I am watching an adaptation of Les Miserables and am furious at how terrible Thénardiers are. Who is your least likable literary character?

My favourite novel I may never get entirely through.

"It well suited me to say the truth with laughter"

What does it say about patriotism though? I find it highly dangerous. A true mind disease. The last refuge of the scoundrel.

I recall reading Saturday some years ago and not particularly enjoying it, finding the denouement somewhat absurd and the character of Henry to be a bit spineless. I believe I watched the film Atonement at around the same time and remember finding the character of Briony so abhorrent that even now I struggle to rewatch it.

Recently I've been greatly enjoying Martin Amis, both due to the quality of his prose and the meta-textual elements in his work. Given the friendship between the two authors I've been wondering how they compare stylistically and what peoples thoughts on McEwan are.

Hi, this is a query.

I remember back in one of my English lit classes we studied some works (want to say 15th or 16th century but can't be certain) which were "written" by X author (again, can't remember) but one of the things that was pointed out was that it was in truth a translation from an Italian work and that at that time it was not unusual for a translation to be treated as an original work (I don't know if this was done knowingly or because people were unfamiliar with the original work and couldn't google to check).

Kind of like when people think of the Brothers Grimm as the authors of those fairy tales rather than the compilers.

I'm trying to remember some examples of this but can't for the life of me.

Can anybody help me? With either titles, "authors" or preferably both or maybe the time period this was common? It's been years since those classes and that time period wasn't my forte.

Now I do agree that if a work in another language INSPIRES you and you do something transformative it is not just a translation. That would count as an adaptation (or modernization if you prefer in some instances), but this is not that.

But that's a different issue.

Anyways, hope this doesn't break any rules per se

I remember watching Lovecraft Country and hearing Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Catch the Fire” and I fell in love with it.

What’s your favorite piece that you weren’t looking for?

What are you reading?

I didn’t come in with high expectations and it was a slow burn to start, but after that I could barely put it down.

The development of the characters and of the storyline is perfect. Personally, I have no background of the British aristocracy and their mannerisms in the 1800s. Yet, I never felt I needed it. This is a story of family, status, and love that is relatable to any person of any generation.

Even with the flowery, meandering dialog, every character feels so real. Who doesn’t know someone like a Mrs. Bennett or a Mr. Collins? This isn’t to say they are stereotypes; they are just fully fleshed out and relatable, even to the modern day. They are weird; they are oblivious; they are hilarious.

The title is perfect. Darcy is mostly prideful but also prejudiced. Elizabeth is mostly prejudiced but also prideful. To realize their faults, they make mistakes with each other, they point it out to each other, they listen to each other, and they finally try to make it up to each other. Together, they grow past their pride and their prejudice to find happiness. Their connection doesn’t develop because they are the same, or because they are perfect, but because they learn to fit together like two jagged puzzle pieces. This is a perfectly satisfying and timeless story

I just finished A Separate Peace yesterday. I absolutely love reading, and I think this has become one of my new favorite books. I'm 15, and my childhood best friend died a couple of years ago, so I really saw myself in the characters. I underline my favourite quotes in everything I read, and this had quite a few. Some were important to the plot, important/meaningful to me, and some were just written beautifully. Here were my favorites:

"In the deep, tactic way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and blinked out like a candle the day I left. " (page 10)

"Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking - I had made my escape from it" (page 10)

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. " (page 14)

"It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend." (page 29)

"It was only long after that I realized sarcasm was the protest of people who are weak. (page 29)

"Always say your prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God." (page 35)

"Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is his moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person 'the world today ' or 'life ' or 'reality ' he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever." (page 40)

"You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you." (page 51)

"I wanted to break out crying from stand of hopeless joy, or intolerance promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a place like this. " (page 55)

"If you broke the rules, they broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning. " (page 74)

"In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out." (page 88)

"That's what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug." (page 115)

"There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream." (page 117)

"He was all color, painted at random, but none of it highlighted his grief." (page 148)

"Once again I had the desolate sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him." (page 179)

"I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's straight-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case." (page 194)

"But then times change, and ears change. But men don't change, do they?" (page 198)

"I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe it. Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant I'm the human heart." (page 201)

"My fury was gone. I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever." (page 203)

"Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there." (page 204)

Hey ! This year I'm studying Robinson Crusoe in class and I struggle to find it... interesting. My professors study it from a post-colonial stand-point, which is relevant in a way, but I feel like we're missing out a lot on the religious part. I can't shake the feeling that we only superficially going over things that are important.

How come a story written 300 years ago still have a strong imprint on the arts and society ? The fact that it was one of the first novel can't be the only reason.

I'd like to get some deep literary analysis ans while post-colonial studies shed some light onto the story, I feel there is more to it.

Amy recommendation on what to read to have a better grasp on Robinson Crusoe ?

A plot must continue somehow so why do readers and cinephiles complain about McGuffins? Does a perfect narrative not contain a single McGuffin?

I can understand hating lazy McGuffins but just because you can analyze a text and locate which part contains a McGuffin, doesn't mean the narrative is inherently lazy.

If the Second World War was a fictional story than wouldn't the Comcentration camps qualify as a McGuffin?

Margot had seen the sun as a child and vividly remembered it.

On Venus, the sun hadn't appeared for seven years. Then, one day, it appeared for a single hour. Ironically, during that specific hour, Margot was locked in a closet and missed seeing the sun she had longed for.

At the end of the story, Margot is let out of the closet, and the narrative concludes. There is significance in the fact that the story ends at this precise moment:

a) First, there are two key scenarios in Margot's life. In both instances, Margot experienced an event that profoundly influenced her. The first was her childhood encounter with the sun. The second was her confinement in the closet, which prevented her from seeing the sun again.

The first event clearly influenced Margot deeply, as she held onto the memory of the sun as a source of hope for many years. However, the story doesn't show the aftermath of the second event—her confinement—or its influence on her.

This ambiguity is significant. It leaves room for interpretation beyond assuming she is completely traumatized or that the ending is solely negative. It could also symbolize that even though the confinement negatively impacted her, the sun's presence was a factor in both defining scenarios. The sun influenced her memory (first scenario) and its physical appearance, which she missed, defined the second scenario. Therefore, the ambiguous ending might offer a glimmer of hope, reminding the reader (and Margot) that the sun still exists, even when unseen, and that holding onto that hope is possible. This might be why the author chose to leave the ending open to interpretation.

b) Secondly, the ambiguity surrounding Margot's state upon emerging from the closet—whether she is dominated by the negative influence of her confinement or sustained by the enduring memory or idea of the sun—contrasts with another element in the story: the sun's next reappearance is certain but very distant (seven years away). Just as the sun's eventual return is something awaited with hope, the reader is left hoping for a positive future for Margot, despite the uncertainty.

I’ve seen online discourse about this book, and a lot of confusion. I just wanna share my perspective as i had a way better reading experience that way:

we see the world through sam’s eyes, sam is schizophrenic though and this actually all takes place in a psychward. for example: the bunnies are other patients in her group, the lion is her psychiatrist/therapist, ava is imagined, the workshops are group therapy etc.

i could be wrong of course, i’m not saying „this is what it definitely is“ i just had a more interesting reading experience through this lens and wanted to share. 💖

I have about two hundred pages left of reading this trash. I’m amazed how The Times put this in the top 100 books to read of the 20th century.

Wallace is too emphatic and derivative from the Postmodern tradition. His subjects all melt in desperate unctuous prose that bleeds of insecurity of not being an academic and pitiable inadequacy.

I respect him tackling the ugly realities of drug addiction and consumerism in the America of his time, but his aim to reform the novel just failed for me. The form became too gimmicky, kitsch, tasteless, carried with just embarrassingly shit prose. I still can’t get over what a shit writer he is for an American (I’m British).

Any readers thinking of reading this book, save your 1000 pages for The Karamazov Brothers, 1Q94, Don Quixote, Don Delilo. Life is too short too read this garbage.

My unapologetic rant.

It really frustrates me when people say a book isn’t well-written because a character conveniently dies and sets off the entire plot — as if the writer didn’t intentionally make that happen. Or when someone asks where a character’s family is and others reply, “They weren’t mentioned because they’d ruin the plot.” Exactly! The writer chose not to include them because they’d break the story.

Do people not realize that fiction is constructed around the plot? That leaving out “ideal conditions” or irrelevant people is part of storytelling — because a plot full of neat, realistic logistics would be boring?

Is this just a difference in how people read fiction or am I unable to identify bad writing? Curious how others think about this.

Also I'm not very sure if this is the correct subreddit for this conversation but I thought you guys must get attached to books as much as I do too so you might have an insight on this.

That passage is an attempt to recreate for the reader the confusion, chaos, and disbelief created in the other partygoers by what Tom has done [breaking Myrtle’s nose and the blood and trauma that went with this violent act]. By the time Nick comes back to himself, he has discussed a lunch date with a stranger knowing that he will never see him again, accompanied that stranger to his apartment in this same building, help a stranger [an older man] out of his clothes and into his bed, and discussed a very large portfolio of the man’s artwork with him while he was sitting up in his bed in his underwear. The very bizarre nature of the passage is supposed to help demonstrate just how traumatic Tom’s violent, entitled behavior has been on everyone involved, including Nick, the first-person narrator who is telling the story to the reader.

Both Nick and the old man, Mr McKee, were both traumatized by what Tom Buchanan did by abusing and hitting the lady, Myrtle. My interpretation is not that McKee did anything weird in the elevator, but that it was just that he was out of place due to how abusive Tom was. And remember, McKee was asleep during the entirety of the party during Ch. 2, and he only awoke when Tom beat Myrtle for mentioning Daisy repetitively. So, I can only imagine that they both were disturbed and traumatized. For Nick, since he’s the narrator, I think he was on “autopilot” during that time because there were time jumps/skips, and he was half drunk.

All in all, my interpretation is this:

The entirety of that scene highlights Tom’s abusive behavior. Mr McKee (the old man) awoke and saw the beating of Myrtle by Tom (and the blood), was traumatized by it and left subtly with Nick following. (At the time this takes place, it’s not very easy to see these kinds of things. Abusive behavior and such dramatic things were never really exposed to us until recently. Look at “The Phantom of the Opera” novel by Leroux. It explains the same thing but with a deformed man and Christine’s reaction is similar. I hope this example makes sense.) So, McKee leaves and goes in the elevator and Nick follows, takes his hat, because he knows the old man will need help getting to his apartment. Remember, he (the old man) is not really in the right mind… he’s half awake, half asleep, and half traumatized. He leans on the lever, in his own disorientation, and the elevator boy yells at him — “Don’t touch the lever!” — and McKee replies: “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.” Then, he makes small talk with Nick, whom he’ll never see again. He doesn’t even know him. Then he enters his apartment, then the scene cuts, and the man is in his under garment and showing Nick his art portfolio, then Nick is at the train station. (But I think Nick was just going through the motions, because in the end, that’s when he “wakes up” at the train station — meaning he was just on “autopilot” because of how abusive Tom was. I don’t think he did do anything sexual. I think he went to go help the old man undress and then was just going through the motions not really thinking about it.)

While those interpretations are interesting, I don’t think Fitzgerald meant for it to appear that way. I can understand if we were talking about the two girls from The Count of Monte Cristo, but this scene for The Great Gatsby ,specifically, slips through the cracks and is misinterpreted.

I am open to discussion! Thank you for taking the time to read this. :)

Appointment in Samarra is such a fantastic book, after which O’Hara published 16 novels which never again measured up.

(His short stories, of course, remained great.)

What other literary novelist comes to mind who (a) kept publishing novels throughout their life but (b) none ever matched the achievement of their debut?

I went into this book really wanting to love it as an avid hiker and nature lover after hearing about it so much. The first third was great. The character introductions were interesting, the writing was solid, and if that section had just been its own novella, I think it would’ve been perfect. But once that part is over, the book completely loses the plot.

For one, it is way too long for how little actually happens. It has one message, "trees are special, everything is connected" and it just repeats that over and over without adding anything new. By the halfway point, it starts to feel like Powers is just beating you over the head with it instead of actually exploring the idea in a meaningful way.

Then there’s the characters, who all talk in the exact same weirdly lofty, unnatural way, like they’re just mouthpieces for the author instead of real people. And some of their transformations don’t feel earned at all. Some of the characters becoming eco-terrorists make sense, like Douglas the Vietnam vet with nothing to lose and a deep connection to trees from the war, but then there's characters like Mimi who seemingly just sees a patch of trees across from her office be cut down one day and immediately begins chaining herself to trees in the middle of the woods and participating in massive protests with barely any internal struggle. The book just skips the part where some of them actually change and expects us to roll with it. It's like Powers knew that he had to get characters from "point A" to "point B", but didn't put nearly enough effort in actually making it a believable transition.

Another issue I had was the cartoonishly evil villains. Every person who isn’t a tree-loving activist is basically a soulless corporate monster. There’s zero nuance, zero attempt to show the complexity of environmental issues—it’s just “good guys vs. bad guys” in the most simplistic way possible. The book never evolves beyond the depth of a Captain Planet episode.

Also, the dialogue. Nobody talks like this. Gabriel Popkin’s review highlighted this issue perfectly with this actual conversation from the book, between a Vietnam vet and a guy he met at a seedy dive bar playing pool:

“Who’re you planting for?”
“Whoever pays me.”
“Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gases put to bed.”

What? Just because someone says "lotta" instead of "lot of" doesn’t mean you get to pretend that’s how an actual pool shark at a dive bar speaks. Every character, regardless of their background, speaks in this weird, stilted, pseudo-profound way. And then, of course, if they’re a "bad guy," they turn into straight-up Bond villains, twirling their mustaches and delivering lines about how they’ll burn down as many orphanages as it takes just to make an extra buck.

I really wanted to like this book. I kept hoping it would evolve or build on its early promise, but it just got more repetitive, more heavy-handed, and honestly, kind of exhausting. I get why some people love it, but for me, it ended up feeling more like a lecture than a story.

I joined my work’s book club and I work for a large scale employer with mostly much older people, so have generally really enjoyed the atmosphere and discussion. When we were given this book to read, it was maybe the first provocative literature we’ve had so far so I was quite eager to hear everyone’s thoughts.

In short, I really thought it was written with a western fetishist perspective and felt too anxious to share my real thoughts in the club because I’m spineless and didn’t want my colleagues to think I was being righteous or something. But they were all absolutely glazing the book, and their comments specifically kind of asserted my view that it’s written from a hopeful prospective of American dream and utopia, without really ever leaning into the reality of why Iranian social politics are challenged due to economic oppression.

I really do understand why people might like this book, but personally I found it actually quite frustrating and after the club I have found other Reddit threads complimenting it similarly. I’m not trying to discredit it entirely but trying to understand if there are any shared criticisms here because I found it really frustrating that the story never really focused on the wider systemic themes behind the oppression they faced. It felt really demonising of the culture in a way that catered to western ideals in a way that actually fed the beast of oppression they were facing to begin with, if that makes sense?

I’m not expecting this to be very well received and am just compensating for the fact I didn’t feel comfortable discussing my real view in the club, but am curious if anyone else had a similar experience reading it because again, when I found similar discussions on Reddit they seem also in favour of the novel’s messages and I am curious about other perspectives.

I love reading novels — most styles, most time periods, I’ve read and enjoyed. I want to enjoy short stories as well, but I just don’t. I’ve spent time with short story books by Auden, Kingsolver, Carver, Munro, Nabokov, Chiang, Everett, Benioff and a couple others, wanting badly to appreciate them.

I feel like I’m missing something about short story as a form and I just don’t connect at all.

Any thoughts/tips/etc you care to share? I think my expectations are too high and I need to learn to expect a lot less with each one I read and be okay with that. What’s the goal with writing/reading short fiction? So many of them feel like ambivalent photographs of a moment in time and that’s it.

Do you have any favorites? To be sure, I absolutely love Ted Chiang and his are far and away my most favorite short stories hands down. But others leave so much to be desired.

Someone motivate me — encourage me to think about them differently and give short fiction a better, fair chance.

To be sure, I’m not asking for specific book recommendations, just a discussion about short stories and their merit and how to appreciate them as they’re meant to be taken.

Are there any authors who were once canonical but who are now forgotten, yet whose work you enjoy and recommend? I always love discovering these forgotten writers.

I was recently reading the works of Walter Savage Landor, a poet and prose writer who was a contemporary of the romantic poets but lived until almost 90 years of age. He was best known for his Imaginary Conversations (between men of letters and statesman) in his lifetime; today, if remembered at all, it is for his short poems. Many of his contemporaries couldn't stop showering him with superlatives. Swinburne (himself now little read) said he "had won himself such a double crown of glory in verse and in prose as has been worn by no other Englishman but Milton". Dickens said his name was "inseperably associated ... with the dignity of generosity; with a noble scorn of all littleness, all cruetly, oppression, fraud, and false pretence." John Cowper Powys: "De Quincey and Hazlitt seemed dreamers and ineffectual aesthetes compared with this Master Intellect." Ernest de Silencourt: "As a writer of prose none has surpassed him." George Moore asked if he wasn't "a writer as great as Shakespeare, surely?" (surely!). Who reads him now? Funny how reputations change.

Do you know any other writers like Landor, now forgotten who were once canonical and are worth seeking out? Why did their reputations falter?

I binge-audiobooked all of John Updike’s Rabbit series (from Rabbit, Run through Rabbit Remembered). Here are my brief and random thoughts.  (Spoilers!)

• At root, the Rabbits series is about a man who peaked in high school (as a basketball star), and is forced to navigate a life that is, in many ways, experienced as a huge disappointment.

• Reaction to Rabbit, Run: Rabbit is young, immature, erratic, thoughtless, irresponsible, adrift.  He has unconsciously realized that his life is bound to be a disappointment, and doesn’t know what to do about it.  It’s honestly hard to empathize with Rabbit here.  I couldn’t imagine shacking up with a prostitute for a summer while my wife is in the late stages of pregnancy.  

• Reaction to Rabbit Redux: I was most frustrated by Rabbit in this one.  His behavior with his wife, his son, Skeeter, and Jill, is pretty revolting.  He has a cruel edge in this phase of life, and I don’t like him. His relationship with Skeeter is not quite believable, at least to me.  He takes risky behaviors throughout the books in the service of getting laid. But why would a guy who is basically racist decide to let an aggressive black nationalist stay in his house for an extended period of time? It was all very odd.

• Reaction to Rabbit is Rich: this is when I started to truly fall in love with Rabbit.  He gets back together with Janice and struggles with fatherhood.  I could empathize with this plight and understand his decisions.  I laughed out loud often in this book.  There are hilarious deadpan lines like (this is from memory since I don’t have a hard copy, sorry): “Every since Rabbit f***ed [what’s-her-name] in the a**, he had a renewed love of the world” - like lol wtf??).  Rabbit’s cruel edge has dulled, and he’s become soft and ridiculous.  Rabbit’s relationship with Stavros (the man who had an affair with Janice) is a genuinely cute bromance.

• Reaction to Rabbit at Rest: what a whiplash. For most of the book, I was really warming to Rabbit in his older age. He was mellowing out and being a decent person and a decent grandfather. Then, well, he slept with his daughter-in-law, which was disgusting, and as Janice told him, it was the worst thing he ever did to the family - it was unforgivable. Any hope for a series-long redemption arc for Rabbit was shattered. He learned nothing, he had no moral development, he turned out to be the pig he always was. His final act of running away and playing basketball was a terrific ending.

• Reaction to Rabbit Remembered: Maybe the most uplifting book of the series. It was wonderful to see Nelson avoiding falling into his father’s despicable ways. Nelson actually shows a level of self-reflection and self-improvement that Rabbit never showed. And we are given hope that Roy will likewise escape the Rabbit curse. Nelson connecting with his long-lost half-sister was really sweet in many ways. If it were Rabbit, he would have slept with her. Nelson, thankfully, chooses another path.

• I finished the series a few weeks ago and I still think about the characters everyday. It has had a strange and profound impact. I’m still processing the meaning of this series for me. At some level, it is a fantastic cautionary tale for men - it shows us many pitfalls that we should avoid if we want to lead a good and worthwhile life. 

• It is kind of creepy how Updike was able to humanize such a disgusting person. When I finished, I told my wife (to her horror), “I feel like I’ve lost a friend.” Yes Rabbit is awful, but I did grow close to him. I was, after all, in his head for a couple months.

• For a long stretch of the series, shockingly, Rabbit and Janice have a very sweet marriage.  I honestly found it inspiring how they grew together after such a rocky start (although of course it ends in disaster).

• John Updike’s writing is magical.  The prose is stunning.  The books are peppered with beautiful insights into family life and the human experience. 

• This may sound weird: For white American males, the Rabbits series is in fact THE Great American Novel (runner-up: Infinite Jest).  It’s the greatest story ever written about the everyman-ish white male experience in America.  For women and racial minorities - you will probably enjoy this book much less than I did.  In fact, you’ll probably hate it, since Rabbit is quite racist and sexist.  Reading Rabbits made me realize that given the diverse range of experiences within American history, there cannot be ONE GAN, but instead there will be GANs told from the perspective of each of these different experiences and identities. Every white male should read this series - and take the George Castanza route: if Rabbit does it, do the opposite! Whenever you detect Rabbit’s flaws in yourself, work to correct them, because you will see the sad ending that awaits you if you don’t.

A newly published book mentions Pashto language “writings” of early modern times instead of literature in the title, but in the description literature is mentioned too. Can these be used as synonyms, or did he simply want to emphasize the written aspect of it in the title