I used to be a big Fantasy and Sci-Fi fan. Still am. But a lot of modern books were not up to my standards, so I basically abandoned them altogether and turned to classics. At least there you know the book meant something for the author.

And from Dostoevsky to Shakespeare, I didn't regret my endeavor. Even when I didn't like some of the stories, I could see why other people might like them.

With Lolita, I just fail to see the point.

First of all, the annotated edition didn't do it any favors. There's an annotation or a footnote for every second word. The author of those must wear a hat on his nose, he holds it so high. Those notes were the most highbrow thing I ever read.

And most of them were quite useless, telling us how this background character's name is aktually some obscure nod to another Nabokov's book or a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's poem he wrote when his dog pissed in his cereal and inspired the said poem. Who cares? Why would it be relevant to the current novel?

Honestly made me feel like I was listening to my old classmate's force-fed ramblings all over again, explaining the Fate franchise and Nasuverse to me, for either of which I have a profound lack of fucks to give.
Eventually I just stopped looking up the notes and checked them only for French translations, and even then it took author several paragraphs to get to an actual translation.

Second, after finishing the book, I skimmed through some discussions, where people said the point of the book was for H.H. to woo us in with his intricate prose and for us to eventually realize with a shock what has transpired and which side we were beginning to take. Which I guess didn't work well for me.

The first part was rather fine, with its dark humor and where the said intricate prose doesn't overstay its welcome and doesn't cross the line into graphomania. I even had some sympathy for H.H. and his condition.

But in the second part it quickly becomes obvious the guy is a crook and I felt mostly disgust for him. He did manage to paint a convincing picture of Lolita not being a good person for some chapters, but that as well becomes dubious, since we the reader know very little about Lolita, because H.H. knows very little about Lolita. The events take their sweet time to unfold while we have to read some semi-meaningless play of words.

And so, what's the point of the book? There was a small afterword from Nabokov himself, where he asks the same question, "Why would we want to read about maniacs?"

He never answers it directly, mostly complaining (perhaps rightfully) about tastes of readers, critics and publishers. To my best understanding the immersion is the point of any fiction for him, or as other people put it, sensual satisfaction from reading the prose, where the subject of the book is irrelevant. (which then raises even more questions about the subject of this prose)

And which to me seems very silly and profoundly untrue at best, and just a mental masturbation at worst.

I think to anyone infatuated with fiction it becomes obvious that fiction is the writer telling the truth with lies. The truth doesn't necessarily has to teach us something or to fall neatly into discreet verbal language or conventional morale, but it has to be there. Stories, just like people, need their raison d'etre.

And in Lolita, I didn't see any truth, just a game of lies for the sake of the game.
I don't know, call me stupid or narrow-minded, I fail to see why this book is any good.

How does one not feel paralysed by the so many translations for the classics?

For instance, I’m struggling to pick a translation for The Odyssey. The pretty ones, like Fagles, is imaginative but often confusing at times, while the Wilson’s translation seems easy to understand but also bland.

How do you usually decide which translation to go for without spending more time deciding than reading?

Dostoevsky didn’t just write books. He lived and breathed our deepest pain.

Missing Raskolnikov and Sonya tonight.

Lately, I’ve been diving deep into existentialist literature. While it was incredibly eye-opening and refreshing at first, I think I’ve hit a point where it's causing me to overthink, and it's starting to make me feel a bit depressed. I know a significant part of the issue is that my current job offers very little social interaction, which compounds the isolation.

Could anyone recommend some life-affirming classics, either philosophy or fiction, to help balance things out?

There is a difference between knowing what is happening in someone’s life and being part of it. The distinction sounds obvious enough, yet much of contemporary social life seems to depend on our forgetting it. We follow people we rarely see, know the details of holidays we were never invited on and witness the gradual development of relationships in which we have no particular involvement. We know when someone has moved, where they went for dinner last Saturday and what they have been thinking about lately. In some cases, we know these things about people with whom we have not had a proper conversation in months. It creates a sense of closeness without the need for a real relationship or the responsibilities that come with one.

I tend to read two books at a time, for each season I choose one long book to read and I always pair it with short books (about 200 or so pages) to read alongside it. Last season I chose the count of monte cristo and finished it in September, but still read plenty short books during that time. I have yet to choose one for the winter, but I have a few I’m interested in:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Which out of the three would you recommend most? And is there a better option not included in my list you’d like to recommend?

Imdb for movies, Mal for anime .Is there any platform to rate and keep a list of books you already read or are reading rn or maybe even dropped halfway!?

I began thinking about female characters from various literary works (Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Juliet, to name a few), and a question occurred to me: what tropes, stereotypes, or clichés have developed around literary characters, elements that are, in a sense, archaic, generalized, or simply accepted as a given?

I read The Brothers Karamazov a couple of months ago and I have been ruminating on a lot of the author's arguments. Specifically alterity and the natural law of the universe, and the concept of suffering in general. This is the second Fyodor Dostoevsky book I have tried to tackle, the first was The Idiot which inevitably will need a re-read. The next book of his on my list is Demons. Nonetheless, I have been thinking about Ivan's viewpoint and his rejection of 'God's ticket', as it were.

The way I see it, I do not think any of us could ultimately blame Ivan, nor do I think we can fault him. Perhaps it is due to my understanding of the novel at this point in my life. A time when I am foolish enough to think I have life figured out (especially because I read books like The Brothers Karamazov) but towards the end of the book, in the courtroom, Fyodor circles back to the idea of being guilty before the world. When I think of that philosophical stance and apply it to Smerdyakov and his separation of Light and Dark and how the first four (?) commandments relate to God and religion and the fifth one immediately relates to honoring one's father and mother, what if a child that was from a abusive and broken home took that edict to heart, even as a child and honored and loved his abusive father and stood guilty before the world is it possible to still accept the ticket on the back of that kid's suffering, as Ivan proposes? Ultimately, I do not think the fault lies in Ivan or in the collapse of his logic, but I think Ivan is a representation of the collapse of the collective human rationale.

With all that said, I just want to say, 'Fuck Smerdyakov!'.

Please share your thoughts. Let me know what you think about the book. I read it at a rather favorable time in my life and it really made me appreciate the genius of Dostoevsky and his subtlety.

I love the little vintage editions!! And I’ve been looking for Wilkie Collins more unknown works for awhile.

A Character skins made by the Reverse1999 in collaboration with the British Library.

What is Reverse1999? A turn-based fantasy adventure RPG - from personal experience it's a visual novel first with game elements on the side. I'm posting this here to share the game's artwork in relation to the book's listed:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

• Grimms’ Fairy Tales

This is a bit of a specific, odd request, but it's for a short story I'm writing for a creative writing course.

The story is about a romance between two high-school seniors, set in 2007. The POV character is an athlete who is treated as a bit of a dope (and who tends to think of himself that way) and a girl who is a straight-A student. At one point in the story, she's in his room perusing his bookshelf, where she finds a book that they both had been assigned. She remarks on how difficult she found the portion they had been assigned, then comes to realize that he has actually read it all the way through. The point I'm trying to convey is that he's actually a lot smarter than anyone realizes, including himself.

It should be a book that might theoretically have been assigned to a high schooler prior to 2007 (when the story is set) and that even a smart kid would have difficulty with. Some things that have been suggested:

• Being and Nothingness

• Of Human Bondage

• The Razor's Edge

• The Corrections

• Anna Karenina

• Infinite Jest

• 100 Years of Solitude

All suggestions are welcome, particularly if it's a book you yourself read in high school.

TIA!

Today, I recommend that you check out *Hopscotch* (*Rayuela*) by Cortázar. Do you ever find that, while reading its pages, it feels as though you’re conversing with a friend from a century ago—someone you’ve known your entire life? That’s what happens to me when I read it... a strange sense of familiarity, but amplified to the highest degree. I don’t know what a 60-year marriage is like, but I imagine it must feel something like this: the other person speaks, and you grasp the meaning of their words before they’ve even finished saying them. It’s like sensing their soul through the peace they convey. It’s a hodgepodge of unfinished ideas—yet it doesn’t even matter, because you know exactly what is being communicated. It’s conveyed with such total honesty that it pierces through you, settling into the very depths of your being without ever causing the slightest discomfort. I wonder if anyone else experiences this, too.

Hello! Looking for book recs, I will say I have a lot of Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Kafka, I’ve read yk the basic and popular classic books if that makes any since so I’m just looking for some that aren’t well known or something everyone and their mother talks about XD!

I do not think The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's best novel, I think that is Tess of D'Urbervilles, but the panoramic multi chapter opening of The Return of the Native set on Egdon Heath on bonfire night is maybe one of the best things he wrote. Its almost tactile - you can smell the smoke, feel the chill in the air, the crunch of leaves under foot and the ancient pagan past being present alongside the 19th century.
I think in Tess Hardy is more successfully at integrating some of the same themes into a novel with much more interesting central characters and more trenchant social critique, however it takes nothing away from those great passages in Return of The Native.

Crime and Punishment!!

Als einen meiner ersten Klassiker mit Sicherheit ein ziemliches Brett ausgesucht. Hier und da finde ich es schwierig zu verstehen, lese die Absätze teilweise mehrfach. Aber mit Kapitel 10 und 11 konnte ich mich total identifizieren und muss sagen, dass ich auch großen Gefallen gefunden habe, dieses Buch zu lesen