I made a post six months ago with my thoughts on reading Yesteryear. Here is that post. The post garnered a lot of comments and I have really loved reading everyone’s thoughts. One thing I said was that I wanted to reread it. I decided to wait a bit to do a full reread (I reread a few sections admittedly!) as opposed to doing it immediately.

I’ve picked up on so much. The first time, I was concerned with the mystery of it all. I was trying to figure it out. Now that I know what happened? Well, it’s like seeing the full forest versus seeing the trees.

Here are my thoughts as I reread…

1. I like Abigail. I’m so proud of her for leaving that useless ass Bryce. I’m proud of her for getting therapy. I want to give her a hug when she announces she’s leaving Bryce and her mom just sobs and Natalie just… well, Natalie. When she cries that she can’t do it for another 40 years. Abigail is who Natalie wishes she could be. Natalie hates Abigail for leaving because she wished she could see leaving as a viable path.

2. Natalie’s abuse of the children seems worse upon my reread (and before someone says what about Caleb - yes. Him, too). Her abuse of Mary, Abel, Noah, and Maeve was bad. She neglected them. And what she did to Mary… poor Mary.

3. The first day Shannon is there, Natalie goes to bed saying she wants to fire Shannon. Shannon is awake the next day giggling with the nannies and Natalie says Louise looks like the cat ate the canary. I believe that is when it happened. Shannon and the nannies stayed up late giggling “what if we took her down!” I’m sure the plan wasn’t fleshed out. Maybe it wasn’t even a plan. But I think the seed was planted that first night. Now, I don’t think Shannon took the job with the intention to take down Natalie. I think she was genuine in the interview. But I think what she saw that first day changed her. Maybe she was hoping to do some exposé-style documentary after what she saw. Maybe that’s why she was filming Doug at that rally.

4. Who the fuck names their kid names Junebug? The first book I kept hoping it was a nickname. Or maybe her name is June and they call her Junebug. Poor Junebug. It’s giving Jinger Duggar.

5. Now that I know who the “other” people are in pretend-1800s world (Stetson and Samuel), it’s even more haunting that Natalie didn’t recognize them. Yes, I think that’s evidence of her mental illness. But I also think it’s evidence of how little she cared for her children. My children are young (toddler and baby) but I feel like on some level my soul would know them anywhere. I feel that connected to them.

6. Mary saying “mama, I miss you” broke me.

7. Natalie and Caleb should never have gotten married. Obviously. But this book shows the dangers of fundie marriages and marrying so quickly. They didn’t even know each other and thought a general fondness was love.

In my reread, I saw less Ballerina Farm and more Turpin/Franke family.

If you read all of this, thank you. Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you did a reread like me!

Fuck Natalie. Sorry, Lord, but really, fuck her.

I will start by saying I will not read another book by John Grisham. I have read over half of his published works and find his writing style to be an easy read. I know he is a very popular author, and many would describe him as a formulaic writer that produces "page turners that lack substance". Frankly, I am ok with reading page turners at times. I am pushing 60 and I really enjoyed his work in the 1990s. When I came back to reading in the 2010's, he was an author I would read because of my good memories of his early work. But increasingly in the 2020's, I find his books to be very frustrating at times.

Since The French Illusion is new, I will use spoilers for comments on it. I listened to the audiobook, as that is how I consume books these days. And I enjoyed the story and the writing of this book, for the most part. There were some parts that didn't make sense, but pushed the story along. This was a book that I felt as I listened, was broken into two parts. The first half, or even more than half, was setting up the real story. Newlyweds are kidnapped in Paris and the wife is ransomed and released while the husband is ransomed but not released. Story jumps back and forth between Paul in captivity and events in the outside world where the FBI tries to find him. And then over halfway through, a young lawyer is recruited to be a decoy to be kidnapped in order to save Paul and two other kidnapped Americans. And I thought this was the real plot of the book, following the decoy, Stuart Nash, as he helps in the rescue mission. There is graphic torture scenes of the kidnapped Americans and time is spent on the training of Stuart for the rescue. But there is no rescue. After Stuart is kidnapped, the American government pays a ransom and the men are released. So why did I read about the rescue planning? Why was it important to follow Stuart's recruitment and training? This whole book was a waste of time with the bad guy winning and getting away. Yes, the story was propulsive and built tension, but i need a purpose to reward

my invested time. Why bother with writing how Paul's family is struggling with money if they are essentially forgotten in the second half of the book. Why bother writing about recruiting Stuart and training him if the government is going to end up paying a ransom. I just feel this was a colossal waste of my time.

Wow, what a book. Definitely gonna be one of my favorites of the year. Written in 1971, as relevant today as it was back then. On the surface it's an action novel set in the Harlem reinassaince, but it's so much more.

It defies description. It’s like a Pynchon novel from a black POV, creative formatting and a healthy dash of Assassin’s Creed. It’s a cultured take down of American society combined with an action film, a bizarre look into a parallel reality where the Titanic is sailing in 1929 and Moses (of Egypt fame) had a rock band. At times it felt like reading a counterculture pamphlet, or a Freire/Chomsky combined essay, at others like watching a movie Tarantino would rip off and add even more n-words.

In an even more bizarre description, it's what Kuang's Babel tried to do, but by a competent author. It's a real takedown of colonialism and the dominant cultures that has real depth. It's not just a series of stereotypes thrown around. You will come out of this book more educated, asking more questions, with a reading list 5 pages long.

"Fever dream" is overused, but that's what it is. Handwritten pages, unrelated photography, anachronisms, real people weaving in and out of the story.

Has anyone read any other of his books? I understand this is his masterpiece but curious if others match the same vibe.

Edit: Forgot to ask, do you think the art thieves being called mutafikah is intentionally both an Islamic reference and a bastardization of motherfuckers?

Spoilers for the end of Red Rising and for Timothy Zahn's Thrawn (2017) below.

Near the end of Red Rising, Nero au Augustus pulls Darrow aside and offers him a place in his house, as his lancer, in exchange for his silence. He explains he doesn't care about bloodlines, only strength, and since his own line is weak, he collects talented young people. When Darrow says his lieutenants will stay loyal, Augustus tells him loyalties fall apart the moment everyone leaves, and that every generation has believed it was different. Darrow kneels and swears to be his sword, while privately planning to hang him one day.

It immediately took me back to the scene in Zahn's Thrawn where Captain Parck presents Thrawn to Palpatine as a gift. Thrawn corrects him, he's not a gift, he's a resource. He offers information about threats that also endanger the Chiss, the people who exiled him, and proposes a deal of mutual benefit. Palpatine answers that he has seen others with that kind of nobility, and most of them fell once their idealism met the real world.

The parallel is close on three points. A brilliant outsider enters the service of a power that isn't his in order to serve his own people. The old power receives him as something to collect. And the older man tells the younger one that his idealism won't survive the world, almost in the same words.

But the difference is what stayed with me. Thrawn declares his agenda. He tells the Emperor exactly who he cares about and puts the terms on the table, and if he loses the bet, he loses it in the open. Darrow hides his. He swears to give up his name while planning the gallows. One is an ally with explicit conditions, the other is an infiltrator.

What strikes me is that both models only work for someone the power can't do without. Thrawn gets his deal because his knowledge is indispensable, and Darrow gets in because he was rebuilt to pass as a Gold and has a whole network behind him. For anyone without that leverage, Augustus's offer is the only one on the table.

Has anyone else read both? Does Golden Son make Darrow look more like Thrawn later, or does it go the other way? No spoilers past the start of Golden Son, please.

Just finished Collin Gosselin’s “In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of my Childhood”. I listened to it and Collin narrated it himself.

It was absolutely devastating. As someone who watching Jon and Kate + 8 for a few years and then saw when Kate said Collin needed help, I never imagined what he was going through.

I don’t usually cry at books but I cried a couple times. From sadness, anger, and eventually happiness for him.

On a random note: I will no longer be supporting TLC by watching their shows. They should be ashamed of themselves. I didn’t have a high opinion of them before and now it’s way worse.

This book tells two stories. The first story is about a large piece of Jade which is carved into a Ming Dynasty masterpiece and the various places it goes. The second story is a search for that "lost" masterpiece. The story is very well done, and remains interesting all the way through. The ending was an unexpected, yet a pretty realistic surprise. The jade carving touches on a lot of different points of history, but the story doesn't get bogged down in historical details, but all the different historical points does keep the search interesting.

I just finished The Starless Sea, and I know I’m a little late but I wanted to write up my thoughts. I haven’t read The Night Circus, a friend recommended The Starless Sea and so I went into the book not knowing anything about it.

The Starless Sea is a story about stories. Specially it’s a story about the DNA of stories. Stories are made of imagery. They have themes, motifs, symbols, atmosphere, and affect. Stories are made of tropes. They have love stories, adventure, mysteries, and origin stories. And, most importantly, stories have organization. They have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a climax. They have a call to adventure. They set the scene and tie up loose ends.

And so, The Starless Sea is about what happens when a story loses its organizing logic and becomes deconstructed into just its DNA. The imagery becomes overwhelming and redundant. Scenes are disconnected. Characters appear and disappear without purpose. Symbolism takes over and in doing so loses its meaning.

And the book itself is constructed in just this way. As the Harbor deconstructs, the story itself also deconstructs. The book has a clear, traditional beginning and end, but the middle (and the majority of the book) becomes more and more meandering. The fables repeat the same story on a loop without progressing the story. Our main characters seem lost in the Harbor, drifting from one place to another. The book is both about a story that lost its way and it is itself a story that lost its way.

Having said all that- I liked the idea but didn’t love the execution. Everything just felt so shallow and surface level. And there were just so. many. symbols. And they were all so generic. The keys, the swords, the hearts, the bees, the owls, the cats, the books…. They can’t all be equally important, and so they ended up all feeling meaningless. The atmosphere/ affect just got so boring and repetitive after a while, and again just felt generic. Cocktails, Harry Potter, dusty books, fancy food… it just felt so vague and devoid of any substance.

I also truly disliked the repetition of Zachary’s name and “son of a fortune teller.” It didn’t add anything for me and started to feel annoying.

I read some opinions after I finished and saw a lot of people didn’t like Zachary. I liked him, or at least I didn’t mind him. I think he was basically a blank vessel for the story to deconstruct around.

So! Those are my thoughts. Thanks for reading.

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!

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) tells the story of Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a political prisoner in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s, and is based on Solzhenitsyn's real life experience living in a gulag.

This novella is short but phenomenal. The book doesnt focus on the gulag system as a whole or in Soviet Union's politics. It rather focuses on the human experiences in imprisonment. As the name indicates, it focuses on one day in the camp, from waking up to falling asleep. And the book's descriptions are so immersive that I felt like I was in the camp as well. The descriptions of the Siberian cold were particularly potent, but my favourite part was the description of the simple things that made the protagonist happy (a cigarette, an extra 100grams of bread, not being sent to solitary confinement...).

This book is above all about resilience and about how humans adapt to whatever awful situation they're thrown into and manage to find little comforts to keep on living for. You can see that the author was writing about his own experience, as he details the little things so well. For example, he explains the informal economy in the camp and how you could do "odd jobs" to gain some little rewards, which I found super interesting.

The only thing is that I wish I couldve read this book in Russian (which I unfortunately cant do) because the English translation I read wasnt amazing. It wasnt terrible and thankfully I read it on a kindle so I could check the dictionary there, but I am curious how different the book would be in its original language.

About the author, Solzhenitsyn had a very though life. He was sent to Siberia because, while he was serving in the army during WWII, he sent a letter to a friend where he criticized Stalin's military strategy. He spent 5 years in a gulag, then he was sent to exhile in Kazakhstan (oh and he had a very serious cancer during this time). Then he managed to publish "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962 in a period of relative calm (during Nikita Kruschev's government) and won a Nobel Prize. Then he wrote his other, more famous book "Gulag Archipelago" and was expelled from Soviet Union again.

I’m reading one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

I actually read it before alongside my dad. He had his copy in Dutch, I had mine in English, both translated from the original Spanish. It’s about a man who discovers a mysterious book and becomes obsessed with finding its author and uncovering what happened to him, all set against the streets of Barcelona.

And we were reading it while we were actually in Barcelona.

There was this one moment where we were sitting together on a square, eating manchego and reading. At some point we both looked up at the buildings around us, and my dad suddenly went, “I think this chapter takes place… right here?”

By complete coincidence, we were at almost exactly the same point in the book.

So we put the books away and started walking through Barcelona, following the streets and places from the descriptions in the chapter.

My father passed away three months ago, and this memory came back to me while reading this again. Sitting together on that square, realizing that the story we were both reading was unfolding in the streets around us, and then going off to explore them together.

It was already an incredible book. Now it’s one I don’t think I could ever separate from him.

Just felt like sharing that.

Apologies for any part of the book I remember incorrectly. I don’t have my copy, I left it with him, the person I consider the love of my life, despite our short time together; I guess it was our copy, not just mine.

Back in December I started dating this guy. He was handsome, funny, and charming, and we bonded over our love of books. He ran a chapter for an international book club that had previously read Stoner by John Williams in 2019, before he started the one in our city, so he never got around to reading it himself. But I’d been meaning to read it for a while, and I picked it up myself in February.

In the first chapter, Stoner’s professor tells him he’s in love. He’s in love with the English language, he’s in love with literature. From that moment in the book I knew this was a book I wanted to share with him. I began annotating, which I hardly ever do, and wrote all my notes in the margins. Stoner’s love for literature reminded me of his own love of literature, how passionate he is about his book club and the books that he reads. I wanted to share every moment with him and every thought that I had. I underlined, circled, scribbled everything that I thought he would connect with and find as interesting as I did.

When I was reading, I didn’t really care to hear Edith and her connection (or lack thereof) with Stoner. But when Katherine entered the picture, I was floored.

The relationship between Stoner and Katherine, although “forbidden” given their positions at the university, completely took over my reading experience. The time they spent together never felt wasted and the pages they consumed made me want to never put down the book. These were my most annotated pages, the ones I cherished the most. They reminded me of my own love, how deeply I felt it for him, how deeply he felt it for me. They loved each other so deeply, despite knowing the world would never accept them as they did.

Katherine and Stoner separated and I was left devastated. I understood, I carried on with the book, but my heart stayed there, in those pages, wishing it could’ve lasted forever. I wrote it all in the margins, and I remember telling this all to him, but I never told him how much I related to it with how I felt about him and how he felt about me. How we felt about each other. I hoped he could read my thoughts that I left in those pages instead.

For Valentine’s day I gave him the book, the copy that I poured my heart out to. He told me he would write his own notes and annotations and give it back to me.

A couple months ago, he and I met the same fate as Katherine and Stoner. I moved away. For a graduate school program, actually. I didn’t leave him with no word like Katherine did, but I did leave him even though I wanted to stay forever. My friends and family thought the long distance would be bad for me, his family thought the same. So we went our separate ways, I moved across the country, I am alone even when I am surrounded by people, because I have a hole in my heart where he belongs.

He never gave the book back to me. I wonder if he kept it, or if he threw it away when we broke up. Our paths may never cross again. But I write this now because I think about him everyday, even though I may very well never see him, or hear his voice, or feel his touch, with the distance and silence between us. In that way, I hope he and I never reach the conclusion that Stoner and Katherine did where they never saw each other or heard from each other again, aside from her dedication in her book: to W.S.

And I very well may never write a book, as Katherine did, but here I am writing this post, and thinking about him in the same way, after all those years, that Katherine thought about Stoner.

To P.D.

Thanks for reading.

So I have never beenuch of a physcal book reader until last year when for some strange reason I picked up a physical book for the first time in since my college days. I had always been more drawn towards audiobooks for the ease of use and the fact I was a slow reader. Thankfuly that has changed as long as I have a book that captures my attention.

Now 2 years later I have read probably close to 50 books. Most of these books are newer books and they all had something in common... no Table of Contents. I get that not all books have chapter names but i always enjoyed looking over the outline of the book and seeing how many pages each chapter has made up of. It seems strange to me that this has disappeared in the time I read of school till now. Does anyone know why we have gone away from this? Did anyone else enjoy having a Table of Contents?

Anyways I am currently reading Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree. Thanks for letting me ramble. Hope you all have a wonderful day.

Anybody read this short story? Spoilers follow, although it’s more of a straightforward speculative piece, there’s no big twist as in many of his stories.

In the story, a man sees how powerful computers have become and wonders: if computers follow rules, and words have rules, why couldn’t computers write words?

“A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Would it not be possible, on this principle, to build a memory of almost unlimited size?”

His companion questions why anybody would want to read a story written by a computer.

“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. And stories - well - they’re just another product. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country!”

That done, he then sets out to pay the big human authors money to never write again, and let him put their names on his stuff. But he has to be careful:

“Thereafter, Knipe wisely decided to concentrate only on mediocrity. Anything better than that - and there were so few it didn’t matter much - was apparently not quite so easy to seduce. He found that the older ones, those who were running out of ideas, were the easiest to handle. The younger people were more troublesome. They were apt to become abusive when he approached them.”

Finally:

“This last year it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were published by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.”

Uncanny stuff, eh…

I wanna start by saying there are overwhelmingly more things that I like about the book than I don’t like, but the things that I dislike are too big to ignore. I’m bringing this specific point up because all of the major icks about the book (see 11 year old gng bang, over sexualization of the women characters etc. etc.) have already been discussed ad Infinitum.
.
.
.
It’s pretty obvious from the start that Bill is just a stand in for Stephen and he is so pretentious about it. Bill is the only character who isn’t externally flawed. Mike has an inability to move on, Bev has an attraction to violence, Eddie is Hypochondriac, and Richie is annoying. But not dear old perfect bill. The worst thing about him is his stutter, which isn’t even his fault. Stephen makes him such a golden child and that is so irritating to read. These aren’t my only thoughts on the subject but it is hard to look past. As an adult he cheats on his wife with only a minor bit of reflection and we the audience were just supposed to be cool about it

Edit:I’m not looking for agreement, but telling my thoughts while reading

I googled just now and realised Daddy Long Legs was published in 1912, which makes it even less understandable why people were lapping it up in the eighties.

Me. I am the people, me and everyone else I knew. We loved the crap out of that awful book when we were teens, and when the Japanese cartoon version hit our screens (in the nineties?) we loved it even harder. We loved Judy's descriptions of life in an American all-girl college, and her obligatory letters to the mysterious Daddy Long legs- the only payment she had to make for her otherwise free college board and tuition- were the height of whimsy and love. Wuthering Heights what? Jane Eyre who? It was all about the blossoming love of teenaged orphan Jerusha nn Judy for her rich older benefactor, Daddy Long Legs, who provided her with a free college education after plucking her out of a Dickensian orphanage, and then married her.

Barf. What was wrong with us? Why did I and my little posse of schoolfriends and our moms love this gross book so much? Why did nobody tell us that it was wrong? Why was it lying around in every house that had an old bookshelf on it somewhere?

Years and years and years later, I chose to watch the Hollywood movie of the book with my Dad as he slid into dementia, thinking the singing and dancing from his favourite actors from the fifties and sixties might cheer him up or distract up. Leslie Caron was the orphaned Jerusha, Fred Astaire was the rich man falling in love with her -ahem- intelligence and personality. They twirled around and sang about their love. Some of Daddy Long Legs's fusty old rich-man friends huffed and puffed, in added scenes not from the book, suggesting that falling in love and marrying a teenaged orphan that he just put through college was just - not the done thing you know old chap.

Astaire poo-pood them, twinkling down the stairs of the orphanage, what did they know of love, boring old men! He was in love! LOOOVVVE!

Ugh. What the fuck was wrong with us?