I am not well enough versed in philosophy to understand some parts of this book, however other parts were easily digested. Makes me want to live a far more a***og life, throw my phone in the bin, and drink wine in a park for no reason other than to do it.

Quick, fun read. Found it interesting how I related in small parts to the characters amnesia, having lost a sense of precisely who I used to be before my various brain injuries. A nice break from the denser books I've been reading lately.

Wait how does this work

Download the Fable app & then follow the link

We got almost 50 ppl in the club (some girls from Fable joined the club too)

man...

What did you think?

it frustrated me and elated me. left me feeling disappointed at the world and also myself, yet without any anger and with a hope towards the future. some of his writing is as though he's peered into some commonality of all human souls the way he speaks of transitioning from child to adolescent to adult. great book

The MJ of readers

My kids when they find my goodreads

The Brothers Karamazov:

Loved the entire perspective on faith vs doubt, belief, morality, guilt, good and evil. Russian literature just seems extremely cold for my taste at the moment however, Ivan’s conversations with Alyosha were the highlight of the novel, his poem + dealings with the Devil were chilling.

about halfway through TBK myself

I know it's considered top two for Dostoyevsky but tbh I liked The Idiot more so far. maybe it's just because at this point in my life I'm not that interested in the theological debates that you mentioned. we'll see how I like the second half

definitely agree with your description of TBK being cold but imo there's a lot of Russian literature that's not that way. Turgenev, Chekov, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov write with much more humor and heart

that's what I really liked about The Idiot. it had its funny moments while also having a lot to say about society and ethics

Confusion by Stefan Zweig (1926)

novella about a precocious college student who finds a mentor in a college professor and the relationship causes confusion. first Zweig I've read where I wasn't all that impressed. maybe it was ahead of its time in some of the topics it covered, and as with all of his writing there was psychological depth, but this one just didn't really resonate with me

7/10

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (1973)

novel about a young man in the Appalachian mountains who is displaced and slowly descends into a life of depravity and violence. Cormac's third novel and while it does have some of his signature prose that stops you in your tracks and makes you reread a sentence several times, the story didn't feel quite as fleshed out as some of his later work. could've used another 100 pages imo but still a great, harrowing read

7.5/10

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

I had such high expectations for this one as it's considered one of the greatest novels of all time. however, this is just not really my type of book because so much of it was philosophical debates and longwinded postulations. Alyosha was the only character I really cared about and his storyline with the children intrigued me the most. the rest of the story just never really moved me and although this was definitely well written with a lot of detail, I enjoyed Dostoevsky's The Idiot much more because of its characters and message. still a monumental work and I can understand its praise, just wasn't really for me

8/10

Thanks for the thoughts! I read Child of God a few years ago and it's stuck with me since. McCarthy was definitely jacking Flannery O'Connor's whole s*** but at least it was good enough to still be respectable. The imagery of Ballard in the cave alone is so evocative and constricting that it probably won't ever leave me, and I am always kind of drawn to stories of people doing horrible things without really understanding why or even really wanting to do them (like compulsion). Have you seen the James Franco movie?

yea a lot of powerful imagery fs. I've still got to read through a few more books from Cormac's bibliography so it'll be interesting to see where CoG ranks later on

I have not seen the Franco movie. don't really trust Franco, and the trailer looked pretty bad imo. I try to avoid film adaptations of books unless they're supposed to be really good, ruins the images for me

Reading is good. Keeps your mind clean.

Bajo Este Sol Tremendo (Under This Terrible Sun) by Carlos Busqued (2008)

Argentine novel about a listless stoner who gets a call that his mother and brother have been brutally murdered. he travels to a small town to bury them and collect insurance money and runs into a cast of characters that are into some heavy s*** and involve him in it. full of joints, metaphors, and extremely graphic descriptions, this was like a sick twisted movie I couldn't turn away from. Busqued's writing and slow characterization was impressive and although I finished the book thinking wtf did I just read, it has stuck with me and was very well crafted. would recommend for those who can stomach it

8.2/10

The City & The City by China Miéville (2009)

speculative fiction about a murder mystery in two European cities that overlap yet are prohibited from interacting with each other. the concept was interesting but the detective part of the story felt pretty generic and most of the book seemed like conversations with witnesses/suspects saying "idk". could've been better

6.8/10

Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh (2022)

novel about a young disfigured boy in the middle ages in a medieval fiefdom. somewhat horror but definitely dark, this book had a little bit of everything from murder, rape, cannibalism, and all that fun stuff. Moshfegh is one of my favorite contemporary authors and she clearly went out of her comfort zone for this one. not sure she landed the ending but she's elite at world building and all her books are page turners in my experience

7.7/10

5/5

What more can I say about this series man? I love this world so f***ing much!!!

The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa

I think this is a bad translation! Plenty of times the translator would use the same word twice in a sentence (using "again" twice in a sentence is nuts and it happens again and again in this book). The story itself is also unengaging. The narrators friend died in the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, then 9 years later returns to visit the narrator in Germany. There they mostly wander the city and converse with others, framed by a semi-relaxed quarantine environment in early COVID-times. It's plodding, frankly, and the interesting ideas that are introduced don't ever really find a way to cohere into something meaningful. Also one can spot the ""twist"" ending coming a mile away. At least the Planetenwegen is something cool I learned about through this book.

The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera

A short, fast paced neo-noir that purports to be a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, though only retains some minor elements. The Redeemer runs errands through a mid-pandemic Mexican city (eerily prescient for a 2013 novel) where the streets are empty, masks are looted from convenience stores, and paranoia is at an all time high. The Redeemer's errands are all in service of negotiating a body swap between two warring underworld families. The writing is evocative (think of empty streets, still air, swarming flies, and black puddles), but the characters themselves are extremely thin - ESPECIALLY the women. Mostly noir cut-and-pastes, though it does keep the plot moving. Most of the novel involves The Redeemer interviewing various underworld figures about the events precipitating the deaths. It's pleasantly short and engaging enough, but it did not impress me nearly as much as Signs Preceding the End of the World.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

What an interesting book. It's credited with birthing the Gothic genre (basically inventing the haunted Scooby Doo castle) and as a marketing stunt the publishers pretended it was a non-fiction manuscript from the time of the Crusades found in Italy (it invented the "found footage" genre too!). It's all here: haunted suits of armor, the lord of the castle losing his mind as he struggles to explain the paranormal happenings, booming voices speaking to characters from nowhere. I thoroughly enjoyed it, it spends a lot of time examining the moral universe of the 12th Century while still giving space to dank corridors, secret passages, torchlight bouncing on walls, and moonlight shining through arrow slits. Definitely a fun Halloween read.

Starfish by Peter Watts

Re-read but I LOVE it and I just don't think enough people have read this book so I'm talking about it again

Dark, grim, soul-crushing: this book has it all! One thing that I love about Peter Watts that I understand others might not love is how researched his books feel. Certainly makes sense for this one seeing as he is a marine biologist, and it shows. I, however, am not a marine biologist. I am not an organic chemist. I am not a psychologist specializing in childhood trauma. And despite all my shortcomings, I was able to understand all of what was happening in this book by just holding on, and occasionally googling some terms.

The rifters spend the majority of this book on the bottom of the ocean, and from like page 2 it's pretty clear they collectively have lost their minds. I think from the first chapter one of the team is already sleeping on the sea floor instead of inside the submarine base designed for them. I love the 'creeping descent into madness' genre, and this book did not disappoint. I got that feeling in my gut that all these small unstable actions the characters are taking are adding up, and they are adding up to something big. The payoff for the descent into madness was satisfying. There's a lot here about trauma and how it affects the way we act and think, but I didn't find it gratuitous which was nice.

I tend to like Peter Watt's nihilistic view of our future. He seems to be pretty certain that humanity is f***ed, and it's entirely our own doing. Whether or not I agree with the worldview presented in his novels, I find it gratifying to see humanity hitting some rock bottom of it's own design. It's hard not to put down one of his books without feeling completely empty and needing a hug.

The action of the book is mostly subdued, there's not much violence, no war. Which makes the violence that does come at the climax all the more visceral and exciting. When the majority of a book is the 'creeping descent into madness', introducing a violent third act twist makes for the kind of whiplash that, when done right, makes me read the last 120 pages in one sitting.

first read dostoyevsky crime and punishment s*** was fye

Mamdani we need ya the east coast savior

10/10

So glad this thread isn't dead!

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
A fast, brutal book about cycles of violence in a poor Mexican town. A witch is found dead, and the narrative switches POVs to tell the stories of all those orbiting the witch. Each POV illuminates something that we've learned before, or lends context to something we will learn in the future. It's a book entirely without kindness, but the slow and methodical drip-feed of information is so masterful that I felt compelled to read further. Characters are fully realized, the world feels as though it ends at the dusty, windswept outskirts of this town. It's a story that could be set in any time, any place, and would still ring just as true.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Everything everyone has ever said about this book is true. It feels like reading something out of the Book of Revelations. It paints a horrifying, red, lightning-charred picture of the American southwest. Please for the love of god just read it.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
TW: this book is ableist, even for the time in which it was written. Fantastic book, and short which I love. It was hard to tell whether this was intended to be a satire of upper-middle class Britain or if it just plays like satire to a 21st century American reader, but either way it's pregnant with meaning for both the era when Lessing wrote it and our era. A genteel married wishes to shirk the "free-love" attitude of the 60s and have as many kids as possible, raising them under the traditionalist values their nostalgia tells them is more proper than the modern age. Their fifth child comes out "monstrous" in appearance and manner, and threatens to upend the entire happy cottagecore-ass home. It's left up to the reader to determine who is to blame for the fifth child's supposed deficiencies: the child, the mother, society, etc. I read it as a story about no matter how much we seek to hide from the world, reality will always find a way through the cracks. Some others I found while reading about the book see it as a modern fairy tale in the vein of "Changelings", i.e. what if malicious faeries actually existed in our day and age. At any rate the book was nasty and evocative, and I loved every minute of it.

ill say this about Hurricane Season, it wasn''t my fav book but towards the end when the character gets locked up.. Really spooky

y'all posting some bangers

La Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (2010) 148 pages

short Argentine novella that started as a story about a hospital in Buenos Aires being used as a research center to measure the few seconds of consciousness that people experience after being beheaded. I liked the structural choices, prose and some of the storylines in that part but then it jumped ahead in time to a somewhat related story and lost me

6.8/10

American Tabloid by James Ellroy (1995) 592 pages

historical fiction meets crime thriller in a story taking place in North and Central America from 1958-1963 that follows three fictional rogue agents who get caught up in the worlds of the Kennedys, J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, and more. first Ellroy I've read and he's got an interesting style and humor that made for an entertaining crime epic full of antiheros. tho it is on the longer side, there were few times where I felt it dragged and the rest of it was a page turner. main criticism is there was some unneccessary racism that I get was part of that world/era but sometimes felt like overkill. still really enjoyed this one and will read more Ellroy in the future

8.6/10

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (2025) 293 pages

novel about a private detective in 1932 Wisconsin being hired on a case to find a heiress to a Cheese magnate. his investigation takes him to prewar Europe and expands to include a cast of characters running from or to something. the plot had its moments and some paragraphs and sentences were amazing but it all just felt so disconnected in a way and too reliant on witty dialogue instead of characterization. fourth Pynchon I've read and I was excited about this one but it just didn't work for me. it was a struggle for me to get through unlike Inherent Vice or Vineland

6.5/10