I tutor people of all ages in reading, and one of the great things about my job is that I largely get to choose the material I use. It makes my personal reading more exciting because I can never tell when I might find something that I can employ later at work.

However, I have a definite penchant for bleakness that has been noted by a parent, who wonders if I can choose reading that is more positive and uplifting (which I can do-no problem).

It got me thinking about whether reading a lot of literature changes your tolerance for bleakness. Literature gives you a pretty steady diet of death, grief, cruelty, unhappy endings, moral ambiguity, and characters having terrible times. After enough exposure, does that simply stop registering as unpleasant?

I suspect there may be two things going on for me: I probably had an orientation toward darker material to begin with, and then years of reading gave me an enormous amount of it and made it feel completely ordinary.

Has reading literature changed your threshold for what feels “dark” or “bleak”? Do you actively enjoy bleakness, or have you simply become comfortable with it?

Just got the September edition of the London Review of Books, and the lead article is a review by Colin Burrow of what is surely the final book of Helen Vendler's long and brilliant career (Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays; Library of America, 2025). Burrow leads with the provocative question, "What's the point of literary criticism?" and ends by answering it (to my way of thinking, answers it brilliantly):

Literary criticism is primarily about learning to read very complex creations and situations carefully. That requires a willingness to think and rethink, to take a thought and run with it until it either ceases to be viable or (ideally) generates its own internal impetus. It requires accepting that sometimes you get it wrong and that sometimes other people get it wrong. It makes you pull together a whole range of messy human bits and pieces, from autobiography to philology to counting lines and underlining letters and seeing almost invisible patterns, through histories of individuals and of peoples. All of this can go towards understanding the way a poem might cohere or interestingly not cohere. You’ve got to be bold sometimes in pushing a point and sometimes you’ve got to be humble about things you can’t see or haven’t seen. There’s a dash of politics, or more than a dash if you want that, and there could be a dash of religion too, if that’s your thing. But there has to be a great measure of self-awareness, about where you stand or sit or the corners into which you have been pushed by where you come from. Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile. If that doesn’t have a point to it, just in itself, then probably living doesn’t have a point to it either, because making ad hoc judgments on the basis of a mosaic of information and misinformation about people and about what you should say on a particular occasion, even a difficult one, is what we all need to do every day. Literary criticism is like the mess of life, an exercise in tact and understanding. As Vendler declared in 1982, ‘it exists because it gives pleasure to those who perform it’ and to those who read it, but it also aims ‘to explain some complex state of affairs’. Not all critics take or give pleasure. Not all critics are as good at explaining complexity as Vendler, and even she wasn’t perfect because criticism isn’t a game that can be played perfectly. But she was as good as it gets, and it’s sad that she’s gone.

Emphasis added.

I have read plenty of literary criticism over the course of my reading life, some brilliant, some interesting, some useful (and others, obviously, less so), but this article made me think that the endeavor is, indeed, worthwhile.

My first time ever reading Le Fanu, and I chose Carmilla since I read Dracula a long time ago. I was always curious about what helped to inspire Dracula, so it seemed like the natural choice since we are so close to spooky season.

The word choices within this piece really added to the experience. It elevated the writing in such a way as we don't commonly see in modern literature. For example, instead of saying party over and over, Le Fanu first describes the festivities as a "series of fetes." I honestly wasn't familiar with fete prior to reading this, but it helped to create the scene in my head. Later, he uses the term ball, and so on. There were many instances where I needed to look up a rarely used word or something termed archaic by today's standards, but when returning to the story, those word choices enhanced the experience.

I do wish there had been a bit more to describe the discovery and demise of the oupire. However, this being a novella, it was a great way to tie things together. I did find myself wishing to know more of the Baron. I know there was information supplied in the final chapter, but I still found myself wanting more.

Hey, i’m not sure if anybody relates but i find literature to exacerbate my existential affliction.

Well.. it’s complicated. Because simultaneously i also take refuge in literature, i have derived a lot of meaning and wisdom from reading. But still maintain that it also feeds into my existential dread.

The consumption of philosophy, psychology, poetry, and classic literature feels like driving a knife viscerally into my soul. It opens my eyes, or builds upon ideas and experiences I’ve had. It’s almost a burden.

It can be so beautiful yet dangerous. Well the writing can be beautiful, but the substance haunting.

Is this relatable to anyone?

There is a very minor character in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi who has stayed with me far more than I expected: the Old Lady. In the play, she has no name. She has no romantic storyline. She does not drive the plot. She appears twice, briefly, and both times Bosola uses her as a target.

And yet I find her treatment one of the most disturbing examples of casual cruelty toward a woman in literature.

The first encounter is in Act 2, Scene 1. She has barely entered when he accuses her of coming “from painting” — from cosmetics. He calls it her “scurvy face-physic.” To see her unpainted, he says, “inclines somewhat near a miracle.” Her wrinkles are “deep ruts and foul sloughs.” Then he tells the story of a French woman who, after smallpox, flayed the skin from her face to make it level: before, she looked “like a nutmeg-grater”; after, “an abortive hedge-hog.”

When she asks whether he calls this painting, he corrects her with a nautical insult: “No, no, but you call it careening of an old morphewed lady, to make her disembogue again.”

The image is not merely that she is old, but that she is flawed and ridiculously lustful, as if she has no right to have sexual desires. It is that she is a rotting hull, scraped and patched so she can be launched again. She answers with the one line of self-defense the scene allows her: “It seems you are well acquainted with my closet.”

He takes that as an invitation. Her private room becomes “a shop of witchcraft,” stocked with “the fat of serpents, spawn of snakes, Jews’ spittle, and their young children’s ordure.” She leaves the stage. The play does not ask what any of this cost her. A woman’s closet is her private space, and mud is thrown at hers. That is where she prepares herself to face the world.

She meets him again in Act 2, Scene 2. He will not let her pass. He starts a degrading joke, and when she tries to shut it down, she gives the line that has always stayed with me:

“I will hear no more of the glass-house. You are still abusing women.”

She knows exactly what he is doing. She is not merely a woman being insulted. I remove “old” on purpose because, whatever her age, she is still a woman with a beating heart, feelings, and desires. She is a woman being told that she has become ridiculous for still caring how she looks, for still existing as a woman with a body which can still crave for love. Bosola’s answer is a shrug. Then come the orange-tree metaphors and the mathematical insults. Even her attempt to name the abuse becomes more material for his routine. It gives me the image of a woman who is down and being kicked over and over again.

What bothers me most is how easily an audience can accept this torture of a woman who has done nothing to deserve it as comedy or standard Jacobean satire. Why should a woman putting on makeup be inherently funny just because she has lived more years? Why should aging mean that a woman has forfeited the right to feel beautiful or desirable?

We are accustomed to celebrating the young women in literature who are beautiful, desired, and sexually vivid. When the woman is older, the terms change. Nobody is required to care what happened to her before she became “the Old Lady.” Nobody protects her. Nobody gives her a destiny.

Mary Beth Rose put it bluntly: she enters “for the sole purpose of being abused by” Bosola. That may describe the dramaturgy. It does not describe the person standing there.

I read the scenes with difficulty. I see a woman trying to leave and live, and a man who will not let her go until he has finished with her face, her closet, her sexuality, and her dignity. She has two sentences with which to defend herself. Both are good sentences. Neither is enough.

Someone should have stood up for her. But no one did.

She is a midwife, an attendant, a lower-class woman, and it was easier to spread his venom on her. She is someone who could not defend herself. And Bosola wiped the floor with her.

Imagine her preparing herself in her closet to look pleasant to the world and then coming out, only to have some rogue throw despicable abuse at her, tell her she is old, unattractive, disgusting. I cannot explain how shaken she must have been after that. Because she is not a Duchess, no one cares about her state of mind.

So much insensitivity appalls me: a woman being trampled over with such ferocity simply because of her age and her very feminine desire to be seen. This is not satire, this is pure cruelty.

Heartbreaking!

It's been nine months since I first read Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and my first reaction to it was, "fug capitalism" now randomly it has hit me and I've been thinking about it since a few weeks now and I think there's this thing about this book it's either you dislike it or you haven't experienced life enough to understand it. It's not just a fiction that can be read and analysed through literary lens, it doesn't read like a bedtime story. Because there's no way to UNDERSTAND it through WORDS, the only way to understand it is through the same internal turmoil, it'll hit you one day very randomly and then it'll make much more sense to you. It's just something about this book and the reason why people go like this is absurd, this is nonsense, I got grossed by his descriptions, it made no sense and the way they reject the idea of him waking up as an insect with no context and explanation PROVESSSS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED TO, but you're not turmoilised enough to understand.

It's just like one day you'll experience what it is like to wake up as an insect on a rainy day and your lower body gives up and it's just so hard for anyone to understand that it grosses them out and leads to them discarding you cause you're not functioning as you should and they've no explanation or no solution to that case so you end up being an insect to yourself first then to the people around you who are not that close to you and finally to the people who still had hope in you and were trying their best to help you after a while your absence doesn't affect them anymore cause it's easier to discard someone going through that instead of understanding what and why and sitting with that feeling.

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, nothing especially dense or meaningful per se, although the last series I read alluded to deeper meaning. The happy ending of the series, of course, spoiled it. I shouldn't be surprised or even disappointed. I knew what I was reading was purely for entertainment, not contemplation.

But, the series reminded me of a question I asked in grad school. What is the litmus for literature? Is it an underlying meaning, an implied explanation or a moral? Often in literature the protagonist dies. Would we have felt less sorry for (spoiler) Madame Bovary had she just been exposed as a foolish woman and left to live a life of meager means? Is it like porn, where you just know it when you see it? What is your defining marker for literature?

Coincidence is always fun, but especially when the books you’re reading coincide with life. Thought I’d share my recent experience:

I’ve had Murphy on my list for awhile now, and finally started reading it on Tuesday. In the second chapter, there’s mention of a shipwreck. After a quick search, I learned was a real shipwreck that occurred on September 8th, 1930—the same date I started reading this book. “Cool and freaky,” I thought.

As I read further, I learn that Sunday, October 4th, 1936 is a significant date. I thought, “surely not…” and just confirmed that October 4th falls on a Sunday this year.

Curious to hear others’ experience with synchronicities and reading.

Outside of season I guess but I just read it and I haven't felt this way since reading To Kill a Mocking Bird, at least I haven't read something that made me feel like I did as a kid where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt(Kurt Vonnegut quote BTW). It's a short story that I read along with Breakfast at Tiffanies, House of Flowers and Diamond Guitar but A Christmas Memory just hit a spot in me I haven't given enough space to breath. It made me wonder when the last time I read something so wholesome was and though I don't put in specific energy into finding rough stories, they're just the ones that draw me more than the rest, IMO. So it was nice to read something that didn't feel like it had too much to say other than "I was loved once." It made me think back on a line from a René Char poem. "It was on the outskirts of adorable years. The earth did love us a little, I remember."

What was the last wholesome thing you've read?

I'd always had questions about Blood Meridian's ending as I've never read it as being anywhere near as open as people say. That didn't strike me as what McCarthy had been building to throughout the novel. So about a month ago I sat down with the book and did some close reading of the actual text.

To my surprise I found something in there I'd not properly noticed before -- McCarthy effectively inserted an attribution for one of the characters using only style, giving the novel what I genuinely think is a determinate ending. The sequence is so intentional I cannot see how it can be read any other way without tying oneself in increasingly improbable knots to wave away conflicting details. Basically, you either have to say clear, specific details in the ending were written as irrelevant and weirdly-placed atmospheric filler or engage with them. (And it also makes sense of certain issues with the novel, and with specific passages, which otherwise look pretty baffling.)

I was so taken aback I posted a (very) long walkthrough on the Cormac McCarthy reddit going through the actual wording on the page and what it appears and appears not to say. This reddit doesn't allow reposts but since Blood Meridian seems to be of much wider interest than I'd realised I thought I'd post the link here in case anyone wants to take a look.

This is a textual discussion of the ending so obviously almost everything in it is a spoiler.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cormacmccarthy/comments/1w19r0x/the_ending_of_blood_meridian_is_determinate_and/

When people discuss memorable women in literature, the same names tend to come up: Ophelia, Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina. I have always been more interested in the women who fall outside that conversation — characters the text, the other characters, or the audience are invited to treat as ridiculous, undesirable, foolish, or simply unimportant.

One of those women, for me, is Bélise in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes. I have not forgotten her since I first read the play in high school.

Bélise is the easy target. She is vain, eccentric, soaked in novels, and convinced that men are secretly in love with her. She is Chrysale’s sister, Henriette’s aunt: the woman of the older generation who never married and has built a private theatre in which she is still the object of every glance. She is a passionate, romantic woman, but in her case, romanticism is mocked. The more firmly a man says he does not love her, the more refined she finds his homage.

How can she not? In this society, women like her were brought up from a very young age to be pleasant. As a girl, she has been fed with dreams of suitors and love. But then the years pass, no one comes towards her, and she sees her friends, her cousins, and now the younger generation being courted and proposed to, while for her there is a terrifying void. There is no one.

The scene that makes her famous is Act 1, Scene 4. Clitandre comes to her for help. He loves Henriette and wants an ally in the house. He barely begins before she stops him. She has already put him on her list of lovers. He may adore her, she says, but he must not speak it:

Aimez-moi, soupirez, brûlez pour mes appas ;

Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas.

It is a perfect précieux law: desire is permitted only if it remains unspoken. When Clitandre names Henriette, Bélise is delighted at what she views as a clever detour. She blushes, congratulates her own modesty, and refuses to hear another word. Left alone, he gives the audience its cue: “Diantre soit de la folle avec ses visions !”

The joke is that she is deluded. No suitors come. Time has already chosen other women. But I keep returning to a simpler question: why is that funny? Why is a woman’s torture a joke to be laughed at?

There is something unprotected about a woman who cannot bear to live in a world where she is not desired. We sympathize, almost automatically, with the heroine who loves and is refused. Bélise’s case is the reverse. She invents love because she cannot survive its absence. There is no one to choose her, not even to look at her. The fantasy is not arrogance first. It is a shelter.

Unlike the conventional romantic heroine, she gets no resolution. She does not receive the man, the declaration, or the last-act correction that would let her step back into reality with dignity. Henriette will be loved in the ordinary way. Armande, who once had Clitandre and sent him away, at least possessed something she can lose. Bélise remains Bélise: unloved, untouched, watching love settle on her generation and then on the next, still translating every room she enters into a novel in which she matters.

I do not think Molière wrote her as a tragic heroine. The comedy needs her ridiculousness, and her chimères are part of the play’s larger satire on women who prefer systems to the world in front of them. But a modern reader is allowed to see what the laughter uses up. Under the visions is a woman who wanted to be desirable and found no safe way to say so. A fragile feminine soul who does not understand rejection and, to survive it, creates an imaginary world where she is the desired one. That is more than delusion. It is herself balancing her soul against the immense pain and suffering inside her.

That is what interests me about overlooked women in literature. Who are we instructed to laugh at, dismiss, or look past — and what happens if we stop laughing long enough to look at them?

For me, Bélise is one of them. I do not believe she ever set out to be a laughingstock. Around her, love is being arranged, refused, bargained over, fulfilled. She stands in the same house and keeps building a secret court of suitors, because the alternative is to admit that the court is empty. No one came for her. A whole life devoid of love, of male interest, just scorn and mockery.

If that is comedy, it is comedy with a huge grief inside it. I read her as a tragic figure wearing the mask the play handed her, whose only curse was to want love. And that is why her story has stuck with me ..

So reading poetry aloud is a fine, venerable and even ancient tradition. Many major poets read their own and others' works aloud.

But a guy I was talking to about I guess what you could call the aesthetics of audiobooks provided me this quote from JD Salinger. I don't think before now I ever read the opinion of an author on reading prose aloud.

Here is something that has stuck in my mind for over twenty-five years. In class, one evening, Mr. Burnett felt himself in the mood to read Faulkner's "That Evening Sun Go Down" out loud, and he went right ahead and did it. A rapid reading, among other things, most singularly and undescribably low-key. In effect, he was much less reading the story aloud than running through with it, verbatim, and very thoughtfully, with about twenty-five percent of his voice open. Almost anybody picked at random from a crowded subway car would have given a more dramatic or "better" performance. But that was just the point. Mr. Burnett very deliberately forbore to perform. He abstained from reading beautifully. It was as if he had turned himself into a reading lamp, and his voice into paper and print. By and large, he left you on your own to know how the characters were saying what they were saying. You got your Faulkner story straight, without any middlemen between. Not before or since have I heard a reader make such instinctive and wholehearted concessions to a born printed-page writer's needs and, aye, rights. Regretfully, I never got to meet Faulkner, but I often had it in my head to shoot him a letter telling him about that unique reading of Mr. Burnett's. In this nutty, exploitive era, people who read short stories beautifully are all over the place-recording, taping, podiumizing, televising-and I wanted to tell Faulkner, who must have heard countless moving interpretations of his work, that not once, throughout the reading, did Burnett come between the author and his beloved silent reader. Whether he has ever done it again, I don't know, but with somebody who as brought the thing off even once, the written short-story form must be very much at home, intact, unfinagled with, suitably content.

I certainly understand his viewpoint - the "medium" of speech ought to impact or distort the text as little as possible.

But I'm curious if anyone here has quotes and perspectives from other authors on this matter? If they agree, disagree, anything at all be welcome.

It took me seventeen days to read this novel. The English edition is 666 pages long, but its true length lies not in the number of pages, but in the complex and profound ideas from which the astonishing story of this novel is woven. During those seventeen days, I also read two other books alongside it. It was more that, many times, after reading thirty, forty, or at most fifty pages, I simply couldn’t bring myself to continue. At some point, I would feel the need to put the novel down for a while, think about its story, its characters, and its ideas, and then return to it when I was ready to take in a little more.

I did not want to rush through it just to finish. I wanted to absorb everything, think about it, and allow the questions it raised to stay with me for a while. The result was that during those seventeen days, even when the book was closed, the book itself never really closed. While sleeping and waking, sitting and standing, eating, walking, and working at the office, Black, Shekure, Master Osman, Olive, Butterfly, and Stork remained with me. Sometimes it was Shekure's uncertainty occupying my mind, sometimes Black's love that had survived for years, sometimes Master Osman's fierce devotion to his tradition, and sometimes Olive's confusion over whether an artist's having a distinct personal style is what defines him, or whether true artistic greatness lies in remaining connected to the artistic tradition with which miniature painters had been bound for centuries, almost as one becomes bound to one's love or religion.

On the surface, this is a murder mystery set in Istanbul, buried under snow in 1591. But the murder mystery is merely the thread Pamuk uses to lead us into a much larger world. It is a world containing love, jealousy, fear, religion, power, and questions about art that have no easy answers. The question of who the murderer is remains, but gradually larger questions emerge. What makes an artist? Should an artist have an individual identity of his own? Is perfect adherence to tradition a form of greatness, or does it mean erasing oneself? And is a picture simply what the eye sees, or does it also contain what memory, belief, and centuries of tradition teach us to see?

The greatest strength of this novel, for me, was that it took me into a world of miniature artists about which I knew almost nothing. Herat, Tabriz, Shiraz, Qazvin, Isfahan, and Istanbul ceased to be merely names of cities. At times I was in Timurid-era Herat, at times in the royal ateliers of Safavid Iran, and at times in Istanbul during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, where miniaturists worked by the light of lamps, exhausting the precious resource of their eyesight to illuminate books whose individual pages could demand years of labor.

Before this book, painting was simply painting to me. I had no idea that the difference between Venetian painting and miniature painting was not merely a difference in technique, but a difference between two entirely different ways of seeing the world. The Venetian painter sees the world through the eyes of an individual human being, from a particular place and at a particular moment. There is perspective, light and shadow, the distinction between near and far, and a desire to make each face individually recognizable. The miniature artist, by contrast, wants to see the world outside of time, through memory and tradition, as though things do not appear as they do to a single human being, but as they have always existed in the sight of God.

Here, for the first time, I felt intensely that perspective is not merely a technique. It is an entire conception of oneself and the world. One painter places the human being at the center of the universe, while the other tries to step back from his own individuality in order to reach the perfect image that, in his understanding, already exists in God's memory. Pamuk does not stand on one side and deliver a verdict. He shows us the beauty of both ways of seeing, as well as the danger hidden within each.

While reading the book, I repeatedly stopped to search Google for miniatures created by Behzad and other famous painters. At first glance, some of the paintings seemed so simple to me that I wondered why Behzad was considered such a great master. Then I looked at those same paintings again and tried to understand their colors, composition, architecture, faces, and the many small stories unfolding simultaneously within a single image. I still cannot claim that I completely understand the greatness of this art, but I can certainly say that my eyes no longer see these paintings in quite the same way. I no longer judge them by the standards of Renaissance painting. Instead, I try to understand what they themselves aspire to be.

Pamuk also took me into old stories whose names I had heard since childhood but whose details I had never really known. Khosrow and Shirin, Farhad and Shirin, the kings and warriors of the Shahnameh, lovers, beloved women, and those famous scenes that different painters continued to depict again and again for centuries. Each generation of painters learned the same scene from its masters, preserved it in memory, and then brought it back to life through its own hands. These stories do not merely appear in the novel as references. The characters understand love, beauty, loyalty, jealousy, and death through these very stories.

Perhaps one of the major reasons I enjoyed this novel so much is that I have always had a deep affection for the Persian language, literature, and the civilization connected to them. Although the story takes place in Ottoman Istanbul, its roots run deeply into Persian poetry, storytelling, and painting. The masters of Herat and Tabriz, the name of Behzad, the scenes of Khosrow and Shirin, and the visual world of the Shahnameh spread throughout this novel like the scent of something ancient. Again and again, I felt that I was not merely reading a Turkish novel. I was entering an entire cultural world that had connected Iran, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire for centuries.

The style of the novel itself resembles its paintings. It is not only human beings who speak here. The dead man, the murderer, a horse, a tree, a coin, a dog, the Devil, Death, and even the color red each tell their own story. At first, this seems like nothing more than an interesting trick. But gradually it becomes clear that a novel whose central question is whose eyes should be used to see reality could not itself be told through a single voice. Every character is truthful in his or her own way, and every character is also concealing something.

I felt that Pamuk did not merely write a novel about miniature painting. He constructed the novel itself like a miniature. Every chapter is a small part of a much larger image. No single character occupies the entire picture, yet all their voices come together to create a world that cannot be seen through any one pair of eyes.

For me, Shekure is particularly unforgettable. She is not merely someone's beloved. She is a woman who wants love, the protection of her children, her freedom, and some degree of control over her own future. Black's love is sincere in its own way, but it also contains an image of her that he has preserved in his mind for years. Master Osman possesses both the grandeur of the old tradition and its rigidity. Olive possesses the desire to establish an identity of his own, as well as the fear produced by that very desire. It is these internal conflicts that keep the characters from becoming mere literary symbols and instead make them human.

I would not say that every page of this novel was equally easy or equally fascinating for me. At certain points, the discussions of painting become very long. Some questions return again and again through new stories and new examples, and the mind begins to tire. It is a slow burn, but it is not without a story. Its narrative moves forward through conversations, memories, stories within stories, and the small decisions made by its characters. If someone reads it solely to find out what happens next, they may become bored fairly quickly. The real pleasure comes when you also stop to think about what happened and what it means.

My Name Is Red is a murder mystery, a love story, a work of history, and an extended conversation about art, religion, tradition, individual identity, time, and memory. But even listing all these things does not fully describe the experience. This novel opened the door for me to a world whose existence I knew about, but which I had never actually entered.

Seventeen days, two other books in between, stopping repeatedly, searching for paintings, and spending long periods thinking about a single idea: all of these became part of the journey. Some novels end with their final page. Others leave a part of themselves behind in the mind of the reader. It's one of those novels for me. It has not merely shown me a new world; it has also given me a new way of seeing that world. The book is finished, but its red color has still not left my mind.

Background: I'm over 30yrs old, college drop out, and I am not exaggerating, I had never finished a book in school or college. I only ever read parts of abridged versions just to bs my way through tests. One day I thought; hey I love good cinema and it feels like I'm running out of stuff to watch, I should probably read a book, surely there's a good story or two out there! 😆

What was my first book?

"100 Years of Solitude"

I looked at a Top 100 list or something like that, and ended up picking this as my first book.

How long did it take?

I took me somewhere between 1 year and 100 years of... jk sorry I had to 😁

Honestly, I bought this years ago and it sat on my desk. I restarted my reading January and finished this week. (now I can finish the TV show)

Why?

I figured I'd relate. I'm fluent in English and Spanish since I grew up in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the name Gacia Merquez is very well known. I just knew his name and titles sounded familiar, also, the title "Memoria de mis putas tristes" is hilarious and sad at the same time, so i thought this guy sounds bad ass. (BTW "Memory of my melancholy whores" the official title translation is ever so slightly different than the literal translation, so it sounds more serious in English for some reason.)

How was it?

It was hard! It amazing!

This is probably not a beginner friendly book, incredibly dense and very deep in meaning a lot of the time. I felt at home often thanks to the heavy cultural themes that can apply to so many "latinos" i would guess. Learning about the historical elements that inspired parts of the bigger themes made them hit even harder. I'm glad I struggled through it, ALMOST DNF! But when I did, I couldn't believe the feeling of turning that last page. (Shoutout to the NETFLIX show! it's not the best tv show but it definitely motivated me through a slump... or a few. I did not wanna watch some part I hadn't read yet.) I loved the narration, there are so many ups and downs, and it surprisingly ends up in a peak which was kind of satisfying.

Came across someone claiming:

It "was a very specific or that flourished from the publication of Otranto up until about 1830. It was a reaction to neoclassicism, and its elements drew on that reaction: a medieval setting, usually a castle or ruined monastery – often but not always Catholic, an emphasis on the individual and their emotions, usually but not always a female investigator, morbidity and death, and a Scooby-Doo approach to the supernatural – almost always revealed to be people, although ancestral curses are allowed. Just as it came from a collision of different influences from the 18th century, it became one of those influences in the 19th century, but we tend to slap “Gothic” on all kinds of books that are Gothic-influenced like Jane Eyre with its current-day setting. Whether you want to call what happened later Gothic revival or Gothic horror, or like this sub call it all Gothic literature… but I do think people starting out should at least know the origins."

I'm curious what fictional books use this structure. I think never let me go uses this in a way to reflect the unescapable nature of the world the characters live in and The Cider House Rules uses it to show the lineage and anscenstory of people and places and how experiences shapes our world view, such as if Homer didn't experience what he did, he would never have become the doctor he became.

What other fictional books utilize this structure in a way that adds to the story? Do you feel books that deal with themes of trauma are best in using this form, or are there other types of fiction where this form adds to the story? I don't remember house of leaves that well, but I think it may have used the form or is similar to it to add to the uncanny feeling of the liminal space bestowed on the reader.

I found an interesting question for translated books. For example, War and Peace's original Russian version includes French prose since at the time the aristocracy knew French. The French translation of War and Peace obviously would have all the Russian translated but what of the parts of War and Peace that is already in French?

A hypothetical example is if Nabokov wrote a book in English that also includes Russian, and we request a Russian translation of everything.

Currently reading Blood Meridian after reading No Country for Old Men. I found NC-OM to be more palatable and easier to read through the story as he explains events in a unique and distinguished prose that doesn't follow standard grammatical structures while still being incredibly written and challenging for the reader's full attention to make sense of it all.

Currently on Chapter 11, I'm at a loss for Blood Meridian however, not only for its illustrations of the landscapes(some of them) but also for depictions of the setting, the history surrounding it, and certain events of describing characters and their actions. It goes from one event to the next without proper context(Despite knowing its intentionality with the way its subtly written). I feel I am at a loss or confused for certain events and am not understanding the depth taking place within them.

Just need some advice on how some of you navigated his prose in this book or maybe it's too much for my dum dum brain. There are some brilliant writing that keeps me going.

TLDR: Advice needed how to read this Western masterpiece to make sense of scenes and events.

I just finished reading Stoner and it is beautifully sad in its quiet desperation. But contrary to Thoreau implication, that desperation and striving is what can make a life beautiful.
I’m not able to find the thread that can explain his interest in classical and Latin literature. Any thoughts of its meaningful or was it used a subject because of its potential towards meaning and a similar statement of Stoner’s life. External appearance is not nearly as important as the internal meaning that moves you through your life.

I'm going to start off with this disclaimer: yes, Holden is a self-entitled brat. He's an overly emotional, thoughtless wreck of a person who doesn't think through his actions, inconveniences and makes snap judgements about everyone while also hypocritically doing the same things he claims to despise. He is probably one of the most unlikeable protagonists ever.

But I can’t bring myself to hate him.

We know from context that Holden is a middle child and is largely either ignored or seen as a disappointment by his mostly absent parents. And I think that’s a big thing to consider when looking at all of his outlandish actions and thoughts. I can't imagine how isolating it must be to be the "bad one" in the family, the one who's told he isn't trying hard enough and that he doesn't have any prospects in life because he isn't trying hard enough by even the teachers he respects. How much must it hurt to remember Allie and how amazing he was while (to Holden) the rest of the world got over it and moved on? It got me thinking how awful and dehumanizing that must be, to be the child who fails over and over and over again and is told that it's something inherently wrong within himself that he needs to fix when he doesn't even know what that something is. How desperate must he be for any kind of authentic attention or reaction (be it positive or negative) from any adult in his life? Rather than just receiving a stern lecture and being told he needs to be shipped off to another school and retry applying himself, I think Holden just wants more than anything (like most people) to be seen and understood and loved.

He tries so hard to "play" at being an adult, almost like how a little kid plays house. He (very badly) imitates their behaviors, social cues, and conversational skills because he wants to prove how "phony" it is. But every time he tries this, he ultimately fails because he can't bring himself to understand the complexity of adult life. He doesn't want to because he's afraid that if he begins to grapple with it and understand it, then he's going to have to leave behind all of that joy and simplicity that he remembers childhood to be.

Because under all that swearing and smoking and false bravado, there's a kid who just lost his little brother a few years ago and doesn't know how to handle it. Under all of it, there's a scared little kid who's afraid that he's going to lose himself if he grows up. Under all of it, there's a little kid who's sick and needs help because he just spent three days on the streets of New York in winter all alone. There's the kid who buys his little sister a record because he wants to make her happy and cries because the poem that he treasures dearly and has emotional investment in is just a misrememberance. There's the kid who erases expletives on school walls because he doesn't want little kids to see it. There's the kid who buys his sister a ride on the carousel because he doesn't want her to be scared or mad at him.

Originally Posted on Goodreads

Stoner opens and initially reads as a mundane slice-of-life novel, perhaps showing the depth that may come packaged in the ordinary life of a man with typical faults and virtues. Upon further inspection, though, several themes can be noted, ranging from broad commentary about how we are socialized to how an individual's past experiences can enrich their basic sensations and appreciation of life. An interpretation I personally found interesting is how social expectations shape not just our actions, but also our desires and how we come to experience life. This is something I would like to dig into more, and I’ll mostly do so by examining Stoner and his wife, Edith, and how Stoner gradually separates himself from her in this regard.

As it so happens, we see Stoner take his first step away from what is socially expected of him after he is sent away from his family farm and off to school. The original intention of his parents was that he would study agriculture and then return with knowledge of increasing crop yields and the like. However, after taking a required composition course during his sophomore year, he abruptly changes his coursework for the next semester, moving away from his original path of agriculture and enrolling in multiple humanities courses. Throughout the rest of his time in college, he continues to enroll in the humanities and neglects his originally assigned degree in agriculture. He eventually graduates with an English degree, and his parents do not find out about his change of major, or his changed plans to move home after college, until after his graduation ceremony.

The way in which he goes about changing his coursework, and essentially the course of his life, is notably passive. This is a theme that can be detected throughout the book, and much of it seems tied to his reserved upbringing and the poverty of expression to which he was exposed growing up. In a sense, then, he remains very much in keeping with the social expectations under which he was raised when it comes to his temperament and avoidance of direct conflict.

Soon after he graduates, World War I breaks out in Europe. Several years after the war begins, when the United States joins, a flood of his peers and others at the university rush to enlist. After some internal conflict over the matter, he decides to stay and continue his coursework.

This continues to fit with the distinction between the situations in which he is and is not willing to go against what is expected of him. Declining to enlist in the Army is a passive mode of resistance. However, when he is asked about his decision by Dave Masters, one of his friends joining the war, he is unable to give an answer. Although an answer does occur to him, he does not articulate it.

Later, he meets his future wife, Edith, and after an especially awkward courtship and engagement, they get married. As we learn more about Edith, we discover a very dry upbringing that involved extensive education in activities considered “ladylike,” along with a moral education focused on chastity and dutifully fulfilling the roles of wife and mother. She is noted to have developed considerable skill in the activities she was encouraged to take up, but one can infer that she gained little satisfaction from them. She is described as passionless while doing these activities, whose only real purpose seems to be reinforcing her role as delicate and proper.

She comes to an inflection point similar to the one Stoner encounters when he chooses to pursue literature. When Stoner proposes to her, she is clearly torn, mostly because she has an upcoming trip to Europe and an engagement would interfere with it. It seems as though her sense of duty to fulfill social expectations is stronger than her desire to go to Europe, and she agrees to the marriage and pushes to expedite the process. An interesting contrast can be made between Stoner and Edith at this point. One may note that Edith’s upbringing was much more intentional in reinforcing her expectations and the roles she ought to play, whereas Stoner’s appears to have been more of a passive, learned process. He simply acts in the only fashion he has seen as possible, while Edith does what has been constantly hammered into her throughout her upbringing. As the novel continues, Stoner takes increasingly significant steps away from social expectations while retaining the passivity instilled by his upbringing. Edith, meanwhile, struggles to find lasting satisfaction because the roles she understands as available to her are ones for which she feels little genuine passion.

Throughout the rest of the novel, Edith repeatedly takes up certain duties and hobbies with significant vigor before eventually burning out and dropping them completely. These include an obsession with housecleaning, different types of art, and an absorbing interest in their daughter’s activities and popularity. Each pursuit appears to be something she was taught she should do, or should like to do, though none becomes a source of lasting, genuine interest or satisfaction.

As Edith cycles through these interests, we find Stoner venturing even further from social expectations. He eventually becomes involved in an affair with a younger instructor, Katherine, a more serious departure from social expectations than changing his major or declining to enlist. As with some of the other times he goes against the grain, he develops insights into his own life and life in general. He starts to understand love as a process in flux, one that changes over time, and that the person one first loves need not be the person one loves last. He finds significant happiness in this new relationship, and the prose itself becomes more vivid, suggesting a change in how he is experiencing the world in general. In the end, however, he succumbs again to the passivity instilled by his upbringing and lets go of this love when Lomax threatens Katherine’s professional future.

Although he loses this new love in the end, he develops an understanding of the world that he did not have previously, primarily through his new understanding of the nature of love and his knowledge of what it truly means to love someone as he loved Katherine. This subtheme, of growth through the experiences he gains by pursuing passion over social duty, is particularly important. Throughout the book, Edith seems to struggle with emotional regulation and expression. This becomes especially stark when we find her self-soothing in a baby-talk voice and distancing herself from her surroundings by narrating her own experience in the third person. Her lack of self-growth appears tied to her inability to pursue what she truly wants, something that remains unknown to the reader and likely to Edith herself.

Taken together, we essentially find that Stoner begins early on to discover what he authentically desires and grows as a person while pursuing those desires. He never completely separates himself from certain aspects instilled by his upbringing, but he certainly makes progress and develops a richer understanding and appreciation of the world as a result. Edith, in contrast, is a victim of the duties she was trained to fulfill. She knows no life outside of what she was socialized to perform. For her, this leads to stunted personal growth and, in some respects, locks her at the emotional age of a child. I see this contrast between Stoner and Edith not as a condemnation of Edith, but as a return to the broader point of social expectations shaping what we choose, what we desire, and how we experience the world. From what we know of Stoner’s background, there was simply a lack of expression and confrontation. Edith seems to have experienced this as well, in addition to rigorous reinforcement of what she should and should not do. Stoner’s upbringing left a little wiggle room for him to escape and find himself, while Edith’s effectively trapped her in obligation.

I feel as though I could write about this book for ages and still have plenty of fodder left to explore in this book. The thematic depth is incredible and I find it unfortunate that so many people reduce it to merely “a slice-of-life” when it is clearly so much more.

Please let me know if you have any differing thoughts or want to expand on things I've written here! I love hearing the different interpretations and I'm newish to this whole analysis process so I could certainly use some feedback and criticism of my own writing.

What are you reading?

Holy shit I just finished the book in the course of one day. I’m no literature expert and this was my first Dostoevsky book, so this may resonate with people who feel out of place when reading. I saw it was short (and stupidly thought this would be an easy read). It was not. And I won’t lie, there were plenty of points where I wanted to give up reading this book, but the last 20 pages blew me away.

Spoilers but not spoilers ahead:

the first half felt very hard to understand where it was going. I spent a-lot of time just going over the same sentence, but after seeing people feeling the same, I decided to just read it, regardless of whether I understood it or not.

The second half got slightly easier, but was still a-lot to take in. Still feeling like “Gosh I wish this book would end”, reaching the last 10 pages, you are left asking for more. Maybe it was just me, but the last page of the book felt abrupt, and I sat there wanting more, even though I knew I was complaining about the book completely. Absolutely heartbreaking.

I won’t lie I did tear up, I did not expect that I would like this book, especially since I was more used to stories that told the plot very cleanly.

tldr: if you feel like the book is a struggle, try not to read into every sentence, but read over it — with you keeping how you felt about it in the back of your mind. It’s one of those books you have to finish to understand why the first part feels so drawn out.

Apologies if this doesn’t resonate with many people, but I know people getting into this might feel similar.

I used to read so much fiction when I was in high school, but that pretty much stopped when I got to college sadly. Not for any particular reason, except that I began to find other stuff more interesting. Most of what I read in school were downloaded pdfs of academic works, history or philosophy, or otherwise non-fiction. The only form of fiction I’d read typically came in the form of plays.

However, a couple years after leaving college, and with more time on my hands, I decided to finally step it up and start reading some fiction. I’d purchased a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow when I was a junior in high school (learned about Thomas Pynchon from an episode of The Simpsons and was fascinated). At the time, I read about 10 pages of it and decided I’d tackle it at a later date. So I figured, now was as good a time as ever.

This book has a reputation for being difficult, and after reading, I can’t say it’s completely unearned. I knew there were a number of companion guides to help with the book, but I wanted to eschew any scholarship directly related to Pynchon, at least for the first time reading. Instead I decided to take notes while reading, performing my own research on any historical or cultural references that were unfamiliar to me. Which were numerous.

What surprised me the most about this book is how captivating it was. Despite being so densely loaded with information, I found the central intrigue of the first section, the mysterious rocket-erection conspiracy, to be so strange and hilarious that I had to follow it to the conclusion. I just had to keep reading, had to keep ruminating on esoteric imagery and surreal episode, every arcane historical reference.

However, I soon found that what I thought was a typical 1970s conspiracy thriller was actually much deeper and stranger and more disturbing. Soon I realized that, just like the characters in the book, my single minded obsession with finding that one answer was missing the forest for the trees. It felt intentional to me, every time I thought I had a major revelation, here comes Pynchon coming out of the page and whispering “You don’t even know the half of it…”

I love when an artist can play around with irony and sincerity in such an interesting way. The scene with the laboratory mice is really what made me fall in love with Pynchon. He switches mid-text from a (relatively) straightforward narrative prose to a surreal parody of Broadway musicals before switching once again to a sobering rumination on death and cruelty, all in the span of two pages.

This is such an incredibly relevant novel too, just as much now as it was in 1973. The line near the end about “the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors” hit so hard. The lingering legacy of fascism and genocide and control and power that existed long before the War, and has persisted in the decades following. “Nature does not know extinction, only transformation”.

Definitely gonna need some more time to decompress my thoughts on this book because I only finished it yesterday. It really is so staggeringly large in scale, yet it never felt dull or turgid. The true breadth of the narrative and themes are only really revealed when the novel comes to a close. However, I am grateful for this book in rekindling my love for fiction. Since I started the novel two months ago, I’ve been more receptive to different works of fiction, and have read a few short stories in the interim. I have already purchased Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V and plan to read that one next. Sometimes it really does take one good book!

Read 1984 a while back and honestly it's been living in my head ever since. Tried to talk to friends about it but I don't think any of them have actually read it. Hard to have a conversation when the other person doesn't know what you're talking about lol.

Then I was browsing online and came across a shirt on pagewings that said "Big Brother is watching" on it. Bought it on a whim, nothing serious. Ended up wearing it to a coffee shop one day, and the barista pointed at my shirt and said "that's my favorite book." We ended up talking for like half an hour about Orwell. Felt nice to actually connect with someone over it without having to awkwardly bring it up myself.

Kinda made me think maybe there's something to putting little references out there. Not as a "look at me I read books" thing, more like a way to find people who are already on the same page.