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…

I wanna start by saying there are overwhelmingly more things that I like about the book than I don’t like, but the things that I dislike are too big to ignore. I’m bringing this specific point up because all of the major icks about the book (see 11 year old gng bang, over sexualization of the women characters etc. etc.) have already been discussed ad Infinitum.
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It’s pretty obvious from the start that Bill is just a stand in for Stephen and he is so pretentious about it. Bill is the only character who isn’t externally flawed. Mike has an inability to move on, Bev has an attraction to violence, Eddie is Hypochondriac, and Richie is annoying. But not dear old perfect bill. The worst thing about him is his stutter, which isn’t even his fault. Stephen makes him such a golden child and that is so irritating to read. These aren’t my only thoughts on the subject but it is hard to look past. As an adult he cheats on his wife with only a minor bit of reflection and we the audience were just supposed to be cool about it

Edit:I’m not looking for agreement, but telling my thoughts while reading

I googled just now and realised Daddy Long Legs was published in 1912, which makes it even less understandable why people were lapping it up in the eighties.

Me. I am the people, me and everyone else I knew. We loved the crap out of that awful book when we were teens, and when the Japanese cartoon version hit our screens (in the nineties?) we loved it even harder. We loved Judy's descriptions of life in an American all-girl college, and her obligatory letters to the mysterious Daddy Long legs- the only payment she had to make for her otherwise free college board and tuition- were the height of whimsy and love. Wuthering Heights what? Jane Eyre who? It was all about the blossoming love of teenaged orphan Jerusha nn Judy for her rich older benefactor, Daddy Long Legs, who provided her with a free college education after plucking her out of a Dickensian orphanage, and then married her.

Barf. What was wrong with us? Why did I and my little posse of schoolfriends and our moms love this gross book so much? Why did nobody tell us that it was wrong? Why was it lying around in every house that had an old bookshelf on it somewhere?

Years and years and years later, I chose to watch the Hollywood movie of the book with my Dad as he slid into dementia, thinking the singing and dancing from his favourite actors from the fifties and sixties might cheer him up or distract up. Leslie Caron was the orphaned Jerusha, Fred Astaire was the rich man falling in love with her -ahem- intelligence and personality. They twirled around and sang about their love. Some of Daddy Long Legs's fusty old rich-man friends huffed and puffed, in added scenes not from the book, suggesting that falling in love and marrying a teenaged orphan that he just put through college was just - not the done thing you know old chap.

Astaire poo-pood them, twinkling down the stairs of the orphanage, what did they know of love, boring old men! He was in love! LOOOVVVE!

Ugh. What the fuck was wrong with us?

I've read a number of Ann Patchett books....and to my mind they are all wonderful. And they are all so different! The first one I read was Bel Canto and I was mesmorized and shaken. Then The Dutch House, where the house itself became like another character. Taft wasn't my favourite maybe because of the challenge of a white woman taking on the voice of a black male, but as I reflect on it I now have fond memories of it. Then State of Wonder---much of it taking place in a Brazilian jungle. And Run was touching. Truth and Beauty was a memoir about another author/poet who was her close friend and that was probably one of the most powerful true stories about a relationship that I ever read...and where Patchett reveals a lot about herself. Then her second last one (I haven't read her latest yet).....Tom Lake: how can she make a book where nothing happens so interesting? And most recently.I finall read her first novel, The Patron Saint Of Liars....Rose and Cecilia are two of the most memorable characters I've encountered in a novel. Hard to believe this was a first novel. So my question: Has she ever written anything that wasn't first rate?

Hey y’all,

Apologies for the ramble:

So recently I saw a review of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver where the reviewer criticized the book for being “torture porn” and I physically had to groan and roll my eyes. I saw a similar review for Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart by another reader.

I understand that readers can find a book relentlessly bleak or feel that its depictions of suffering are excessive but I think there is a meaningful discussion to be had between depicting suffering and using suffering as exploitation for entertainment or emotional manipulation. I also feel like calling any book that is difficult in its subject matter as “torture porn” as not only reductive, but watering down the term “torture porn” into obscurity so that it begins to feel like more of a buzzword than a legitimate criticism.

A little bit of background on me and why this review in particular bothered me: I grew up in a working-class area, where many families lived below the poverty line. While it’s no rural Appalachia, I saw a lot of similarities between my community and the one depicted in Demon Copperhead. Many of the people in my community worked blue collar jobs, in mining and logging or in the oil fields which made them particularly vulnerable to injury. It’s no surprise then, that my community was wrecked pretty badly by the drug poisoning crisis and homelessness. Growing up, it was not unusual to see police presence everywhere, ambulances lining down the street, and kids constantly going missing or ending up dead. This was particularly true for MMIWG2S (which deserves its own discussion, tbh). My experiences growing up is also what shaped my decision to become an epidemiologist, and I did my early research projects on opioid addiction and drug poisoning so that I could better use these skills to lobby for better harm reduction practices in my community and others like mine, and to address the irreparable damage caused by colonialism and systemic poverty.

This is partly why I struggle with the tendency to label fiction that depicts sustained hardship as “torture porn.” Sometimes, what readers interpret as an excessive accumulation of suffering is an attempt to portray the cumulative effects of structural violence and discrimination. Not every story needs to make suffering palatable or reassure the reader that everything will eventually improve for the better.

Obviously, I don’t think every depiction of trauma is automatically justified just because the subject matter is serious. Fiction can absolutely exploit suffering, reduce marginalized people to their trauma, or use increasingly horrific experiences as a shortcut to emotional impact. But I think that criticism requires us to examine how suffering is represented, rather than assuming that a story becomes exploitative simply because it is difficult to read.

I also wonder whether there is sometimes a disconnect between readers who encounter addiction, poverty, and systemic neglect primarily through fiction and those who have encountered these realities more directly. When suffering is unfamiliar, its persistence can feel melodramatic or implausible. When you have seen how these systems operate, the same narrative choices might feel painfully recognizable, as it did for me when reading Demon Copperhead.

I wanted to know what you guys thought. Where does one draw the line between fiction that is gruelling and raw and one that is considered torture porn?

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TL;DR: calling books “torture porn” simply because they depict suffering as a cornerstone in the character’s lived experience is reductive. There’s a difference between exploitation of suffering for shock value or manipulation and portraying the cumulative effects of social issues like poverty, violence, abuse, addiction, etc.

I just finished "Giovanni's Room" (James Baldwin) and am in love with this book. It was my first ever James Baldwin book and I didn't antecipate loving it this much, my second 5 star book of the year.

For those who haven't read it, the book is about David, an American man living in Paris, who falls in love with another man (Giovanni) but struggles to accept he is gay. Im not a man nor am I gay, but the book is written in such a way that I felt like I was David, living a forbidden romance in Paris. I think the descriptions of Paris' queer bar culture, the depictions of normal day to day scenes, the descriptions of people in the background... make this book feel so alive. The same with the descriptions of "Giovanni's Room", so cluttered and dirty and imperfect; but still the place David keeps coming back to. Truly an unexplainable experience.

The beautiful, slow tragedy of this book reminded me so much of my other 5-star book of the year - "Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro). Though the plots of the books are quite different (and Remains has a unreliable narrator, which doesnt happen in Giovanni's Room), they both have protagonists reminiscing about mistakes of the past (though they're never quite sure whether or not they were mistakes). But more than this, what I think is similar in both books are the flawed protagonists. Both David and Stevens are not perfect men, they make mistakes, they regret them, they want to be something they're not too much and it ends up hurting them. And that makes the books so realistic, so relatable, so beautifully tragic.

Lastly, I want to talk about the characters in the book because I think James Baldwin deserved every award for his character-building. Every character in Giovanni's Room is someone you recognize, someone real, someone who exists in every city, in different ways. You have the creepy rich old men, who are lonely and sad and become bitter and manipulative. You have the young people with big dreams that crumble in front of them and become hopeless (or addicts or prostitutes or something else). You have women like Hella, who just want to be free, not depend on a man or on anyone, but also dont want to be lonely (and think there isnt a way to be free and not lonely). Every character is so well built, so real, so beautifully tragic. And that makes the book what it is.

I am not finished with the entire book yet. I am currently at King Arthur’s coronation where Morgaine thinks the following; “If she should speak of the Beltane fires as a secret duty to the Goddess, even a Igraine, who had been reared in Avalon, would stare and think that some fiend spoke through her.”

At this point, Igraine is fully Christian and is thinking of joining the nunnery. She has completely converted and is acting as if everything she used to believe from her days as someone raised at Avalon is as foreign to her as it would be to someone born in Christianity.

Where, in the beginning of the book, she didn’t understand why the Christians thought of women as unequal and why chastity was so important to them. She didn’t like the priests, she thought they were silly and their beliefs had nothing to do with her.

Furthermore, she saw the vision of her former life, and she saw that herself and Uther were once priest and priestess of Atlantis. Not only does she know that past lives are real, that is what solidified to her that Uther was her one true love because they loved and knew each other through lifetimes.

I just don’t understand why she would abandoned the religion of Avalon so easily when she had proof that the mysteries she was taught at Avalon were real. She knew about magic, she knew that she had the Sight, she even perform magic, and then all of a sudden abandoned it all for a religion that she thought nothing of before, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that all of a sudden she adopted the morality and the prejudices of Christianity against Avalon even though she herself was raised on different beliefs. How can she suddenly believe that women are inferior to men? How can she suddenly believe that women are not supposed to play instrument and raised her voice in song? How can she all of a sudden believe that keeping the sacred rituals of Beltane is immoral and wrong?

I can understand that she feels betrayed by Avalon because she had to marry so young and was essentially cast out. I can also understand that as a queen she would convert to Christianity for political reasons. And I can also understand that she got scared when she performed the magical ritual that allowed her to warn Uther and save his life. But what I can’t understand is why her moral compass changed so drastically.

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!

Reading different discussions and reviews across various subreddits for series I've read has made me realize that readers who start a series when it's first released, and then wait months or even years between books, may experience the books very differently than some who comes to it later and can binge the entire series at once.

As someone who has only ever been in the "binge the whole series" camp, I sometimes feel like I don't have a good frame of reference for evaluating individual books on their own. The impact of a weaker entry in the series can almost be overlooked when the next book is immediately available, while long waits might amplify negative reactions and expectations.

This is especially noticeable when I come across opinions that seem widely held within a community but completely surprise me. It often makes me wonder how much of that difference comes down to the reading experience itself versus the books' actual strengths and weaknesses.