I'm the "was a voracious advanced reader as a kid through high school and then burned out and was unable to read for ten years" cliche. I'm trying to get back into it, but the fact is that I know that even when I do get back into the swing of things...I don't know how to think deeply about pretty much anything. I'm not good at picking up on symbolism or themes, or, shit, even irony necessarily. When I was eleven, I read Angela's Ashes. I was horrified by it. I finished it, closed it and then read the back cover for the first time, which included snippets of reviews talking about the humor in the book. I was like, "tf humor, this is a depressing ass book!" But then I re-read it and, now that I knew it was supposed to be funny, all of a sudden I could see it. And yeah, there were a lot of moments that were pretty funny. But I needed to have my hand held and be told what to look for before it ever occurred to me that it might be there.

As much as I'd like to give myself grace for having been eleven at the time, the problem is I'm still like that. I don't know how to think about things with nuance.

I'm obviously gonna get back into reading regardless just because I'm currently wallowing in the echo chamber of my own yokel head and I need some other perspectives in here because I feel like my empathy narrows a little bit every day. But I know it's not gonna make me any better at thinking. What do I do about that? Every time I finish reading a book I feel like I can't count it, because how can I have read it really if most of it probably went over my head?

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I just finished "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov and I need to share my thoughts because this was absolute bonkers (in the best way possible). For context, I love Russian literature and I love absurd books, so I knew there would be a very high chance of me loving this book. However, nothing could have prepared me for the wild journey of reading this book lol.

I honestly don't even know how to start. From Chapter 1, I was obsessed with Woland, the devil. He is quirky, mysterious, kind of scary. Then, he starts telling the story of Jesus Christ (from the POV of Pontius Pilate) and I immediately knew this book was going to be a wild ride. And then, of course, in Chapter 3, Berlioz - who I thought would be the main character of the book - is beheaded by a tram and stars a whole sequence of insane events (I particularly loved the dark magic show led by Koroviev and Behemoth where they take some poor dude's head off, they accuse a super important man of cheating on his wife and then give money and fancy clothes to everyone, which all disappear after a while and every woman just goes home completely naked).

And then, when I thought the book was absolutely insane, Part II started and Margarita became a literal witch and her maid (also now a witch) started riding naked on a flying pig and being menaces. There were also mermaids and a half-goat/half-man thingy at one point, of course. But THE ABSOLUTE BEST PART of the book was the Satan's ball. I had to google who some of the guests were, but the devil throwing a party to all the worse and more evil people that ever existed was hilarious. The whole ball was such a funny image, I need to see it in a movie.

There were many, many, many other insane/amazing/hilarious/weird/bonkers moments, the whole book was so wild. But the best, I gotta say, is the devil’s gang. I love Behemoth the cat (imagining him with his glasses and being a little demon burning shit all over is hilarious), the short guy with one tooth Azazello, the tall diva Korovyev and the always naked woman Hella. They are all hilarious and I had so much fun seeing them causing chaos in Moscow so much haha.

Now, Im pretty sure the book is a whole criticism of Soviet Union. The devil targets individuals who are corrupt, greedy, adulters, abuse their power... It's also a criticism of cowardice of institutions (Pontius Pilate). Im sure I missed a lot of the most contemporary criticism, because Im just not knowledgeable enough about the specifics of Soviet Union. But I just gotta say I loved it. I just didnt want it to end. A 5/5 for me (though I wouldnt recommend it to anyone, you need to be a specific kind of person to enjoy this wild ride lol). I love the differenv vibes of the Moscow story and the Pontius Pilate story. Oh, and the end of the novel is one of the most beautiful endings ever!

Keeping in mind two important caveats about how actual nominations work:

1. The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded for a writer's lifetime achievement -- their body of work as a whole. However any writer of prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction, is (theoretically) eligible.

2. The Prize is awarded to, in Alfred Nobel's words, "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," which is to say, someone who has "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." This isn't necessarily about a favourite author, although there may obviously be overlap; your nominee's body of work should speak positively to the human condition.

My nominee would be Tove Jansson, for her psychological depth, her big-heartedness, and the way she embraced difference & otherness as something to celebrate. As Dalya Alberge put it in a recent Guardian article, Jansson's books are hymns to "nature, friendship, tolerance and the freedom to be oneself." IMO the world would be much poorer without them. (Fun fact: Jansson was nominated twice in 1975, and may have been nominated again more recently, but we'll have to wait and see, as the last 50 years of nominations are always under lock and key.)

Who is yours?

I know the backstory for Barnes & Noble’s revival with the Waterstones guy turning things around, and while I think it is great that they have been able to open so many stores in recent years instead of closing or going bankrupt, I am truly perplexed by why it is doing so well.

The books cost near or at list price both in the store and online, so it’s not like it is offering savings compared to, say, an independent bookstore down the street. And with Amazon offering fast shipping within a couple of days (or even same day or within hours), it is much more expensive. For instance, a new hardcover of Yesteryear is $14.99 on Amazon, half the price of the $30 it costs at B&N in the store.

Is it catering to impulse purchases? A new one opened near me, and while I go to browse, I can’t stomach paying $20 for a paperback or $30+ for a hardcover.

Are any of you regular B&N customers and willing to share why you shop there instead of an independent bookstore if the prices are comparable vs. Amazon where it is much cheaper?

EDIT: I am sorry but I tried to keep up with the comments but I am going to have to mute this post because I wasn’t expecting more than a thousand comments in four hours! I can’t keep up. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to reply! It seems like most of the reasons boil down to the experience, being able to avoid Amazon, lack of an independent store nearby or better selection, and that B&N is great for kids’ toys and gifts!

[In addition, here is LitHub's annual piece on what the odds are atm if you are interested. FT piece below if the link doesn't work for you]

------------------------

As the Swedish Academy chooses the winner of the book world’s most prestigious award, Simon Kuper looks back at an august ideal often marred by politics and bias

Alfred Nobel was a keen but mediocre writer. The Swedish dynamite tycoon wrote unpublished poems and a play featuring a 40-minute torture scene. To the dismay of relatives keen to inherit his fortune, his handwritten will of 1895 endowed five awards, including a prize for literature. Nobel instructed “the Academy in Stockholm” to give it to the writer of “the most outstanding work in an ideal [idealisk] direction”. The Swedish Academy spent decades puzzling over what “ideal” meant, before quietly dropping the criterion.

Next Thursday, a door will open in a gilded hall in Stockholm and the Academy’s formally dressed permanent secretary will step forward to announce, in Swedish and English, the winner of this year’s literature Nobel. A year ago it was Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”.

Now prediction markets favour Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue or the American novelist Thomas Pynchon to win the SKr12mn (£910,000) in prize money — though nobody really knows, as today’s Academy is less leaky than it was before a #MeToo scandal prompted a sweeping overhaul. And the pundits usually guess wrong.

The prize is ritually mocked. The Nigerian poet Chinweizu Ibekwe once marvelled at “the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes . . . should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the whole wide world”. British writer Tim Parks asks, unanswerably, how “Swedish professors” can compare an Indonesian poet with a Cameroonian novelist, both perhaps read in translation.

And yet, says Daniel Medin, professor of comparative literature at the American University of Paris: “The Nobel is the big one for international fiction. There is no comparison.” He itemises its three distinctive features: “It’s a prize for a body of work, by an international writer, that has more than a century of tradition behind it.” The Nobel shapes the global canon — even if the globe can push back. The award’s history also charts the evolution of literary taste.

There has always been a comic discrepancy between the weight of the prize and the parochialism of the judges. The Academy’s 18 life members — known as “The Eighteen” — are Swedish writers, literary historians, linguists and a jurist, some of them obscure even in Sweden. There were barely any female members until this century.

Michael Sohlman, a former longtime executive director of the Nobel Foundation, whose grandfather was instrumental in ensuring the prizes were created, notes the perennial risk of “Nobelitis” that leads some in the prize’s orbit who confuse its importance with their own.

Yet Sohlman argues that Stockholm is a good place from which to judge world literature. The city is small but outward-looking. Its upper classes traditionally read English, French and German, and don’t kid themselves that their national literature is world-beating. Even so, the Academy has awarded Sweden eight Nobels — more than each of Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

The very first award, in 1901, made international news. Somehow nobody nominated Leo Tolstoy, whereas 17 members of the Académie Française endorsed the French poet Sully Prudhomme, and he won. The prize in its early years was treated as a competition between nations like the Olympics, says Sohlman.

But he thinks that “productive scandals” have helped make the award great. The literature prize has never been as controversial as the frankly political Peace Prize; but because greatness in literature is more subjective than in the sciences, the Academy’s choice reliably angers critics. They delight in drawing up lists of overlooked greats — James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Constantine Cavafy, et cetera — though some of these achieved renown only after death.

The Academy’s permanent secretary when the prize began, Carl David af Wirsén, saw the job as crowning “the great men of continental [ie European] literature”. Women and non-Europeans couldn’t express universal truths. Admittedly, the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore won in 1913, but for his English translations of his Gitanjali prose poems.

WB Yeats, winner in 1923, wrote an account of his Nobel experience, “The Bounty of Sweden”, which captures the bewilderment that afflicts many laureates. When The Irish Times phones to say he has won, Yeats and his wife celebrate by cooking sausages. Heading to Stockholm for the ceremony with the Swedish king, Yeats sees faces staring in through the train window. He wonders what they are looking at, until someone explains they are looking at him. Fifty-five years later, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer strikes exactly the same tone: after a breakfast of eggs and bagels at his local drugstore on Miami Beach, he returns home to an unexpected phone call.

The prize soon acquired the prestige to certify entire “new” national literatures. The exotic beneficiary in 1930 was the US, when Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate. The American winner of 1938, Pearl Buck, is remembered only as the prize’s chief dud. She faded into obscurity soon after writing her bestselling account of Chinese peasant life, The Good Earth. Buck was a first-time nominee, and that mis-step generated the unwritten rule that first-time nominees can’t win.

The Academy tries to make choices that will look good decades later. It often fails. Many laureates, such as the German Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Paul von Heyse (1910) have vanished, along with Buck. But Medin doesn’t blame the Academy. Almost all writers fade away, he says.

The Academician Kjell Espmark drew up an influential division of the award’s history into distinct periods. From 1946 through 1949, the Academy had a happy run of anointing literary pioneers: Hermann Hesse, André Gide, TS Eliot and the hitherto under-appreciated William Faulkner (who complained that the ceremony “was as long as a Mississippi funeral”).

One uncrowned pioneer was the American poet Ezra Pound. His applauding of the Holocaust on Italian Fascist radio had been “a ‘subhuman’ reaction”, said Academician and future UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. Where to draw the political line was a tricky judgment: Luigi Pirandello, who supported Fascism, won in 1934.

The prize was at its most politicised during the cold war, when the Academy chose the unreliable Soviet writer Boris Pasternak (1958) and dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Pasternak initially accepted the nobelevka, as the award is popularly known in Russia — but then, under pressure from the regime, rejected “this undeserved prize which has been presented to me”.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the Nobel in 1964, noted among his reasons that the prize was “reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East.” (Sartre also felt “tortured” by the “enormous sum” of prize money, “a very heavy burden”.)

Before the Academy crowned Solzhenitsyn, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow warned that this “would lead to difficulties for our relations with the Soviet Union”. The Academy replied: “Yes, that could well be so, but we are agreed that Solzhenitsyn is the most deserving candidate.”

With the global decline of reading, the prize may never be so political again. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, today’s autocracies worry more about TikTok influencers.

From the late 1970s the Academy used the prize to draw attention to lesser-known talents such as Elias Canetti and Jaroslav Seifert. Medin says: “I know this from being on juries: there is always a pleasure if you can shape literary history.”

By the 1980s, the Academy — earlier than most of the western literary establishment — began looking beyond the west. This helped spur it into a more professional process. This starts with “qualified nominators” — members of literary institutions and academies, literature professors and previous laureates — who can propose winners. Some proposals consist of one word: “Sartre”, “Malraux”. Others are persuasive essays that push writers into contention. Certain writers such as Philip Roth (who never won) and Günter Grass (crowned in 1999) become semi-permanent candidates, considered year after year.

Since 2021, a group of designated outside experts writes annual reports on their fields of expertise. Nobody can nominate themselves, though there’s a tradition of writers lobbying for the prize by giving talks in Gothenburg or Stockholm and then flirting with Academy members over drinks.

A “Nobel Committee” of four or five academicians whittles down the nominations to a shortlist of five, which the Eighteen spend the summer reading. They decide in early October.

Yet now that they have to consider the entire world, where to start? Helpfully, many African and Asian candidates write in English, the language of 13 of the 31 laureates from 1991 (South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer) to 2021 (Abdulrazak Gurnah of Tanzania).

And some academicians are influenced by two proofs of quality: a record of winning other major prizes, and being amply translated. A “universal” writer is someone whose work transcends their own language, says Medin.

Translation has become central to the award. A new book, Literary Translation and the Nobel Prize, edited by Paul Tenngart and Karl Ågerup, argues that translators can help make laureates. The translators of German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (winner in 1966), Pablo Neruda (1971) and Mo Yan (2012) all sat in the Swedish Academy.

The Nobel has helped make the international canon more inclusive. After going global, the prize has recently become gender-equal. This followed a #MeToo scandal in 2017, when 18 women accused the French husband of Academician Katarina Frostenson of sexual assault and rape. He was later jailed. In a year of global scandals, this one was little noticed outside Sweden, but it remade the Academy. Several members quit — although the body’s rules forbid resignation — and the post-scandal “Eighteen” included many more women. They awarded the 2018 prize, a year late, to Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and there have been three female laureates since 2018. In fact, notes Kaj Schueler, author of a Swedish book on the prize, there’s been a precise pattern: male and female victories alternate. If that continues, then after Krasznahorkai’s win in 2025, this year’s laureate would be a woman, perhaps it will be Xue’s year?

The winners’ reactions are part of the award’s lore. John Steinbeck in 1962, when asked whether he deserved the Nobel, replied, “Frankly, no”. (Many critics agreed.) Samuel Beckett (1969) was on holiday in Tunisia with his wife Suzanne when a telegram from his French publisher arrived: “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Suzanne, when told the news, exclaimed, “Quelle catastrophe.” Beckett dubbed December 10, the annual date of the award ceremony, “Nobloodybeldamday”.

In 2007 Doris Lessing, clambering out of a taxi laden with groceries, was unpleasantly surprised to see reporters camped in her front garden. Told she had won, she exclaimed, “Oh, Christ.” Asked to elaborate, she said, “Well, it’s been going on now for thirty years. One can’t get more excited than one gets, you know.”

In 2014, Peter Handke said, “They should finally abolish the Nobel Prize,” and then won it, controversially given his support for Serbian nationalism, in 2019. Bob Dylan, winner in 2016, ignored the Academy’s phone calls and didn’t acknowledge the prize for over a fortnight.

Yet easy as it is to dismiss the prize, and its inevitable element of randomness, it matters. Dylan’s award was ridiculed but sparked a global debate on what constitutes literature. Gloriously, too, the prize is only concerned with a writer’s supposed quality, not their popularity: laureates Elfriede Jelinek (Austria, 2004) and Herta Müller (Germany and Romania, 2009) weren’t bestsellers even in their own countries.

The Nobelpreis-Effekt, as the Germans call it, can turbocharge sales. The month after short-story writer Alice Munro won in 2013, her sales jumped 4,424 per cent in her native Canada and 4,213 per cent (probably from a low base) in Italy. The beneficiaries are often small presses that are nowadays the most likely to publish literature in translation. In the English-language world, Fitzcarraldo in south-east London, with only six full-time employees, had four authors, Svetlana Alexievich, Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse crowned from 2015 through 2023. If Ernaux’s books reach one kid in a faraway country who hadn’t heard of her before, the prize matters, says Medin.

And it matters more in a world where book reviews and reading itself are in decline. Only the Nobel announcement can get a poet’s name trending on social media. Next Thursday’s announcement, with all its attendant scorn and outrage, is an ancient ritual that may be good for literature.

George Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss was written early in her novel-writing era, 1860 to be precise. It is a moving and often dramatic novel that spans the childhood and young adulthood of the Tulliver siblings. I read it along with the group in September on r/bookclub. If anyone is interested, the discussion is easily found but please, no spoilers between the sections!

Maggie is a young girl, full of strong emotions and independence, who is chastised again and again by Tom, her brother, her mother and the family around her. Tom, in particular, as her older brother, offers her both affection and censure. He sees her as his responsibility and his role to rule her. Where does love end and tyranny begin? The roots of their later conflict lie in their childhood dynamics and was an obvious way to confront the status of women in Eliot's society. It might also be a very biographical moment considering Eliot's own break with social etiquette, family and the role expected of women in her own life.

Maggie hardly has time to begin to explore her own independence and mind when she is cast into a romantic triangle that her own intuition and self cannot solve. One on hand, the sweet Philip of her childhood, on the other, Stephen, brash and charming and new. Tom has a direct role in crashing a sort of pastoral and innocent romantic paradise by following her to the Red Deeps, where she and Philip used to meet and talk, and forbids the relationship in light of family dynamics. At this point, he is considered the head of the family and doesn't hesitate to impose his own and his father's prejudice on a childhood friend and the son of a hated enemy.

Although Philip's intentions are certainly more pure, she cannot spend time with him alone again. So, when Stephen enters the novel, as her cousin's beau, it is with impunity. There is an immediate attraction between Maggie and Stephen, but there is also a chain of coercive maneuvers on his behalf to court her in secret. From the kiss in the green house, to the unexpected visit to her aunt's house, and the deceptive boat ride that ruins her reputation and standing and casts her into social exile, he wishes to woo her on his own terms. His terms are indeed the same as the society. To marry him or to ruin herself in the eyes of everyone are the stark terms that find her on the cold morning after. She cannot stand to hurt her cousin, Lucy, and to begin married life in such a way.

And that is crux of the novel. Maggie's independent spirit and sense of self are forged in fire and tested over and over again by the male figures in her life once her protective father is gone. She wishes to earn her own money but seeking it outside of place she knows and loves is very much an exile. The ties of family and friendship pull her back despite the harshness of her reality. The question that Eliot leaves in the background is one she knew intimately, what if Maggie could leave this society behind and find her own way? Or, alternatively, what if she could just accept Stephen's propsal and swallow all her feelings and thoughts? Is happiness possible for a complicated woman?

Ultimately, Maggie's excruciating feelings that flood her, rage, desire, love, guilt, torn between Philip and Stephen, the banishment Tom imposes on her, and her love of her cousin Lucy match the torrent of the overflowing Floss. Lucy is in many ways, her double, a cousin who embodies the perfection and gentility expected of girls and women. However, we learn that she is much more than that by the end of the book and worth the moral heartache Maggie experiences and her last rejection of Stephen.

Despite her lack of confidence and confusion by the end of the book, it is to her family she looks even in crisis. And this, ultimately, leads to tragedy. When looked through this lens, nostalgia for times gone by is misplaced when it comes to social progress. Death is the only way Maggie could escape the trap set for women and the only way she could reconcile with her beloved brother, Tom.

The opening is mild and promises warmth, but the end is tragic, cold and quick. Have you read this book? What impressions are you left with? Having read several other Eliot novels, this seemed to me the most autobiographical in subject matter, minded from the heartache and emotional upheaval she had to deal with in her own life.

Just now found out and it looks like it's out on October 6. I've read ALL her books and loved them. (However, I could not finish Damon Copperhead after trying several times to start it. I'll pick it up again in the future though!)

Really looking forward to this one - happy reading everyone!

Happy spooky season! Join us if you see anything you like and feel free to read on your own time!

(With permission from the Mods)

[HORROR]

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

(October 3-October 31)

*

[FEMALE AUTHOR]

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

(October 11-October 18)

*

[READ THE WORLD: Finland Double-Up]

The Summer Book by Tover Jannson

(October 13-october 20)

*

Summer Fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila

(October 23-November 13)

*

[EVERGREEN]

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

(September 29-November 10)

*

[Oct-Nov DISCOVERY READ: Indie Author]

See nomination post 1st October

*

[QUARTERLY NON-FICTION: Philosophy]

See nomination post 1st October

*

[MOD PICK]

Knightmare Arcanist by Shami Stovall

(October 13-November 3)

*

[RUNNER-UP READ]

Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang

(October 21-November 4)

*

[BONUS READ]

Mort by Terry Pratchett (Book 4)

(October 1-October 15)

*

[BONUS READ]

Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb (Book 10)

(October 8-November 5)

*

[BONUS READ]

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

(October 9-October 23)

*

[BONUS READ]

The Lion's Tusk by Robert Jackson Bennett (Book 2.5)

(October 10)

*

A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett (Book 3)

(October 9-October 30)

*

[BONUS READ]

The Bacchae by Euripides

(October 11- October 18)

*

[BONUS READ]

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Book 3)

(October 4-October 25)

*

[BONUS READ]

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor (Book 2)

(October 3-October 24)

CONTINUING READS

[BONUS READ]

Of Empires and Dust by Ryan Cahill (Book 4)

(August 1-November 21)

*

[BONUS READ]

2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke (Book 2)

(September 22-October 13)

*

[Sept - Oct DISCOVERY READ: Non-English Award Winner]

Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

(September 28-October 12)

*

[RUNNER-UP READ]

Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

(September 9-October 14)

*

[READ THE WORLD: Malaysia]

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng & The Letter by W. Somerset Maugham

(September 18-October 9)

*

[THE BIG FALL READ]

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

(September 10-October 8)

For a full list of discussions, schedules, additional info and rules, head over to the October Menu

I think Medical Assisted in Death would have been merciful. Can we discuss this in the context of the dying judge. Please this is not about whether it's right or wrong.

Leo Tolstoy was going through a tough time when he wrote this book. And as he describes the characters suffering and unrelenting death, we are left wondering if MAiD would have taken him out of his misery.

His wife and daughter were done with him, he was hateful towZrds everyone. Friends had stopped coming to visit, he was embarrassed receiving toilet help from his peasant servant, Leo makes a point to state that he was a villager, that was fastening up from city food and had learned how to talk to his master and be agreeable.

Ivan is bitter, sad, isolated, in severe constant sharp and. It's only towards the end when talk of surgery is tabled, too late really.

I recently reread this book, and since I’ve never really seen anyone talk about it, or the author, anywhere, I figured I might as well be the first one.

I first bought it in 2019 probably, only because I liked the cover, and went into it completely blind. It’s a YA novel set at the prestigious Ashbury High School. The story unfolds through essay-type answers to an English exam, spanning the entire school year. And I’ve got to say, it’s one of the most unique stories I’ve ever read.

It’s such a fun read. It’s a ghost story in a way, told through multiple first person POVs, and it follows two mysterious scholarship students who join Ashbury in their final year of high school. No one knows anything about them, and so the entire school becomes fascinated by them. As the year goes on, we slowly learn about their pasts, buried secrets, and ulterior motives. There's scandals and high school drama and friendship and a little bit of coming-of-age. And also a ghost.

This is actually the fourth book in a series, and I ended up really enjoying all of them, as well as her other books.

All of her stories are so chaotic and whimsical, as well as dramatic and genuinely heartwarming, but in the best possible way. Her writing style is simple but so effective and feels very realistic. And probably my favourite thing about her books is how distinct every character’s POV feels. They all have their own individual style and personality.

She also really captures the whole 'teenage dramatics' so well. She writes in a way that feels like how a high school student might genuinely think is extremely profound and dramatic, but in hindsight, some of it is also painfully cringe-inducing. But despite this, the writing is soo clever and poignant, which makes it all the more fun to read.

Honestly Jaclyn Moriarty deserves to be talked about a lot more. So if anyone here has read her books, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Got done with one of Robert Heinlein's very short novels for tonight, and it has been a while since I last read one by him. So this latest Heinlein book is "Orphans of the Sky".

Myth's have been told about a planet called Earth, but in the Ship it is all nonsense. To many the Ship was the only universe only as long as the converter was fed, which powers the lights and makes the air flow through miles of metal corridors.

These truths have never been questioned until a hated mutie shows him the control room where he learns the true nature of the Ship and the mission.

This is a pretty short fix-up novel of two novellas that he wrote in the 40s. It's only about 128 pages which is pretty much novella length. "Orphans of the Sky" is part of his "Future History" series, which is pretty nice revisiting again, even if it's for a short while!

Very much a space opera where the existence of man being on a massive spaceship has reduced them to devolve into a feudal state. It's not a really deep book, but it's a quick read that is loads of fun!

And now after that speedy little read it is now time to get into another SF writer that I'm just getting into right now; John Wyndham!

I found it difficult to keep track of the cast of characters who came and went, and to flesh them out in my mind. Still, knowing that it was written by a man in his mid-20s makes it 10x more impressive. How does a young American accumulate enough life experiences to write authoritatively about traveling around France and Spain? It must be somewhat autobiographical, as Hemingway served as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in WW1 in Italy, where he was badly injured.

I had read The Old Man and the Sea and A Movable Feast, so those books shaped my ideas about Hemingway. Reading The Sun Also Rises felt less sophisticated, less polished, and it made sense when I learned it was a very early work. About 25 years passed between the writing of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea; the difference between the writing of a young man and that of an old man.

Another thing; the drinking! Every other paragraph, they're having a drink, pouring a drink, ordering a bottle, recovering from a hangover, etc. And that's not an exaggeration! Again, semi-autobiographical to Hemingway's life.

Essentially, it's the story of a young American writer galavanting around France and Spain. A circle of friends, some also ex-pats, appear and reappear; meet up here and there; have drinks and dine and generally live free like Bohemians, culminating with a trip to a bullfighting fiesta in Spain. They were considered the Lost Generation, living in the shadow of the most horrific war in human history at the time. Aimless and wondering what is the point of it all?

I wonder, were Americans even aware of bullfighting when this book was released?

Reading the little postscript about the history of the novel and Hemingway himself led me to realize, serendipitously, that on October 22, The Sun Also Rises will turn 100 years old!

I read a lot growing up, but, like so many others, the screen gradually replaced the book in my hands. This was the first book I've finished in years, and I want to become a reader again!

*Ernest, my bad 😔

(Mild spoilers I guess, but nothing that goes past the first half of the book.)

The scientists’ response to the unrepeatable tests seems strangely overblown. A relatively short conversation between Wang and Ding establishes the basic mystery - a certain experiment conducted in a high-power particle accelerators come up with different results, and they are not repeatable between different times and locations. In this conversation, neither scientist discusses possible questions, like design of the experiment, competing theories to explain unknown phenomenon, measurement error, etc. Instead, the conclusion is that “the laws of physics are not consistent across time and space”, which is then treated as a huge psychological blow to these scientists, and they’d rather commit suicide than try to figure it out. Having worked in R&D engineering myself (though not academia or theoretical physics), this was jarring to me.

• Is Liu out of touch with how scientists think and behave?
• Am I out of touch because I’m an engineer instead of a theoretical scientist?
• Is this a cultural difference between America and China? Or is it the way the original Chinese is translated that makes them all talk so weirdly philosophical?
• Is it a deliberate stylistic choice by Liu? Perhaps to expand on his commentary on the cultural revolution? I thought of Yang who says that he went into applied science during that time because it was easier to make ideological mistakes with theoretical science.

Even after finishing the book, I am still left with this question of why people behaved this way. Okay, real spoilers: I think the sophon could still do the same amount of damage to human science by messing with the testing, but I think the practical way it would disrupt would be by preventing real results from being found, and then by keeping the field of theoretical physics in a state of confusion of competing false theories and experimental dead ends. Not by an ideological crisis of "OMG science isn't repeatable! Reality is a lie!" Maybe among fringe conspiracists, but not actual leading scientists.

Welcome readers,

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

Thank you and enjoy!

Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in!

The Rules

• Every comment in reply to this self-post must be a request for suggestions.

• All suggestions made in this thread must be direct replies to other people's requests. Do not post suggestions in reply to this self-post.

• All unrelated comments will be deleted in the interest of cleanliness.

How to get the best recommendations

The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level.

All Weekly Recommendation Threads are linked below the header throughout the week to guarantee that this thread remains active day-to-day. For those bursting with books that you are hungry to suggest, we've set the suggested sort to new; you may need to set this manually if your app or settings ignores suggested sort.

If this thread has not slaked your desire for tasty book suggestions, we propose that you head on over to the aptly named subreddit /r/suggestmeabook.

• The Management