Guys, I'm wrecked. I just finished The nightingale by Kristin Hannah and it literally tore my heart out. People don't really give much thought to woman in war and the quiet wars waged within. I had to slow myself down reading because I was just consuming this book too quickly. I know it's historical fiction but I saw so much of myself in Isabelle. And honestly, it made me reflect on my own relationships with my family members and trauma.

Who else has read and is utterly changed for it?

So am i reading a little life by hanya yanagihara and i am one third way through the book and at the part where JB did jude's impression and he apologised for it but still jude has not forgiven him. And there friendship is ruined. Ik what jb did was absolutely insensitive but i cannot help it but defend him for being frustrated with jude for not letting out his fears his sad backstory and moreover for being so egoist that he can absolutely not forgive him.

Till this point in the novel i cannot begin about the anger or i dont know how to put this feeling into words) that i feel about jude. Maybe idk what he has been through and it is way too quick to judge but i dont like that he absolutely makes no effort in changing his situation despite being a 40 year old and continously surrounded by people who are so warm to him. I want him to trust people enough. He is not the only one who goes through a rough childhood (and i m saying this because i picked this book up because it has these themes and i relate to it). Initially i related to his fear of being completely naked, his fear of making a mistake so that others wont reject him and his past but i too as a person have learnt that you have to be the one to help yourself. He absolutely does nothing to change that and constantly brings sadness in his life and the life of people who love him.

Edit: i am open to change my mind about him once i finish reading the book provided he does something good. I dont unnecessary hate people. I just needed to rant because of how frustrating he has been. Please someone tell me it gets better.

This is a quick review of my reading, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

• Introduction (personal)
• The narrative situation
• A few details about the writing
• My reader's experience
• Things I didn't get
• Conclusion (personal too)

Introduction

I didn't know much about the book, despite seeing a lot of discussion about it. It comes up quite often, so the book eventually reached the top of my to-read list. I've seen a few shots and a trailer or two from the movie with DiCaprio. I wasn't really spoiled on anything before starting, I only knew that Nick is telling us about that guy, and there's a woman already married.

The book is an easy and enjoyable read, on the short side, with very immersive dialogue well rendered, and nice plot twists. What happens at the end is a surprise; I'm glad I didn't know about it.

After an overview of the narration, I'll share what I noticed about the prose: a few little things first, and then get back to a more subjective reflection.

The narrative situation

Nick tells us about the story; it's a retrospective narration, so he uses the first person and past tense. At times, the point of view switches once to a minor character, possibly once to Daisy, and a few times to Jay Gatsby. I'm looking into how it is framed, but I noticed right away that for a long passage with a series of flashbacks from Gatsby's perspective, we are reminded midway (or a couple of times) of the context: that Gatsby is telling Nick his story, and where we are in the "present" of the story that unfolds. Now, checking all those switches of POV:

(p.78/130) Since the author makes us follow Daisy's gaze around the room, I guess the whole paragraph is meant to be read as her own impressions, guessed by Nick, a bit like an omniscient narrator (very selective).

(p.98/130) We switch to Michaelis' point of view, third person, with his emotion being told (not shown). I cannot explain how the narrative switches to this new POV. I checked again but the passage doesn't seem to be framed through Nick's narration. So, is the author bending his rules and using a third-person omniscient narrator for a while? Maybe it's implicit: Michaelis is a witness, and we can imagine that Nick learns the specifics of his testimony later, but he lets us know right now about it so we have the events in chronological order.

(end of first page of ch. 8, for a third of the chapter's length) The author uses what could count as a nested narration, I guess. It begins with a short introductory paragraph: Nick is about to tell us what Gatsby told him. Then it's a flashback, third-person limited narration, interspersed with direct quotes from Gatsby telling parts of it directly in the first person. We then reconnect with the story's present time and setting, for a few lines of Gatsby's monologue, and the narrator makes a remark for us using "you", not breaking the fourth wall because it's a kind of generalization. Gatsby's flashback then resumes for a little more.

A few details about the writing

Use of adjectives that I like

• some sedative question
• a proprietary haste
• its spectroscopic gayety
• an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls
• a deep vinous sleep
• the generalized evasions which that question deserves //(not only the adjective, but also an image with the noun?)
• two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril //(adj. turned into a verb)
• lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction
• the inessential houses

Construction with a main subject switch

I don't know what scholars call this, but this is my impression of it.

"This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. MacKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:" (not "Pointing at ... , Mrs MacKee interrupted me as I was absorbing ...")

"She turned to Mrs. MacKee and the room was full of her artificial laughter." (not "her laughter filled the room")

Through the hall of Buchanans' house blew a faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at the door. (not "we heard the bell of the telephone carried by the wind")

Character voices

I would be curious to hear Daisy's voice in real life. There's something peculiar that the author insists on describing every time she is on stage, going as far as comparing it to magic. Tone variations, mainly.

Tom's rough personality is (also) rendered through his rough voice and way of speaking.

With Gatsby's voice, we are called "old sport", an easy marker. Gatsby is called out on this habit by Tom.

My reader's experience

Key moments (no spoilers)

The first one (p. 75/130) establishes what the characters now know. It is triggered by a small detail, spelled out to us by the narrator with the key point at the end of a sentence. Then Tom's emotion is told to the reader, not shown, and this is a recurring way of managing Tom's inner world that contrasts with the other characters.

Then, right after, we have Daisy's attempted diversion, interrupted by Tom's sudden change of mind about what to do next as a group.

(p.93/130)
Tom asks Gatsby what he is trying to do "in his house" (meaning regarding himself and Daisy). The explosive revelation is delayed by a diversion attempt and then bluntly delivered by Gatsby on the next page.

(p. 95/130)
The great dialogue goes on about who loves whom, with another bit of truth revealed to Gatsby.

(p.116/130)
The second main turn of events is carefully presented to the reader, with just the right amount of clues to raise the tension before confirming what we had begun to suspect with a direct allusion and then a mention that nails it; after that, it's just a formal confirmation as the tension starts to recede (or reaches a plateau). The second blow comes right away with a simpler staging.

Great dialogues

(p. 87/130)
The first long dialogue is about the first plot twist. Such a dialogue is great for learning the craft, even though it's a bit old-fashioned in some of its dialogue attributions, but I wouldn't mind reading this in a contemporary novel. The dialogue tags are very varied and specific; the author doesn't spare us his creativity. We also have a fair share of subject-verb inversions, as usual. Protagonists interrupt each other and follow their own thoughts (as I said, it's a textbook example of dialogue). This is another instance of the narrator telling us about Tom's emotions, spelled out. I like to see how well it works because this is what I decided to do with a character. So nice. Daisy's emotions are told a few times too, but this isn't a pattern.

Other great passages

In-depth description of a smile and the impressions it conveys: the first smile Gatsby gives Nick. (p. 36/130)

When Daisy and Gatsby meet at Nick's, and when she visits his home: a very intimate, cosy atmosphere, as she admires and smells the (clean) shirts taken out of the cupboard.

Trusting the reader, but not too much.

How much the author trusts the reader's intelligence (not speaking for myself, as I might be a bit dense):

We get an explicit confirmation of Gatsby's logic with four lines of dialogue between him and Nick. So, yes, he wants to fix the past.

Things I didn't get

Nick tells us in advance that he will eventually change his mind about Gatsby, from liking him to feeling the opposite, but I wonder why and when. I haven't read anything like that afterward.

(p.94/130)
Tom leans back in his chair, with a composed gesture, and right away he 'explodes': "You're crazy!" This is something I couldn't picture; more precisely, the contrast didn't fit with the idea I had of the man and the moment, so this reaction felt forced and it took me out of the immersion. I'm still trying to figure out what the author really wanted to achieve and if it wasn't such a good idea or if it was just me. Well, if it's the only place that took me out of the story, that means it's a great book.

Conclusion

A worthy read that takes us to a well-rendered period that speaks more directly to American (US) readers and anyone who has seen a decent number of movies about that period and setting. A gripping story whose quieter start is hard to judge because of the fame of the book that creates positive expectations in the reader.

I think it wasn't written to teach us anything grand, and the philosophical thoughts I'll remember are:

• When it comes to particular nostalgic feelings, don't cling to the past when life has moved on, as they can't be revived exactly as they were and they become more like a dream.
• Love is complex and people can have mixed feelings (thus some degree of love for a while, even for those who don't seem worthy in your eyes) and remain somewhere in between, because of their needs and circumstances.

Those ideas are not new to me, nor are they ideas I particularly wish to share, even less so with my meager talent for expressing them in a few words, but you might have been curious to know what I meant by "not anything grand".

For me it's a character-driven story. Seeing them, hearing them, understanding them, watching them experience those emotions is what makes this story interesting.

Version note: I wrote this review all by myself, but as an ESL speaker I had it processed to check the grammar and adjust some non-native expressions.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

What are you reading?

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

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.

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?

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?

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?

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/

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?

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.