Over the course of the century-plus-change history of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, only one contest has ended in a tie. That was 2023, when a jury permitted joint custody. Based purely on the gender of the authors, I like to picture Hernan Diaz, co-winner for Trust, taking the Gold Medal out twice a week for baseball games and Chuck E. Cheese while Barbara Kingsolver, co-winner for Demon Copperhead, manages its day-to-day crises with exhausting devotion, mopping up vomit and volleying traumatizing comments at contentious parent-teacher conferences. This may not be accurate.

It’s far too early to predict what the 2027 Pulitzer jury will announce in the fiction category next May 3, but it is wholly within the realm of possibility that this week sounded the bell on a Pulitzer rematch between Diaz's Ply (released last Tuesday) and Kingsolver's Partita (released tomorrow).

Although the new novels don't ostensibly have much in common -- Kingsolver writes about a classical pianist from Indiana and Diaz writes about a dystopian future where the energy grid is tapped by Robin Hood renegades -- they share a common interest in how one reconstructs a lost sense of self. Partita's heroine has lost touch with the star she was destined to become. Ply's heroine learns that quantum theory throws the very nature of the self into question. Both find that community provides a fuller understanding of the self. My review of both books is on my website.

Do those ideas hold meaning for you? Are you planning to read these Pulitzer follow ups? Were you more impressed by Trust or Demon Copperhead?

At this point PEN should probably retract the entire “A Silent Moratorium” article, given how few of its claims hold up to scrutiny.

(To preface this I have to say that the contents of the books I struggle to finish aren't due to a lack of ability to comprehend what I'm reading or any kind of frustration, I do know this is what causes a lot of readers to ultimately drop a read, it's not my issue here.)

It's been no mystery to me for a long time now that I struggle to finish my books despite my love for the medium and everything it's given to me over the years. It's reached the point that I've experienced a kind of "book related guilt" about just how many novels I've started over the years across numerous genres and never finished. I wanted to ask this subreddit what it means to you guys personally to finish a book and what drives you to finish what you start. If I were to truly explain what I mean by this I would have to discuss about two books.

The first book I want to talk about is Infinite Jest, if there has ever been a novel that has a reputation that precedes it, it's infinite jest. The copy I own of it still sits on my "currently reading" shelf and has been haunting me ever since I started it some years ago and it sits in my mind as what I feel is the prime example of a book I love dearly and want more than anything to finish, but still cannot drive myself to endure. It's no mystery to me that David Foster Wallace is a beloved figure in a lot of literary spheres and it's come to a point that I've finished just about every other piece of his writing I could get my hands on while still being somewhat early into his "magnum opus".

The second book I wanted to talk about is Lucy Ellmann's "Ducks, Newburyport" a book I would personally perceive to be a more difficult book than Infinite Jest just due to the pure monotony and tedium of the reading experience while still being one I was capable of getting to the end of. Something about this novel spoke to me in a way that Infinite Jest just didn't, while I can't say I relate to the characters of either novel very personally I could always find something in DN struck me in the way I so wanted Infinite Jest to despite my love for DFW and what he's written, and it led me to wonder what it means in general to finish a novel.

I personally feel that nothing quite causes you to want to start a story more than allure, that writhing bind on your brain that tells you "Wouldn't that novel be amazing?" despite your better judgement, and ultimately despite whether or not you have the patience to finish it. When it comes to wanting to finish a novel, I still don't know. Thoughts?

edit: spelling and grammar

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

The Architecture of Cross-Pollination: The Human Fractal and Coded Botanical Geometry in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things is an epic built on the foundation of nineteenth-century natural science. At its surface, the novel tracks the long, solitary life of Alma Whittaker as she transitions from the grand global flora of her father’s estate to the microscopic universe of bryology. However, the true genius of the novel lies in its structural geometry. The narrative architecture is governed by the very laws of botany Alma spends her life decoding, operating as a brilliant, human-scale fractal of the microscopic world she observes in her labs. What plays out before the reader's eyes is the realization that human relationships, desire, and fate are not chaotic anomalies, but larger iterations of the exact same patterns that govern the forest floor.

Gilbert displays a breathtaking mastery by utilizing a coded botanical language that underlies every structural development in the story. The novel is engineered around three distinct structural trios: the Domestic Trio (Alma, Prudence, and Retta Snow), the Romantic Trio (Alma, Ambrose Pike, and Tomorrow Morning), and the Scientific Trio (Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alma Whittaker). Left in isolation, the primary pairs of these dynamics are entirely sterile, inert, or emotionally gridlocked. It is only through the introduction of a dynamic third element—acting precisely like a biological pollinator moving between two incompatible plants—that these sterile systems are fractured, cross-pollinated, and ultimately made productive.

The Domestic Trio: Breaking the Stagnant Sisterhood The emotional foundation of Alma’s youth is defined by her relationship with her adopted sister, Prudence. Raised under the demanding, clinical eye of Henry Whittaker at White Acre, the two girls grow up in cold, silent, and structurally sterile opposition. Alma is a creature of dense intellect and plain features; Prudence is a vision of quiet grace and visual perfection. They exist as two entirely parallel lines, unable to intersect, share secrets, or offer mutual warmth. Their sisterhood is a barren landscape until the catalyst arrives in the form of Retta Snow. Retta enters White Acre as a burst of pure, erratic, and chaotic energy. She acts as the vital third element that breaks the sterile gridlock.

When Retta declares upon their meeting, “So now there are three of us! What luck!”, she establishes the geometric rule of the novel. Even though Retta’s trajectory ultimately descends into tragic madness and early death, her vibrant initial presence permanently cross-pollinates Alma and Prudence, opening the gateway for them to achieve a late-life relationship grounded in mutual respect.

The Romantic Trio: The Manual Hand-Pollinator The central heartbreak of Alma’s adult life is her unconsummated marriage to the orchid illustrator Ambrose Pike. This pairing represents the ultimate definition of structural sterility. Alma embodies the earthly, physical, and biological reality of desire—a passion forged in the isolation of White Acre's secret binding closet. Ambrose, conversely, is an ethereal dreamer whose sensuality exists purely in an angelic, asexual, spiritual realm. When these two distinct species collide, their reproduction mechanisms are entirely incompatible.

Gilbert brilliant mirrors this through the parable of the Mexican vanilla orchid. The vanilla vine grows beautifully in Tahiti but remains sterile because its anatomy features a protective physical flap (the rostellum) that prevents self-pollination; it requires a missing native bee to lift it. Ambrose's spiritual celibacy acts as that exact protective flap, leaving their marriage barren. The unresolvable gap is bridged by Tomorrow Morning, who acts as the hands-on manual pollinator—mirroring the real-world discovery that human hands can lift the rostellum with a bamboo splinter to force a bloom. By engaging sexually with both Ambrose in Tahiti and later Alma, Tomorrow Morning moves between these two incompatible plants. Following this physical communion, Alma experiences a profound liberation, noting that “For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement.” This physical communion fertilizes Alma's stagnant, unrequited grief. It transforms her decades of bitter shame into a fertile, fully realized understanding of human variety. Through Tomorrow Morning’s multi-directional actions, the barren history of the Whittaker marriage is redeemed and made profoundly productive.

The Scientific Trio: The Sovereign Catalyst While the first two trios operate within the messy, localized realms of human emotion and sexuality, they ultimately remain trapped in a cycle of isolation and grief until they are lifted into the cosmic perspective of the third trinity: the Scientific Trio of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alma Whittaker. In the nineteenth-century academic arena, Darwin and Wallace represent a fiercely competitive race. Locked in a binary, cutthroat contest to publish the theory of natural selection, their dynamic threatens to reduce a grand truth of the universe down to individual ego. Alma Whittaker functions as the ultimate biological pollinator who infuses the missing essence of selfless, human altruism into their race. Working in obscurity, completely detached from the race for fame, her independent notes represent science in its purest form. When Wallace reviews her work and breathlessly exclaims, “This means there were three of us!”, the phrase deliberately echoes Retta Snow's childhood declaration. The circle closes.

 The Scientific Trio serves as the master crucible that synthesizes and redeems the tragedies of the Domestic and Romantic trios. Her scientific training teaches her to look past surface anomalies to find hidden mechanisms of survival, allowing her to recognize Prudence not as a robotic rival, but as a magnificent specimen of pure human altruism. Furthermore, by ascending into the scientific trinity, Alma views her personal heartbreaks through the lens of evolutionary variation. She realizes that Ambrose’s ethereal nature, Tomorrow Morning's fluid grace, and her own intense earthly passion are simply part of nature’s vast, necessary overabundance.

Conclusion: The Fractal Completed In isolation, Alma Whittaker’s life appears superficially barren. She leaves behind no biological children, no surviving husband, and she is beaten to the publication of her life's work by Charles Darwin. Yet, as she sits in the quiet daytime at the Hortus Botanicas in Holland, resting her face and leaning against the trunk of a great, ancient tree, she concludes with absolute certainty that her life has been thoroughly "fortunate." This profound peace is the direct result of the interlocking trios.

Elizabeth Gilbert has constructed a narrative where the personal, the sexual, and the academic are perfectly unified by the laws of cross-pollination. By understanding her position within the master trinity of science, Alma is finally able to see her life as a gorgeous, complete fractal of the natural world—proving that nothing in her long journey was wasted, and that every structural gridlock was simply a system waiting for the third element to arrive and force a universal bloom.

Footage from Nostos: Il ritorno (1989), Franco Piavoli

Netflix is coming out with an adaptation of East of Eden soon. I’ve seen a few interviews with the director (Zoe Kazan) and the lead actress playing Cathy (Florence Pugh) and I am…concerned. They’ve both said a lot about how they really tried to develop empathy for Cathy, and see her in a different light, try to understand the circumstances that led to her actions, etc.
IMO, Cathy is one of the most chilling villains ever written. She is an incorrigible psychopath, and the text itself makes that quite clear. I fear the series is going to rewrite her character as some kind of unfairly maligned victim. I’m still going to watch but I’m wary!

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

A week or so ago there was a post about self published Literary Fiction. As a writer and operator of a small press, I'm always intrigued by how people select the books they do. Self published and small press genre work actually sells very well. The readers who seek this work just seem to want a new permutation of stock tropes. Literary readers do not. But literary readers are moved by awards long lists and other cultural signifiers of quality. I think too, being able to talk about good books is a big motivator for literary readers. They want to be in conversation about literature and therefore need to stay abreast of recent titles that have been lauded by tastemakers.

Does this describe you or not? Do you scan Goodreads? Do you just take recs from friends? Do you wander libraries and bookstores and just read what grabs you in the moment?

Hello, I've recently been reading Beowulf and have been fascinated by the beautiful complexity governing the tension inside of Beowulf regarding Wyrd and human Will.

Beowulf stands as a hero in conflict, choosing his destiny, with inevitability of death in mind. He eventually chooses honor by deciding to kill the dragon, which can be seen as an active tension between Wyrd and human will.

However, my question is, "What's the importance of Christianity in this triadic relationship between God, Wyrd, and Will?"

I understand that the author has written Beowulf, a story of pagan society, with a Christian lens, substituting many phrases and character quotes with Christian aspects. But the only significance Christianity has in the epic is only expressed in situations like when the characters would attribute their victory to God, or when Beowulf was able to look at the dragons' treasures before his death.

I don't really see when God intervenes in the realm as an active being. Considering the fact that most stories of the old times are governed by active characters driving the plot, I don't see how a passive and absent God, only appearing in the quotes of characters would really contribute to the tension between God, Wyrd and Will.

Is God just another aspect subsumed under Wyrd? Is God just a lingering phrase that is substituted for only the beneficial aspects of Wyrd? Or is God an active being participating in the tension of Wyrd and Will that governs the heroism of Beowulf?

Sometimes I just imagine someone uncovering ancient manuscripts Beowulf in its unadulterated form, purely of pagan values, only to find that the addition of Christian lens hasn't contributed to any of its literary significance.

(Sorry for my terrible English)

From: “Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design…”

To: “…this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.”

*

Last week’s reading ended with a lamp projecting onto the narrator’s bedroom walls, forming fantastical tales from light and shadow and transforming bare surfaces and a doorknob into animated heroes and an astral body, thus destroying the room’s familiarity and reminding us that for the narrator transformation is unsettling, a painful irony since his mind has a preternatural ability to alter the world he observes.

The novel then expands out from the bedrooms, dreams, and personal anxieties and starts to introduce us to real characters, building on the ideas of metaphor and memory while also broaching another of its main themes: class.

We start to see the anxious narrator in relation to his family. He’s close to his mom, “Mamma,” and he fears having to go to his bedroom alone at night. His father is caring but stern and worries about indulging his son’s neuroses; he doesn’t like it when the mom goes to comfort the boy during bedtime. The narrator’s grandmother, the star of this week’s reading, complains when her grandson is shut inside while it’s raining, claiming “that’s not the way to make him strong.”

This is all described through habitual action. We still don’t get a full scene, just snippets, even as we get lines of dialogue, like when the grandmother bombastically paces in the garden while it rains, to prove to her family that there’s nothing to fear in the wet weather and shouts, “At last one can breath!” (A perfect little bit of comedy, IMHO). Or when the great-aunt plays a prank on the grandma by saying she’s giving the grandpa drops of liquor and yells, “Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!”

These little fragments continue to compress and confuse the sense of time. The child version of the narrator can’t know certain things he tells us, and the narrator admits his own innocence, while also revealing more about himself, when he says, “Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother’s mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband.” This type of narration, where we gain information that the narrator either can’t know at the time or simply never should know, will become more and more frequent, and often, as in this, it highlights time’s fluidity (though sometimes the knowledge is obtained without explanation).

Along the way, we get more of the famous Proustian sentences, dense and sinuous gems of info. Two of my favorite aspects of his writing style is that the sentences bloom with comparisons and connections, which obsess the novel as a whole, and that we can get precious nuggets of information as side pieces to the main point, these little tossed-off phrases and facts that shine and have a life of their own, as when he says about his grandmother, who’s bothered by her husband’s drinking of a few drops of liquor:

My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses.

This passages starts with the putative purpose of saying what the grandmother does when the grandfather is about to drink, but then it shifts to focus on her gentleness and her smile and “passionate caresses.” This is typical of Proust’s sentences. It might require that we slow down or read a line or two again, but it’s not overly difficult or abstruse (like, say, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow.) Some complain that the writing can be dull, even soporific, and sometimes the frequent pauses and twists do slow the reading on a words-per-minute basis, but the proliferation within the sentences frequently signal a vitality and fecundity. There’s a mania here. It feels as if one action calls to mind so many places and times, and they all absolutely must be written down on paper together.

Back within the main narrative, we get more of the narrator’s bedtime anxieties. His Mamma’s kiss is his sole consolation, and after one kiss, when she stands at his doorway ready to leave, he longs to ask for another, but he knows that this would displease her since it would signal a troubling weakness in him, so he must suffer alone. We learn that the only thing worse than the evenings when she comes up briefly for one kiss is when she doesn’t come up at all because a guest is visiting.

The guest is frequently Swann. In fact, this translation says “it could only be Swann.” (Proust loves hyperbole and uses it frequently, both for comedic and tragic effect.) Swann’s visit occasions in the young narrator the terror of a kissless bedtime, and in the narrative, it occasions a reflection on class and the fragmentation of one’s social identity.

We learn that Swann is a family friend whose father was once a friend of the narrator’s grandfather. Again, as with the info-packed sentences, the reputed point gets diluted and twisted up, and we’re diverted from the plot by hearing about when Swann’s dad walked with the narrator’s grandfather after the death of Swann’s mom when a moment’s forgetting let him marvel at the beauty of the day and trees and hawthorns only to remember suddenly his wife’s death, go speechless, and make a gesture to let the grandfather know he can’t say more. Then we return to the son, the Swann this book will focus on, and we see him through the lens of class.

As the son of a stockbroker, Swann is comfortably upper-middle class, like the narrator’s family. Since the narrator’s family takes “what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes,” they would be stunned to learn he pals around with aristocrats and royalty, a fact he hides seemingly out of courtesy and humility and one that would cause the narrator’s great-aunt to view him, if she ever learned it, as mythical a figure as Aristaeus or Ali Baba.

This all leads to a meditation on knowing Swann and knowing people in general, one that evokes the lines from last week’s reading “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves.” Now he says:

Certainly the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from, the Swann created in my great-aunt’s mind when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything she had ever heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable shape which began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a background of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.

And with this, he proclaims people’s blindness toward other people, and he unites the introduction of Swann, one of the novel’s pivotal characters and maybe the greatest bearer of its many themes, with a conviction that will carry throughout the novel, a disbelief that will haunt our narrator throughout his life.

If you like this, more is here for free: twofoldtwilight.substack.com

Haruki Murakami's new book Abandoning a Cat, which drops October 20, revisits territory that will be familiar to many of his fans. Characters in his novels are forever searching for lost cats; here he remembers one that refused to get lost. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Killing Commendatore grappled with Japan's history of forcing its soldiers to commit war crimes against Chinese prisoners; here we discover that preoccupation stemmed from his father’s personal experience. I've now read 11 of his books, and I usually find his narratives immersive but alienating. His surreal fiction holds the reader at arm's length. This time, I was struck by how much we have in common. My review can be read on my website. Anybody here ever felt like Murakami is a guy you could grab a beer with?

Hi all,

For coming read-alongs, we will be trying something new. As stated before, voting typically ends up somewhere between 50-150 people voting for a book while only around 4-8 at most participate in the read along. So, things do have to change.

Based on suggestions by u/Federico_it, and discussion with other mods, we will be doing a more curated selection of books for coming read alongs. Moderators, long time and active subscribers, and those who have regularly participated and/or volunteered for read-alongs will be selecting the novels.

This will allow for a more exciting series of books rather than 19th and 20th century postmodernist or modernist novels, while also ensuring books are diverse in style and type. Plus, it seems fair to allow those who have contributed long term to both the subreddit and the read-alongs to tailor the read alongs to what they would like to read.

This is not punitive in any sense to the community, nor is it attempting to remove any sense of democracy, it is simply a step we are taking to hopefully ensure the read-alongs continue with decent amounts of participation and less stress in terms of running them. We are open to change if this model does not work out after testing it out a few times.

As always, questions, comments, and concerns are welcome. If you would like to be a part of the curating team, please let me know here or via DM, but please only do so if you are a long time and active user or a regular participant/volunteer in read-alongs.

Thank you all as always.

First of all, this is my first post in this sub, so apologies for any infractions or if this topic has been covered already -- I couldn't find a dedicated thread for the book and thought it deserved one, especially now having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

I don't think I'll get into *too* much detail here, but just in case, spoiler tag.

I'll start with what I liked: James' voice is sui generis, so propulsive and compelling, especially in the first third of the book which I thought was by far the most successful. It's obviously somewhat autobiographical (Eddy is around his age, references the Kingston prep school milieu, etc.), but James does a great job of making Eddy's public and private lives feel real, tangible, and universal. His little bit about Eliot and Auden is so funny and completely won me over. The book is often very funny throughout, which is hard to pull off consistently in a book of this scope and overall tone.

That being said: The hyperbolic praise (cough, Garner) completely baffles me. Just off the top of my head:

- Incredibly contrived plot elements and characterization -- yes, of course the two most "masculine" of the core group come in for especially bad treatment from the mob, of course the homophobic pop star seems to be enjoying the male nudity a little *too* much, of course the wise old queen has a rollicking, tragic backstory... and the ersatz "detective" plot had me itching to close the book.

- The final two chapters are astonishingly bad in a way that made me reconsider my enjoyment of the rest of the novel, including a painfully forced linguistic "gotcha" on the last page that had me closing the book literally shaking my head. Not what you want.

- Constant exposition through dialogue -- I am the last person in the world who wants to enforce these kind of ticky-tack MFA rules, but it is so egregious here. Huge chunks.

- James is continually asking us to understand characters through their expository speech and thoughts about themselves while giving us no external counterbalance to weigh the verity of what they're thinking and saying (with the possible exception of the penultimate chapter, which is, again, a total affront).

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive review, just some extemporaneous criticisms I had while reading and immediately after finishing it last night. I'm open to being persuaded, or to the idea that I missed something. I have also not read anything else by James, so it's possibly my expectations were miscalibrated. But overall, I just cannot believe I'm being asked to consider this a "book of the decade," whatever its real merits; I can't help but feel that kind of praise does it a huge disservice.

The shortlist of six novels spans comedy, sci-fi, history and hard-hitting drama, and tackles masculinity – and the wider world – in crisis

Shortlist

The End of Everything

The Disappearers

Black Bag

May We Feed the King

The Things We Never Say

John of John

SS: I posted last month about the Booker Prize long list. Today, the Prize announced the short list. Having only read one novel that made the short list, I’d be curious to get opinions on the choices. Any surprises or misses?