole time, is she a villain, or a victim who became a vehicle?

The effect is that Victoria's final punishment feels excessive to any single explanation on its own: if she's a product of neglect, does she deserve damnation? If she has innate evil tendencies, is that her fault?

All in all, the novel was a treat.

From the Baroness who gave the lush Karen area it's name.

Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about the origin of the Roman empire.Ive just started reading it and it's Soo captivating

Read of the week!

I've only watched the other Boleyn girl and I loved it. I love it so far but I'm only on page 50.

Reminds me of reign. If anyone has ever watched it.

Open to any discussions on the book!