r/books

I read The Rebel and the Final Blood War by K.A. Linde and I just hated everything about it! I don't know if the other two books in the series were this atrociously written and I somehow overlooked it, or if this was ghostwritten by a middle schooler. The author has no concept of sentence structure, and every other sentence is a partial/incomplete thing like "A woman who had delivered a death sentence with a candy bar."

This is an actual paragraph in the book:

"Reyna's eyes darted to her friends. Meghan and Jodie gave her an encouraging nod. Gabe winked. Tye smiled. They were all counting on her."

The ending was rushed and unsatisfying too. Spoiler: >!the villain of this whole trilogy gets de-vamped (turned back into a human) and just decides to stab himself to death immediately.!< This deus ex machina occurs on page 307 of the 320-page book.

What have you read recently that made you genuinely angry like this?

I read Sky Daddy not too long ago (loved it and highly recommend it!) and when I was looking up discussion on the book, I was surprised to find that some people interpret the ending as the characters not dying in a plane crash, because it seemed pretty direct to me that that’s what happened when I read it—the description of feeling of inevitability, the plane struggling, “I held my best friend’s hand until I couldn’t anymore,” etc,and it really worked as a bittersweet ending—the main character finally both finds human connection and gets her fondest wish, but at the cost of loss of life. For others who have read it, how did you interpret the ending?

I stayed up until after five in the morning here in Taipei to watch the announcement of the prize and could not be happier for 双子 and Lin. This is so huge for Taiwanese literature and for Taiwan as a whole.

I've been on a biography kick this year and this one is worth mentioning. It's interesting for a number of reasons, the first being that that it was written at three distinct points in his life and really has three distinct voices and narrative styles.

The first part, written in 1771 explicitly for his son to read is absolutely the most interesting and compelling. It covers his misadventures as a young adult and his struggles with his family who he seemed to think underestimated him at every turn. It's pretty interesting as it details the evolution of the printing and newspaper industry in the 18th century. It also gets into his love life which is pretty interesting too. He developes his own moral philosophy and gets involved with another printer who tries starting his own Christian sect, honestly fascinating.

The next voice, being written in 1780-81, seems quite a bit more circumspect and self assured. He talks about advertising contracts for the English army, financial concerns and a bit (really not enough) about the American revolution. At this point his voice seems thoroughly self aware, he is no longer willing to admit any mistakes or defects or character. He developes a system for perfecting his morality, and his only flaw is that he is disorganized. Certainly starts to seem like an unreliable narrator in my opinion. This is the point in his life that others claim to be characterized by his whore mongering and general unseriousness. He doesn't hint at it at all.

The last voice, parts 3 and 4 in the book were written in 1788-89. He basically ceased being a character altogether in my opinion, this section attempts to use his lifetime as a textbook in civics and public administration. The narrative is completely absent. Others claim he's infected with syphilis at this point in his life. He never admits a single sexual act in the entire book, let alone with a prostitute, but the cognitive decline is evident.

He dies in 1790, book is published in 1793. Pretty interesting book in my opinion. Anyone else read this? Any other autobiographies has similar discrepancies in voice?

Alright people, prepare for a rant.

I am quite a fan of the modern American playwrights. I have read multiple Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O‘Neill plays.

Nothing could have prepared me for this.

Jocasta complex, incest, non-consensual solicitation, passing mention of pedophilia, colonial segregation, cannibalism, and forced lobotomies - all packaged within 50 pages.

I could not have predicted 24h prior that I would be saying that „cannibalism was the least fucked up theme in there“.

Excuse me, while I spend the rest of my evening browsing r/cats to cleanse myself.

I know this post might make some people on here squirm a little bit, but I think that's what makes it fun and challenging. Any reader should explore works they disagree with on some level because exposing yourself to only those things that you agree with is by definition confining yourself to an echo chamber and I want to prove that this sub is not an echo chamber.

I'll start with two of my favorite very obvious ones:

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

Once again, my local public library delivered. I had learned about this book through an article a couple of years back, and I thought I’d never be able to find it. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a translated copy of it in the library – and was an interesting book indeed.

Lady Into Fox is a 1922 novel (although its length would make it mostly a novella), by the British author David Garnett.

The quiet and idyllic life of Richard Tebrick in the English countryside, is suddenly interrupted when one day, his young wife Silvia, unexpectedly turns into a fox. From that point on, Richard tries to care for his wife and continue their lives as they were up to that point, although the Laws of Nature will quickly overcome his attempts at normality.

There are a lot of ideas cramped into such a short novel (less than 100 pages). The whole magical affair between Richard and Silvia, who, although at first still retains human characteristics despite her metamorphosis, starts to change even more, can be read through various different lens: as a commentary on the traditional, patriarchal family and the role of women in it, the relationship between the modern Man and the natural world, and the meaning of being “Human” more broadly.

The novel is pretty short as I said, and it’s in the public domain, so it can be easily found in a site like Project Gutenberg. If you like stuff like Aesop’s parables etc., you can treat this story as something similar, in a way. It’s quite easily digestible.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok is built around two fathers and two sons, and what makes it so absorbing is how completely different each father-son relationship is, and yet how recognisable both feel. One father is warm and openly communicative; the other raises his son almost entirely in silence. It’s a choice that’s genuinely difficult to understand, and Potok doesn’t try to make it easy. He gives you the logic behind it, slowly and carefully, and you come to see where it comes from without ever being able to accept it. Both approaches carry a cost, but they don’t carry equal weight, and the novel is honest enough not to pretend otherwise

What the novel captures so honestly is the tension between the world a parent has mapped out for a child and the person that child is quietly becoming. The two boys are deeply different in temperament and in what they want from their lives, and watching each of them navigate loyalty to their fathers while trying to work out who they actually are is where the book does its most affecting work. It never gets melodramatic about any of this. The struggle stays quiet, internal, which makes it hit harder.

The friendship at the centre of it is equally complicated, two people from neighbouring but quite separate worlds finding their way toward genuine understanding across a significant cultural and ideological divide.

Which fictional parent-child relationship do you think captured most honestly the cost of a child becoming someone the family never expected?

How you ever been so immersed in a book that it makes want to go to that particular destination describe in the book or crave whatever the character is eating. For me it happens with a variety of books that describe a scene so well.

Had this happened to anybody? What book or scene from a book made you feel like getting up going to that particular destination?

I read books that had lighthouses as part of the story line and it gave me the urge to go and see one.

At a friend's house recently I picked up "Two Years Before The Mast" for something to read. It was very enjoyable, interesting, much more readable than most 19th-century books I've encountered.

It's a 1840 memoir of a college kid who signed up as a seaman on a clipper ship to fix his eyesight (which is weird, but ...) Went around Cape Horn twice, once in mid-winter!

Told in a straightforward way, it gives a really good picture of the often unpleasant life aboard ships as well as life in California before the gold rush.

I can definitely recommend it. You might want to skim through the sailing-ship parts which get a bit technical about sails and lines and whatnot!

Ill speak from personal belief, because I don't know a better way to explain. Whenever I pick up a new book (physical, electronic, or audio) I gave myself between 3 - 6 chapters to decide if I like it. If during that stretch I am not engaged or interested I move on. But I do not consider this not finishing a book. I think about it more like watching episode one of a TV show. Ive barely started, just enough to know I won't enjoy it. To me actually not finishing a book comes when I have invested and then actively decide to stop engaging with the story. Its rare for me to engage in a story and then suddenly not want to finish that story.

Thoughts? Do you have an exit ramp for books, and if so when? When is your point of claiming not fininshed vs not interested?

I developed aphantasia in my late teens and was devastated that I couldn’t read books anymore in the way I used to. I was always a kid who had her nose in a book as I had undiagnosed adhd and a very abusive home life. I used to get grounded for reading too much. I also have agoraphobia due to, well, reasons.

I didn’t read for years, I kept trying and nothing stuck and I would just get frustrated and give up and go back to watching tv or playing video games.

Well, holy shit. This book just struck me from almost the get go. The way she describes Constance hiding when the door is knocked at, the way she shrinks when people are walking around the house and looking into windows, I had to keep rereading those passages because I couldn’t believe how well I related to what she was writing. And then I read that Shirley Jackson herself had agoraphobia and it all made sense.

i asked my boyfriend to read it as well and he was just like, yeah. It‘s fine. He didn‘t relate to any of it like I did and I waffled at him for half an hour about what I found so moving and he said he hadn’t ever read a book that moved him like that. I mean, I’m 36 and the only other book I found that moved me like that was the Harry Potter one where Sirius Black dies and Harry was broken. He thought he had finally been rescued from his abusive life and it was ripped away from him

Anyway, just wanted to tell someone, I guess. I really liked this book.

The Name of the Rose takes a while to get into. The opening sections are dense and demand a certain patience, but somewhere along the way it becomes genuinely addictive, and by the end it’s hard to believe you struggled in the beginning.

On the surface it’s a murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey, and it works well as one. Brother William is essentially Sherlock Holmes in a monk’s habit, his novice Adso trailing behind him doing a very credible Watson impression. The monastery itself, its hierarchy, its secrets, its strange cast of inhabitants, is one of the most vividly realised settings I’ve come across in fiction. Even in the smallest interactions you get an immediate sense of what each character holds dear and where their limits lie.

But the mystery is almost secondary to what the book is actually doing, which is asking a much more uncomfortable question: can knowledge be gatekept? And should it be? The abbey’s library sits at the centre of everything, a place of carefully controlled access where certain texts are kept from those deemed unfit to read them. The people responsible for this aren’t monsters. They have a coherent logic, a genuine belief that some ideas are too dangerous for certain minds. Eco makes you sit with that logic long enough to understand it, even as the novel is quietly pulling it apart.

It feels less like medieval history and more like something recognisably contemporary, which is probably why it has stayed with me.

It also feels like a novel that couldn’t be more timely. At a moment when book bans are accelerating and the arguments for them sound remarkably familiar, the idea that someone always believes they’re protecting others by controlling what they read, and always believes they’re the right person to make that call, lands differently than it might have a decade ago.

Which books have made you think most seriously about who gets to decide what knowledge is accessible, and to whom?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

I remember my daughter crying over Great Expectations- she was 11 at the time.

(I remember her age, because I remember telling that later to a new school in small town Canada where we rocked up, who put her randomly in an ESL class because her name wasn't white- anyway that's a different story)

I was like - why are you crying? And she sobbed that she loved Pip and why was there no-one like him, and she wanted to marry Pip.

I loved Bilbo Baggins- I didn't want to marry him - he's obviously not marriage material, but I loved him very much and wanted desperately no harm to come him.

I also "fell in love" with Hamlet when "doing Shakespeare" at high school. I was shocked by his death, I hated how useless Ophelia was (yes, that was me as a teenager), and I wished so much I could be at that bloody court in Denmark and save him. I also loved Horatio, but not the same way I loved Hamlet.

I loved Emma from Jane Austen, and also Anne from Persuasion, and I would have married either of them in a heartbeat, if I could. I still would. I never really got that much into Elizabeth Bennet- she always seemed rather exhausting- all that witty banter! And running around in fresh air! But I definitely had moments where I aspired to be like her- and indeed, where I secretly thought I was like her. Lol.

I loved David, the biblical narrator in "God Knows", by Jospeh Heller. So funny, so gorgeous, so smart. I learned so much from him too.

Obviously I loved Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, and I just wanted to reach out into his world and be with him. I would have gladly traded places with Kurt.

Flaubert said he was in love with poor Emma Bovary. I read Madame Bovary, and didn't quite get the appeal, myself, but it might have been the translation.

Who are your literary creations you fell in love with? And what was it like?