This is inspired by my recent reading of Patti Smith’s M Train. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so disappointed by a mostly beloved book. I found it pretentious and boring. I did not find it poetic or profound. I spent every page wishing and reading only to hasten the end. There was one particular line about her Rockaway bungalow surviving the first major storm of the 21st Century and I was irritated by her dismissal of Katrina. I think I am very alone in my opinion towards this book, but I couldn’t throw this one in a donation pile faster.

Please tell me your experiences with renowned works!

It took me a long time to finally read Brave New World but Im quite happy I didnt read it earlier in life. Im still trying to gather my thoughts on this book and Im very curious of how other people have interpreted it.

So first of all, let me start by saying that Huxley was way ahead of its time. The whole society he built - a society where every the individual doesn't matter and you are very much replaceable, where capitalism is what moves society, where people do everything to only feel the good parts of life - is something we see in 2026. The fact that he wrote this book just 20 years after Henry Ford created the assembly line is kind of insane tbh and I think the world building is clearly the biggest strenght of the book. Also, writing this openly about sex, including between children, religion, politics and State propaganda and drugs in 1920s was very brave, even though the UK was of course more open than other countries back then.

The second point I want to make is that the book is not an easy read at all. Not so much in terms of content, but in terms of language and pacing. Im not an English native, but usually read everything in English and this book had so many words I've never heard of before. And the pacing is my biggest beef with this book. I think its suppose to be on purpose tbh, just like an assembly line, everything happens fast, there's no time to focus too much time on an individual character. But it did make it harder to read and Im still not 100% sure I got everything correctly and there's some characters Im still confused about (Henry Foster, for example, I dont get this character at all).

Now, the part I want to ask about is people's thoughts on John's character. He's of course supposed to represent the exact opposite of the people who were conditioned since birth to be part of the new society. But he is the exact opposite, meaning that - in my opinion - he is his own kind of extremist. While the "civilized people" want 100% comfort and happiness, he seems to want 0%, to prove to God he is worthy. He allows himself zero satisfaction, he ignores Lenina's advances, he doesnt try somma, he prefers to isolate himself from society and torture himself. He's flawed on his own way, which I quite liked in the book: Huxley doesnt give us any character who is the beacon of morality, who we should want to be like. He gives us two-sides of the same coin, though I guess Bernard Marx and Helmholtz are somewhere in between the two.

Finally, Im curious to know whether anyone has seen the BBC adaptation. The book is paced so fast and with so many technical/old words that Im kind of confused about some parts and would love to see an adaptation of it, but only if there is one that is actually good.

Has anyone here read Till We Have Faces? If so, what is your opinion? I just finished it and I am unable to say anything positive about it. I was familiar with the Cupid and Psyche myth upon which it is a variation and I wondered what Lewis, with his talent for myth and fantasy would do with it. I considered putting it down and quitting often throughout my read but kept on hoping to arrive at some 'aha'. It never came. Reviewers (professional and Amazon) rate it highly. Based on that I'm considering re-reading it to see if a deeper understanding or 'aha' will come. I've never re-read a fiction tale I didn't like on first read hoping to see what I missed. So to other readers of Till We Have Faces, both pro and con, thoughts?

This is a favorite book of mine which I revisit every few years, and in light of reports about Trump considering selling off part of Yosemite to a private developer, not to mention the "Lake America" debacle, the short story "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" felt especially relevant and emotional to read. In general, I've found Bradbury's works to be enduringly prescient, though often in regrettable ways.

"'They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names.

The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.'

'We won't ruin Mars,' said the captain. 'It's too big and too good.'

'You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth.

But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there'll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won't ever be right, when there are the proper names for these places.'"

Additionally, the penultimate story, and my personal favorite, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set during a future post-apocalyptic August of 2026 (the book was published in 1950), so that was another stirring coincidence/parallel of sorts.

Read this recently and was surprised just now to find virtually no discussion of it here. I thought it was very good. The prose perfectly went from thrift to flowery to suit the mood and was frequently breathtaking. I was captivated by Enda’s story and I enjoyed the chapter formatting where the one chapter wherein she tells her story is basically the entire novel.

I found the commentary into human lives and relationships incisive if a little sentimental- Enda and the priest seemed to fall for each other rather quickly. Overall though I enjoyed the exploration of Father Declan’s mind, especially since it’s not immediately obvious that his regrets are the focus of the story. Reminded me a bit of Ishiguro with the focus on the inner worlds and wearies of the characters.

Thoughts?

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What's your big secret? Maybe it's that you're part of a really embarrassing fandom or maybe it's your gender identity. Maybe your secret is a source of immense pleasure that the world at large just can't understand or maybe it's a source of great shame and acts as cross you must bear. Whatever it is, Sky Daddy by Kate Folk is a really fun book for the overly self-concious about how to manage these confusing and challenging parts of yourself.

Linda is, by all external markers, completely unremarkable. She's a young woman with a crummy apartment, who only has a single friend who works with her at the same dead-end job moderating online comment sections. The one thing of interest about her is her obsessive sexual and romantic attraction to planes, with her greatest wish in life being to die in an aircraft.

Linda believes that if people find out out her misplaced love of planes, she will be disqualified from participating in polite society and that's an all too familiar feeling for me and I'm sure many others. Your life becomes a shrine to this odd thing about you, your every action becomes about sereptitiously moving towards that desire or spending all your mental energy trying to keep it under wraps.

Almost every character in the book carries a secret like this, childhood traumas, affairs, loneliness, there's something everyone is burying beneath the surface. What made the book such a hypnotic read is seeing what happens in the aftermath of these secrets coming out.

Everyone was right to be worried, the truth being revealed ends friendships, derails careers, and sends people into the pits of despair. It hurts but you also see people walk so much more freely now that they aren't chained to the dark hidden parts of themselves.

My takeaway from the book is that the life you will live if you spend every day denying who you are is so much more painful than the initial discomfort of being honest with people who care about you. Coming out with the truth might be difficult and embarrassing, but you get to walk around with a much lighter heart if you do

Just finished it and wow, I loved it. I am a big Christopher Moore fan, and I know he has his problems and some people don't like him, he's not for everyone. I LOVED this book.

I really appreciate the afterword where he explains the historic facts, how he used them, how he took poetic license, how he was inspired. I like how he explained after all of it, the book is really a story about Waly.

It's total fiction, yet I learned things about art, Klimt, Waly, Carl Jung, and Inuit mythology.

I really loved the dialogue, I could imagine the chaotic discussions between three and four people at once, he wrote them clearly enough yet didn't lose the sense of chaos. The interplay between Judith and Waly, or Judith and anyone, was sooooo good.

I enjoyed how he blended Frankenstein, Inuit Mythology, and 1900s Vienna and made it all seem "right" and plausible, like at no point did I think "this is just ridiculous and stupid," I was never taken out of the fantasy of the story.

Somehow he can write horrible things that aren't as triggering (for me) as when other people write about those things.

I just thought it was a fun, really interesting story, well written, never dull and never dragging.

If you haven't read it, I would recommend it. If you HAVE read it, please tell me what you thought about it, if you didn't like it, I'd like to hear your reasons why.

My book club just finished this book and it is still haunting my thoughts. One quote from near the end of the book about Yossarian bearing responsibility for his friend's death really stood out to me, and neither my book club or the internet seems to have discussed it much:

"Yossarian thought he knew why Nately's whore held him responsible for Nately's death and wanted to kill him. Why the hell shouldn't she? It was a man's world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for every unatural tragedy that befell them, just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every manmade misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other childeren behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all." Ch39 The eternal city

As a millenial, it immediately made me think of climate change inaction, and how by silently disagreeing or merely trying to survive, very little is done against the crushing inertia of the systems that have existed before we were born.

It wasnt until I was trying to find what the author intended for the reader to take from this passage, that I think it recalls back to Yossarian's debates with Clevinger, and shows Yossarian adding nuance to his previously extremely individualist, survival-at-all-costs view. In chapter 8, he acknowledges that the war must be fought and men would neccessarily die, but he is adamant that he would not be the victim. In the battle of Bologna, he is willing to allow the ground troops and other bombers to go into danger to keep himself out. After chapter 39, he refuses to take the deal for safety and is willing to risk his freedom for the kid sister.

This one passage is adding new life and complexity to the debate in the book that on first pass was pretty easy to agree with Yossarian wholecloth.

​“Brother” by Ania Ahlborn was one hell of a read. I’ve been a massive fan of her work for years now, and many horror readers consider this her best novel. I can easily see why, because it was an impressive read.

Before I dive into my review, here are all the trigger warnings I found while reading…

- Parental abuse (mental and physical)
- Violence against animals
- Homophobic slurs
- Rape
- Cannibalism

If any of these trigger you, please do not read this novel. Moving along, Ahlborn’s writing style is incredible. ​She knows how to craft an engaging story, develop memorable characters, and deliver the horror. Reading this novel felt like an insider look at a family similar to the one in the legendary horror movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Imagine getting a deep look at the minds of each member of a psychotic family like that, and that is how it felt here. It’s a modern twist on a sick and twisted family of killers with a whole lot of bloodshed.

There are many layers in this novel, especially in the dynamic between Michael and his brother, Reb. My goodness, Reb was quite the insane character. Demented and sadistic are the first words that come to mind when thinking about what he brought to the story.

Even though I enjoyed this story for the most part, especially all the atmospheric building, some parts dragged on. This was evident whenever the story shifted between past and present timelines. It was interesting to get backstories on several of the characters, but these chapters were too heavy on dialogue and not enough horror. At times, it disrupted the natural flow of reading, as I was more interested in the present than in the past.

The good news was that this wasn’t an ongoing issue from beginning to end. ​Once I hit the 75% mark, the suspense and climactic race to the end were brilliantly written. There was so much gore and bloodshed that it made my horror-loving heart very happy.

Please don’t worry, I’d never spoil anything for my fellow horror readers, but there were several insane reveals in this novel that blew my mind. I didn’t see them coming at all, and it just added even more awesomeness to this novel. It also made up for those parts that dragged on, and overall, it picked things up tremendously. These plot twists and reveals were surreal.

The ending was fantastic, and one I did not see coming. I was shocked, to say the least, but everything wrapped up nicely, and once again, Ahlborn delivered. I was delighted with how this bloodbath all ended.

I give “Brother” by Ania Ahlborn a 4/5 for being a terrific read, and one I will remember for a very long time. It’s more of a slasher novel, with a sociopathic killer family, that shows the dynamic layers of what that looks like through the lens of two brothers. If this novel didn’t have parts that dragged on due to that alternating timeline of the past and the present, this would have easily been a perfect 5-Star read. Either way, I love Ahlborn and look forward to reading more of her books, which I have several waiting for me on my TBR, and anything else she writes in the future.

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I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The choice to pick this up was spurred by NYTimes' list of 100 best books of the century, where it polled on readers' list and the critics' polled list. Plus the log line seemed interesting to me: two creatives charting a path from mid 90s to mid 2010s video gaming industry, years that squarely line up with my growing up and playing video games (although maybe a decade or so younger than the characters of the book).

And I thought the premise of the book remains interesting (a bit of Halt & Catch Fire in there, the latter seasons), but I was struck by how poor some of the dialogue and characterizations were. Every conversation feels like an anvil dropped on the reader's head to drive home the point, and not to mention that Sam and Sadie in their childhood talk like no children ever (but I am willing to look past that). But the rest of the book isn't better in that department. It feels very trite in places, as if not giving its readers the benefit of the doubt and has to spell out everything in plainspoken manner. A chief culprit of it is some moralizing that the writer wants to impart, like Sadie berating Sam about how he let her go to her lover even though he had power over him and he knew she would jump into a bad relationship. It was like reading a bad 2018 twitter thread. The metaphors in the book are laboured and drilled with a maudlin, treacly sentimentality.

That brings me to the characters. What the hell is this Marx character? Look, a lot of very famous men rightly get a lot of shit on the internet for writing shallow women, defined almost by their physicality and their relationship to men, and objectified horribly. Well, allow me to talk about Marx, a man dreamed up to be so perfect as to not even be human. It's like the author's every yearning teen fantasy come to life (hey, what's fiction for if not that? I get it, sister!). His flaws are so adorable (he's a womanizer, but damn it, the women can't stop falling in love with the guy), he's blessed with the looks of a Greek god and the kind heart of a saint. He is a non-character. Talk about manic pixie dream boy.

And finally, I feel like a lot of this book, which takes place in the 90s, seems to have been written squarely to land in the good books of twitterati in 2018. Like the author is very concerned about being on the right side of history, and have their characters be so progressive and almost holier-than-thou to render the time period moot.

That's my rant, but I wanted to get capture my thoughts. There is a lot of good in this book despite whatever I have spewed above. The hook of friends who never turn lovers, a creative marriage, in a changing time for an industry that has been the realm of nerds and to bring it to the fore, is a job well done. The novel clips by, it is a breezy read, and doesn't punish you for sticking by its 400 page count.

I just wish I hadn't found a lot of it just so amateurish in places.

English is my first foreign language, I learned it way back in elementary school, have been using it at work and in my private life since forever, and I've read enough books in English to consider myself proficient.

I picked up "Great Expectations" and am currently in the middle of the book and enjoying it a lot for how it details the everyday lives and attitudes of people from all classes and walks of life - at times the book feels like a sociological study framed as a novel. The overall plot I'm already more or less familiar with by way of popular culture, it's the minutiae and characterizations that interest me.

That said, I often feel lost in conversation. The rhythm of the sentences feels confusing at times and I struggle to understand the subtext of the scene. This is the example that provoked me to write this post, at the end of chapter 32:

"Mind you, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm to be more confidential; "I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does a better thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He's always so high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense abilities. That Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst ask him his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he slips in his subordinate - don't you see? - and so he has 'em, soul and body."

Now, I understand the words and can parse the sentences just fine but I still have no clue what he's trying to say here. The book is full of little quips and comments like that and it annoys me to no end that I don't get it all. Sometimes the descriptions of scenes and what the characters are doing are a bit difficult for me to picture in my head too.

Of course, this is a book from ~160 years ago and so it's normal to be missing a lot of context, but I don't get at all confused like that when I'm reading Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë.

Is Dickens supposed to be a difficult author? I've read some modernist and postmodernist literature too and I was expecting something much easier. Was expecting to eat up the book in a few days, but my brain feels so tired trying to work it out that I can't go through more than a chapter or two in a day.

“Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature” by Becky Spratford is a fantastic collection for horror lovers who want to delve into the minds of some of the best horror authors and explore why they are so passionate about this genre. I had a blast reading this and enjoyed the unique perspectives and upbringings that led to the horror seed that eventually grew into a horror tree for these talented authors.

Before I dive into my review, here are the trigger warnings I found while reading…

- Abuse (physical and mental)
- School shootings
- Kidnapping
- Cancer
- Racism
- Bullying
- Miscarriages
- COVID-19

​If any of these trigger you, please do not read this book. Moving along, this collection of essays felt like a love letter to horror. Many of the authors even shared personal stories and recounted what drew them to horror, often relating it to the real-life horrors in the world, which I totally connected with.

I’d never spoil anything for anyone, but I enjoyed every essay, especially by many of my favorite horror authors. This featured Brian Keene, Tananarive Due, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix, Clay McLeod Chapman, Stephen Graham Jones, and more. I not only discovered new authors, but I also enjoyed how Spratford recommended their best and most popular book before their essay. I added a few new books to my TBR thanks to this, as that was a nice touch.

Speaking of Spratford, I had never heard of her until I read this book, and I learned a great deal about her impact in the wonderful genre of horror I love so much. All the work she’s done to help bridge the gap between librarians and horror readers is phenomenal. I remember growing up in the 2000s, and whenever I visited my local library to ask about horror, the librarians would either make a face or not know enough to recommend anything beyond whatever Stephen King had written.

​Now? They will suggest a wide range of recommendations, from horror classics to the year's must-read horror books. It’s night and day different. The fact that she is helping educate and encourage librarians to embrace the horror genre is a testament to her awesomeness. Much respect to her for everything she’s done and will continue to do in horror, as it continues to be such a beloved and popular reading genre.

This collection of 18 essays truly made me love horror even more. One essay even had some hand-drawn illustrations to help tell its story, which was pretty immersive. Once I finished reading, I took a moment to reflect on why I love horror.

I’ve been reading horror for over 30 years now, and it’s simple in the grand scheme of things. Horror is my happy place. Whenever I was going through crap in life, horror was always there for me. I could read a horror book, watch a horror movie, or listen to a horror podcast, and I’d be transported to my happy place when facing issues with school, work, friendships, breakups, and any obstacles life threw my way.

Finally, the overall horror community is such a fun, friendly, and inclusive one. It doesn’t matter if you love 80s slashers, read splatterpunk, or are addicted to The Losers’ Club Podcast. You are always welcome. I can’t tell you how many amazing people I’ve met in the horror community with whom I instantly bonded over our shared love of horror. It’s special. It’s just like all the horror books, movies, soundtracks, and podcasts we enjoy. It’s all extraordinary and feels right for all of us horror lovers.

I give “Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature” by Becky Spratford a perfect 5/5 and would consider it a must-read for horror readers everywhere. These essays will give you a unique insight into the minds of some of the biggest and best horror authors ever. It’ll not only make you appreciate horror even more, but more than likely give you a few new books and authors to get into after you read their thoughts. It’s books like these that have made me cherish all things horror even more, because for most of my life, it has always been a part of me.

It will forever be a part of me.