) saw most of the Doctor Finlay tv series of the 1990's, and quite liked it, and it inspired me to seek out some A.J. Cronin novels. I've now read two or three of his books now and (The Citadel, A Song of Sixpence, A Pocketful of Rye and The Stars Look Down. He has a lot more books and I'm going to look for them. They are a fascinating study of medical practices in the 1930's and 40's in the UK....and I'm surprised at how similar they are to what I experience in my doctor's office or hear about from others here in Canada. A lot of description of ethical dilemmas. I'm wondering if there are any others familiar with his books.....or with other television dramas based on his stories.

I rate things mostly by heart and feeling but as I’m reading so many books I love, I’m finding that I need to be more intricate with my rankings if I want to get an accurate picture. I’m not saying this is a necessity for everyone that rates books, but just my personal preference I’m trying to adopt.

Here is what I have so far:

1.0 - Prose
1.0 - Plot (unless it’s a novel that is mostly plotless)
1.0 - Character(s) - this can be subjective. Enjoyable characters? Character growth?
1.0 - Themes and how they are presented
1.0 - ending
1.0 - Did I feel anything or resonate with the text?
1.0 - ?
1.0 - ?
1.0 - ?
1.0 - ?

I read mostly classic lit and while I’m trying to learn to become more analytical and comprehensive, I think my skills are still at a surface level such as these examples. Does anyone have any ideas to add to this list so I can round out an even 10.0?

I will start by saying I will not read another book by John Grisham. I have read over half of his published works and find his writing style to be an easy read. I know he is a very popular author, and many would describe him as a formulaic writer that produces "page turners that lack substance". Frankly, I am ok with reading page turners at times. I am pushing 60 and I really enjoyed his work in the 1990s. When I came back to reading in the 2010's, he was an author I would read because of my good memories of his early work. But increasingly in the 2020's, I find his books to be very frustrating at times.

Since The French Illusion is new, I will use spoilers for comments on it. I listened to the audiobook, as that is how I consume books these days. And I enjoyed the story and the writing of this book, for the most part. There were some parts that didn't make sense, but pushed the story along. This was a book that I felt as I listened, was broken into two parts. The first half, or even more than half, was setting up the real story. Newlyweds are kidnapped in Paris and the wife is ransomed and released while the husband is ransomed but not released. Story jumps back and forth between Paul in captivity and events in the outside world where the FBI tries to find him. And then over halfway through, a young lawyer is recruited to be a decoy to be kidnapped in order to save Paul and two other kidnapped Americans. And I thought this was the real plot of the book, following the decoy, Stuart Nash, as he helps in the rescue mission. There is graphic torture scenes of the kidnapped Americans and time is spent on the training of Stuart for the rescue. But there is no rescue. After Stuart is kidnapped, the American government pays a ransom and the men are released. So why did I read about the rescue planning? Why was it important to follow Stuart's recruitment and training? This whole book was a waste of time with the bad guy winning and getting away. Yes, the story was propulsive and built tension, but i need a purpose to reward

my invested time. Why bother with writing how Paul's family is struggling with money if they are essentially forgotten in the second half of the book. Why bother writing about recruiting Stuart and training him if the government is going to end up paying a ransom. I just feel this was a colossal waste of my time.

Wow, what a book. Definitely gonna be one of my favorites of the year. Written in 1971, as relevant today as it was back then. On the surface it's an action novel set in the Harlem reinassaince, but it's so much more.

It defies description. It’s like a Pynchon novel from a black POV, creative formatting and a healthy dash of Assassin’s Creed. It’s a cultured take down of American society combined with an action film, a bizarre look into a parallel reality where the Titanic is sailing in 1929 and Moses (of Egypt fame) had a rock band. At times it felt like reading a counterculture pamphlet, or a Freire/Chomsky combined essay, at others like watching a movie Tarantino would rip off and add even more n-words.

In an even more bizarre description, it's what Kuang's Babel tried to do, but by a competent author. It's a real takedown of colonialism and the dominant cultures that has real depth. It's not just a series of stereotypes thrown around. You will come out of this book more educated, asking more questions, with a reading list 5 pages long.

"Fever dream" is overused, but that's what it is. Handwritten pages, unrelated photography, anachronisms, real people weaving in and out of the story.

Has anyone read any other of his books? I understand this is his masterpiece but curious if others match the same vibe.

Edit: Forgot to ask, do you think the art thieves being called mutafikah is intentionally both an Islamic reference and a bastardization of motherfuckers?

This book tells two stories. The first story is about a large piece of Jade which is carved into a Ming Dynasty masterpiece and the various places it goes. The second story is a search for that "lost" masterpiece. The story is very well done, and remains interesting all the way through. The ending was an unexpected, yet a pretty realistic surprise. The jade carving touches on a lot of different points of history, but the story doesn't get bogged down in historical details, but all the different historical points does keep the search interesting.

Just finished Collin Gosselin’s “In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of my Childhood”. I listened to it and Collin narrated it himself.

It was absolutely devastating. As someone who watching Jon and Kate + 8 for a few years and then saw when Kate said Collin needed help, I never imagined what he was going through.

I don’t usually cry at books but I cried a couple times. From sadness, anger, and eventually happiness for him.

On a random note: I will no longer be supporting TLC by watching their shows. They should be ashamed of themselves. I didn’t have a high opinion of them before and now it’s way worse.

I just finished The Starless Sea, and I know I’m a little late but I wanted to write up my thoughts. I haven’t read The Night Circus, a friend recommended The Starless Sea and so I went into the book not knowing anything about it.

The Starless Sea is a story about stories. Specially it’s a story about the DNA of stories. Stories are made of imagery. They have themes, motifs, symbols, atmosphere, and affect. Stories are made of tropes. They have love stories, adventure, mysteries, and origin stories. And, most importantly, stories have organization. They have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a climax. They have a call to adventure. They set the scene and tie up loose ends.

And so, The Starless Sea is about what happens when a story loses its organizing logic and becomes deconstructed into just its DNA. The imagery becomes overwhelming and redundant. Scenes are disconnected. Characters appear and disappear without purpose. Symbolism takes over and in doing so loses its meaning.

And the book itself is constructed in just this way. As the Harbor deconstructs, the story itself also deconstructs. The book has a clear, traditional beginning and end, but the middle (and the majority of the book) becomes more and more meandering. The fables repeat the same story on a loop without progressing the story. Our main characters seem lost in the Harbor, drifting from one place to another. The book is both about a story that lost its way and it is itself a story that lost its way.

Having said all that- I liked the idea but didn’t love the execution. Everything just felt so shallow and surface level. And there were just so. many. symbols. And they were all so generic. The keys, the swords, the hearts, the bees, the owls, the cats, the books…. They can’t all be equally important, and so they ended up all feeling meaningless. The atmosphere/ affect just got so boring and repetitive after a while, and again just felt generic. Cocktails, Harry Potter, dusty books, fancy food… it just felt so vague and devoid of any substance.

I also truly disliked the repetition of Zachary’s name and “son of a fortune teller.” It didn’t add anything for me and started to feel annoying.

I read some opinions after I finished and saw a lot of people didn’t like Zachary. I liked him, or at least I didn’t mind him. I think he was basically a blank vessel for the story to deconstruct around.

So! Those are my thoughts. Thanks for reading.

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!

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) tells the story of Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a political prisoner in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s, and is based on Solzhenitsyn's real life experience living in a gulag.

This novella is short but phenomenal. The book doesnt focus on the gulag system as a whole or in Soviet Union's politics. It rather focuses on the human experiences in imprisonment. As the name indicates, it focuses on one day in the camp, from waking up to falling asleep. And the book's descriptions are so immersive that I felt like I was in the camp as well. The descriptions of the Siberian cold were particularly potent, but my favourite part was the description of the simple things that made the protagonist happy (a cigarette, an extra 100grams of bread, not being sent to solitary confinement...).

This book is above all about resilience and about how humans adapt to whatever awful situation they're thrown into and manage to find little comforts to keep on living for. You can see that the author was writing about his own experience, as he details the little things so well. For example, he explains the informal economy in the camp and how you could do "odd jobs" to gain some little rewards, which I found super interesting.

The only thing is that I wish I couldve read this book in Russian (which I unfortunately cant do) because the English translation I read wasnt amazing. It wasnt terrible and thankfully I read it on a kindle so I could check the dictionary there, but I am curious how different the book would be in its original language.

About the author, Solzhenitsyn had a very though life. He was sent to Siberia because, while he was serving in the army during WWII, he sent a letter to a friend where he criticized Stalin's military strategy. He spent 5 years in a gulag, then he was sent to exhile in Kazakhstan (oh and he had a very serious cancer during this time). Then he managed to publish "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962 in a period of relative calm (during Nikita Kruschev's government) and won a Nobel Prize. Then he wrote his other, more famous book "Gulag Archipelago" and was expelled from Soviet Union again.

I’m reading one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

I actually read it before alongside my dad. He had his copy in Dutch, I had mine in English, both translated from the original Spanish. It’s about a man who discovers a mysterious book and becomes obsessed with finding its author and uncovering what happened to him, all set against the streets of Barcelona.

And we were reading it while we were actually in Barcelona.

There was this one moment where we were sitting together on a square, eating manchego and reading. At some point we both looked up at the buildings around us, and my dad suddenly went, “I think this chapter takes place… right here?”

By complete coincidence, we were at almost exactly the same point in the book.

So we put the books away and started walking through Barcelona, following the streets and places from the descriptions in the chapter.

My father passed away three months ago, and this memory came back to me while reading this again. Sitting together on that square, realizing that the story we were both reading was unfolding in the streets around us, and then going off to explore them together.

It was already an incredible book. Now it’s one I don’t think I could ever separate from him.

Just felt like sharing that.

So I have never beenuch of a physcal book reader until last year when for some strange reason I picked up a physical book for the first time in since my college days. I had always been more drawn towards audiobooks for the ease of use and the fact I was a slow reader. Thankfuly that has changed as long as I have a book that captures my attention.

Now 2 years later I have read probably close to 50 books. Most of these books are newer books and they all had something in common... no Table of Contents. I get that not all books have chapter names but i always enjoyed looking over the outline of the book and seeing how many pages each chapter has made up of. It seems strange to me that this has disappeared in the time I read of school till now. Does anyone know why we have gone away from this? Did anyone else enjoy having a Table of Contents?

Anyways I am currently reading Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree. Thanks for letting me ramble. Hope you all have a wonderful day.

Anybody read this short story? Spoilers follow, although it’s more of a straightforward speculative piece, there’s no big twist as in many of his stories.

In the story, a man sees how powerful computers have become and wonders: if computers follow rules, and words have rules, why couldn’t computers write words?

“A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Would it not be possible, on this principle, to build a memory of almost unlimited size?”

His companion questions why anybody would want to read a story written by a computer.

“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. And stories - well - they’re just another product. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country!”

That done, he then sets out to pay the big human authors money to never write again, and let him put their names on his stuff. But he has to be careful:

“Thereafter, Knipe wisely decided to concentrate only on mediocrity. Anything better than that - and there were so few it didn’t matter much - was apparently not quite so easy to seduce. He found that the older ones, those who were running out of ideas, were the easiest to handle. The younger people were more troublesome. They were apt to become abusive when he approached them.”

Finally:

“This last year it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were published by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.”

Uncanny stuff, eh…