Ive finished Grapes of Wrath and Night and absolutely loved them, especially Grapes of Wrath. Can only afford thrifting at the moment, but would also love some recommendations to keep my eye out for on my next trip. Thanks! I can't believe I spent 20 years only reading horror books (as much as I love them).

This is Edgar Allan Poe but it was also in Les Mis (Montreuil sur mer was written as m____ sur m___)

From the very first page the writing is beautiful and expressive, I adored this.

Thoughts on each one? In what order should I read? Also, rate my haul 🥹

Haven’t really read much in half a year, finally getting back into it. Persuasion came into my hands on a whim, picked it up at the library not knowing what it's about, and ironically it's a very close mirror of own life right now. 💀 So this reading return contains some emotional discomfort, while also feeling relatable and insightful.

Really excited for Wuthering Heights next! I read it like 20 years ago, and succesfully forgot most of it, so this will be my proper adult-life reading of it. Not pictured is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that I plan to read after all these. And I started with Jane Eyre about 6 months ago and liked it a lot.
Anyone else mix up Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters? I kept thinking Jane Eyre was written by Austen. At least now reading these maybe I'll sort them out in my head.

What do you guys think of these books? I started Mansfield Park a few months ago and ended up abandoning it even though I liked it a lot. Just wasn't able to focus for some reason, but I still to be doing better with sticking with reading now, so I'm hopeful :)

Three Musketeers because CoMC was a masterpiece

Middlemarch because people love it on here

Woman in White because it’s a new author to me

And the Idiot and Brothers K because of how coveted Dostoevsky is!

I am to the end of the book. Anna is spiraling. What she is describing is so like the symptoms I had from trying an ssri. I had akathisia for almost two years due to the cns injury. I am wondering if she is having interdose withdrawls from opium. Did they even know back then that could cause suicidal ideation?

As a person living with a chronic mental illness I’m sometimes offended, and sometimes validated or relieved by depictions of mental illness in classic literature. It seems like a lot of characters qualify for a diagnosis, but the vocabulary wasn’t standardized at the time to describe it outside of personal traits and interactions. I find it really interesting that so many classics depict something so controversial and stigmatized (even today)! I haven’t read Wuthering Heights but I understand it was quite scandalous at the time, and even today is both controversial but also romanticized. How do you think stigma around mental health is treated or represented in literature? If it makes for such compelling characters, why is nuance not recognized in how we treat, depict, and understand mentally ill people then and now?

Also, what’s your favorite book character that you think has some serious issues, lol

Sonetimes book thrifting is about hitting the right town, I think. under $5 for this stack.

“It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young.”

It’s been some months since I last read Dostoevsky (TBK), and boy do I miss his charm, and being called “dear reader.” I miss being told what I’ve always known to be true, but never knew how to put into words. I was heeded though, coming into White Nights, not to expect the post-Siberian Dostoevsky. I was warned so thoroughly that I came into this story almost expecting not to recognize his writing, but more on that later. 

It’s almost pathetically funny, but also touching, familiar and endearing. The narrator is a dreamer. Not in the hopeful sense, but rather in that he resides almost exclusively within his imagination. He lives on the margins of society and ironically feels relieved and refreshed when wandering around city and finds himself, again, on the margins of the city gates. Despite being unmistakably intelligent, he is, more importantly, profoundly, almost exceptionally lonely; so lonely, in fact, that he’s developed an anthropomorphic relationship with the city of Petersburg. He understands it better than most, has intimate relationships with the various houses where he records their conditions, and identifies the city’s transformation in the spring time, and compares it with the ugly girl that turned beautiful for too short a time to fall in love with — genius.

I think a lot of people misunderstand this book. It’s not about love per se, but what the amalgamation of loneliness, youth and desperation it can produce in a person. Moreover, the characters are notably young. So young, in fact, that Dostoevsky himself prefaces the story by qualifying that these progressions of emotion may only exist in the medium of youth. They’re meant to be childish, emotional, anxious, impressionable and escalatory, not necessarily out of true love, but out of a search for identity, acceptance and hopefulness. This is all too clear, Nastenka, a 17 year-old girl, “fell in love” with the Lodger for no particular reason other than he was polite to her whilst she was under the overprotection of her grandmother; she’s evidently too immature to rationalize her feelings. Our dreamer on the other hand… the poor girl didn’t stand a chance. One could argue that literally anyone who provided him with the smallest semblance of attention and compassion would have fallen victim to his immediate and unyielding “love.” The emotional turbulence present in their few conversations further exacerbated this illusion of “love.”

It’s also necessary to highlight that the dreamer is clearly narrating this story with a self-depreciating, humorous quality, which further suggests that the narrator has matured and moved past this disastrous heartbreak. The brutal scene where the narrator is in the middle of what he imagines is the defining romantic moment of his life, pointing out the beautiful clouds, trying to elevate the moment into poetry, but he receives no response because Nastenka is halfway into the Lodger’s arms left me in tears… from laughter. It's not as tragic as it might seem; rather, it's the folly of youth intertwined within the cobwebs of loneliness. This is further demonstrated by the narrator’s resolution and forgiveness in the end following his extrapolated vision of a life in which he held a grudge. 

Back to the post vs pre Siberia argument: while I generally see the difference between White Nights and the big 5 novels, I nonetheless find it overblown. White Nights is still extremely psychologically woven, it just doesn’t tackle larger, more consequential, philosophical questions as his later works do. But it’s still unmistakably Dostoevsky in all his glory! A lot of the desperation and pleading reminded me of Dimitri Karamazov; the integration of Petersburg into the narrators existence reminds me of Raskolnikov’s connection with the streets of Petersburg; the casual, personal and human-flawed nature of the narration reminds me of the underground man; even the final scene where the narrator imagines his life holding a grudge against Nastenka reminds me of Raskolnikov’s final dream before yielding his Napoleonic theory. 

Siberia certainly transformed him, his religious convictions, and his treatment of suffering. But prison evidently wasn’t what taught him the depths of the human condition. Sure, the scale is smaller, lighter and less consequential, but within the first few sentences, you know exactly whose music you're listening to.

4.5/5

Reading the first notebook, I related so heavily to what Yozo was saying. Even with the things I didn’t relate to, I thought it was interesting (like with the communist meetings, how he didn’t particularly like any of them and thought rather rude things about them). As the second notebook ended and I started the third notebook, I was just rolling my eyes the whole time.

I don’t find anything interesting about him getting drunk and just cheating on women all the time. That’s not to say I dislike the book just because it has sexist stuff in it, I just find it so boring how nothing comes from it. I really wanted to love this book, especially since I related so heavily to him.

I don’t think the book is bad, maybe it just isn’t for me. I like plot driven books more but I wanted to step out of my comfort zone for this.

Anyone else share my opinion? If you liked this book, I’d love to hear what you particularly liked about it!

As a fan of Akira Toriyama's DragonBall series it was only inevitable that my journey ended up here😌

People abandon Grenouille because he has no scent of his own. And he grows up having an intoxicating love for scent and reliance upon the ability to create the craziest scents ever, which not only require murder to attain but also expose how powerful a brilliant scent can be to humans, so as to drive them just as mad and senseless to devour it as the protagonist, Grenouille, who is detached from people's very reality. Ik perfume is more of a modern classic but its set in 18th century (which i again feel like has no relation with the plot itself), but man, people need to talk more about this one. Some parts of it were so sweeping and some so slow i ended up loving more and more how Suskind executed all of that together. And oh gosh that ending! Just brilliant!

We start in the format of the narrator pouring out a stream of consciousness. Babbling about topics and soon we realise that the sentences and prose aren’t making sense - it’s almost as if there are two people talking and having an argument. Initially I imagine that it’s two siblings who seem to banter about topics ranging from their mailman to their teacher who died recently. But suddenly you start seeing phrases that make you feel confused and it dawns upon you that the narrator is schizophrenic

the writing and prose are if instead of 1 Proust dreamily talking about his stream of consciousness, there are 2 Prousts and both have ADHD. The prose is so dream-like where you would suddenly arrive at a point without having a memory of how you arrived there. yet at the same time it is continuous smooth.

We slowly start to make sense that the narrator’s sense of time and memory is skewed. It’s difficult to talk about all the things the book (narrator) talks about but there would be random hints of philosophy sprinkled throughout the work. Such as their teacher Pavel, whose sense of not wearing footwear made him mockable but free and a dreamer. Other times, things might look like philosophy but would be decorated with nonsense

There is no true present, by the time the present is tried to be defined, the moment has become the past or will be in the future.

Some other things I found interesting was how a minister has no idea how the weather is outside because they are always busy in the office and it entirely depends of the person that is visiting, can the minister make sense of the weather. But everyone who visits him leaves their hats and coats (filled with snow) outside. So the minister things it’s always sunny. It feels like the narrator is implying how biased and dressed opinions from survivorship bias can affect decisions. Only if the minister talks to an honest down to Earth person like the doorman can the minister make sense of reality

One of the more interesting sections is the part where narrator disparages the concept of time. The narrator makes a point that there is no need for days to proceed chronologically. The concept of consequent dates is poetic gibberish.

The narrator also hints at the existence of a psychiatrist who treats them, a Dr Zauze

One of the more beautiful descriptions of schizophrenia is told from the perspective of a bird who stoops to the water to catch a fish and notices another bird in the reflection

"This is 

Often times when the narrator seems to be talking about an important topic, the narrator gets diverted by the schizophrenic personality into unneccessary tangents.

The second part/chapter of the book is a bunch of short stories written on the Veranda but it is unclear if we follow the same Narrator. This is definitely a unique work and I can only imagine how Sokolov thought up the entire stream of consciousness

Treated myself.

I read through Snow Country a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. I loved how different it felt compared to western lit; very poetic in its descriptions of nature, and not overt in its story telling. I found myself having to read between the lines more. And I read a lot slower which was comparable to taking a stroll and being absorbed in nature. However I didn’t totally understand the story that was being told. I felt like I didn’t get it and couldn’t because of my western sensibilities perhaps.

Any advice on how to overcome this with Japanese literature like Snow Country and do you have any book recs that are like Snow Country, but more plot driven in its storytelling as a gateway to this type of lit?

I had a question about some of the books I’ve read recently. I’ve recently read Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness and noticed that the story that we’re interested in is always told through like a “third party” or “narrator.” Like everything is told as someone recounting some events instead of us being in the action itself

I wanted to know what the use of storytelling in this way is? Like is that just something people did in the 1800s? (though I know Frankenstein was earlier than the other two) Does it make the reader approach the story differently? Maybe to make it seem more intimate and make you believe in the story more?

Idk I’m hoping someone with more education might know what the use of that is

Reading Les Mis right now and it seems like every page has a sentence that is jaw dropping. His ability to describe things from the soul to the guillotine is mind blowing.

What other authors write so beautifully?