Do y'all ever feel like you're not getting everything you can from a book? I sometimes feel that I have trouble pulling themes from a reading, or making connections to other pieces of literature that the book may be in conversation with.

For example I'm reading Rosemary's Baby now, which is famously steeped in subtext. But I have trouble putting together an idea of ""what the book is saying"" because all the parts feel disparate, like I can't find the unifying idea that makes all these puzzle pieces fit.

Does anyone have any strategies or lenses through which they read that helps them feel like they've gotten something deeper from a book?

damn didn't know much about that. I've only read his book Festival of the Goat but absolutely loved it and it was very critical of authoritarian regimes so it's surprising and saddening to see him pivot like that

amazing writer tho, might move The City and Its Dogs up my reading list and get to it soon

yeah, he had a failed run at the presidency which is pretty interesting. I haven't actually made it to The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero yet, but Death in the Andes is one of my all time favorites. Highly recommend it as a shorter book that contains many of the ideas he wrote about over the course of his life

yeah but i don’t let it bother me, and if its a book i enjoyed very much idrc cause i might pick it up on a reread

to help get deeper themes only thing i can think about ther can help is reading ina group, or reading secondary literature on like jstor tho i rec this after ur done the book to watch out for spoilers

also writing down notes while reading helps too but can really increase the amount of time needed to finish a book

Anyone else have trouble getting into A Gentleman in Moscow?

I reallyyy thought I’d enjoy it because the subject matter sounded interesting to me and it’s got rave reviews, but I’m about 100 pages in and I just don’t have the motivation to continue, it’s boring me 😕

Think about this a lot

Big reason why I want to read with other people and find some book clubs

Do you guys know of any resource/sites that can help breakdown books, their context, the author's background, intent etc??

Who do you recommend for Irish literature?

Should I start from the beginning with his work or do you have a recommendation for another start point??

Also are there any recommended translations out there - I'm gonna start learning Spanish soon but for now I'd need English translations

I loved The War of the End of the World (translated by Helen R Lane) but it's long and kind of meandering, and required me to do a non-zero amount of research into 19th century Brazil. I think Death in the Andes (translated by Edith Grossman) would be a good starting point. It's shorter and has a more straightforward mystery driving the story, and it deals with a lot of the ideas that show up in his other work (the tension between indigenous spirituality and the modern world, violence wielded by the state vs interpersonal violence). Death in the Andes also has a lot of Vargas Llosa's style elements present such as continuing conversations through different time periods and settings. Otherwise Feast of the Goat is probably his most recognized book, it's about the dictatorship of the Dominican Republic in the 1900s. He's got a huge library of work and switched up genres pretty often, so you could try Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter for something lighter, or The Time of the Hero for a coming of age book

Been reading Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy, just finished chapters 49 & 50, and man. This s*** has got me bawling my eyes out

to start with picture of dorian gray from oscar wilde or a portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyace

Thank you so much for this, just added this to my reading note

@KoGoYos 23 pages into In The Distance

New but precarious, as if decrepitude had been built into them, the houses seemed eager to become ruins

love that book

enjoy bro, I might have to reread that one this year

That book goes so crazy, cried on the bus as I got towards the end. Gotta be close to the best a Western can be

Just read this book cus of this post, very good

@KoGoYos @HrdBoildWndrlnd yeah I'm about halfway through and loving it

Really good book for me to be reading right now because I have a bad habit of getting stuck on looking up words I don't know and letting that interrupt my reading

And even though there are plenty of words I'm not familiar with in this book it's so engaging that it's easy to keep wanting to push forward

I need to hurry up and get some highlighters so I can single out words and sentences I want to return to later

Damn I gotta get to it, I got plenty of time to read and definitely could already be done with the book but I've been slacking

Really glad my post lead to you picking it up though, amazing story and writing

Are there any good sites for commentary/breakdowns on books??

@KoGoYos do you have anything else you'd recommend from Hernan Diaz?

Still got about 100 pages of In The Distance left but I love how he writes and already want to check out more from him

I read his second novel Trust and thought it was good but not on the same level as In The Distance. some people enjoyed it more tho

if you want another western coming of age I highly recommend Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy or John Williams' Butcher's Crossing

if you like his prose more than the subject matter, iirc he writes with a simplistic style that you might find in authors like Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro

I really love the New York Review of Books (nybooks.com, unfortunately you have to pay to access) for long form articles about mostly modern (20th century onwards) literature.

The Complete Review (complete-review.com/main/main.html) is a great free tool for finding discussion on books. They write their own short reviews, but they also link to as many reviews and discussions of the book they can find, so I'm generally able to find something interesting to read through the collection of links the Complete Review provides.

jstor