u/Hot_Construction1529

My Vanguard Roth IRA holds $22,140, with $4,000 remaining to contribute this year. Its current allocation is 60% VOO, 13% META, 18% MSFT, and 9% NVDA.

I also have an old employer 401k through Vanguard containing $28,900, which is invested 100% in VIGIX.

My current employer 401k at Fidelity holds $2,410, 100% in S&P 500 Index, and I contribute 3% to capture the full employer match.

I have two HSAs: one from a previous employer with $2,500 that is currently uninvested due to a threshold requirement, and a second from my current employer with $3,040, of which $1,040 is invested.

I hold $11,500 in a Vanguard Cash Plus account as an emergency fund which gets 3.35% APY, $1,000 in a general bank account, and $411 in a Fidelity brokerage account that is currently paused while I prioritize tax-advantaged accounts.

My financial goals for the rest of the year are increasing my VOO within my Roth IRA to at least 80% to reduce my reliance on individual stock picking. I also plan to consolidate my two HSAs. I want to max out my Roth IRA and HSA contributions, increase my emergency fund to $15,000, and then resume contributions to my brokerage account.

Additionally, I have a medium-term goal to purchase a used vehicle in the next 12-18 months entirely in cash.

My current annual salary is $74,000, take-home pay of approximately $4,500 a month.

I live at home and pay only $500 in monthly rent, my expenses generally remain well under $2,000 per month, and I have no debt.

I have three that I really love. The first is Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy. I think Troyat may have made a conscious choice to write in a style that feels vaguely similar to Tolstoy's own writing, or maybe he just absorbed it through all the deep research and reading he did, and it's really beautiful to read this sweeping epic of the artist's life in a novelistic style that is reminiscent of Tolstoy's own. What I love about Tolstoy's life is his contradictions. He preached a kind of selflessness and altruism, but was very selfish and horrible to so many people close to him. Yet, through his hypocrisy, I do think he truly believed in the ideals he preached, and wanted to be good, only he couldn't fully find his way.

My second is a biography of the ballet dancer, Rudolph Nureyev, by Diane Solway. I don't know if it's really a great biography because of the writer, but Nureyev's life is just so insane and cool. He is someone who I distinctly feel had a destiny, and he never wavered from it from a very young age.

The last is a multi-part biography, Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles. I love Orson Welles' life because even though he achieved so much, and was so talented, he was a failure, and he would say this himself. He also had such an insane life, he was a true prodigy, directing his own theater at 19 years old is wild, and he ending up so far from where he started. The book made me feel that Orson Welles was not purely a genius of the cinematic art, but that he could have done many different things and been world class at them, and that at the end, he felt regret that it was cinema that he chose, maybe because of all of the personal failures and struggles for creative control, or maybe because in the end he felt cinema was perhaps a bit more frivolous than the transcendent art he'd hoped for. It's amazing that even with all his failures, he was widely considered the greatest film director ever until falling a bit out of favor in the last 20 years or so.

I am reading simultaneously Marguerite Duras' novella, The Lover, and by coincidence and without forethought the book of Jeremiah in the bible. Duras is highly romantic, and I love this simple yet painterly and slightly ambiguous style that she has. Some lines will make you hmmm and you don't know exactly what she means, almost a non-sequitur sometimes. The prose isn't complicated, but it is elusive, elliptical, indicative. It suggests.

The eroticism and romance of The Lover is steeped in the understanding that love provides life with color the way a prism receives and scatters a ray of light. If the light comes from ahead, like love strikes us suddenly, then behind us the light is scattered into the various colors. These various colors are like the way that love alters the past. It ceases to be this collection of disparate experiences and becomes a trajectory. All that we have done, experienced, suffered, appears now changed. It was preparing us for a revelation, for the discovery of love.

In Jeremiah, there is a verse that goes, "The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee." This is of course about God and Israel but I decided in my head that it can be repurposed to be between two lovers. Now it becomes a very horny and romantic verse, "He hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn thee."

There is this faithfulness in "everlasting" that isn't something Duras would say, because that kind of certainty isn't her deal. She understands no matter how we feel, parts of our experiences are temporal. She accepts the transience of desire. But if we think of it as a declaration of something aspirational, something a lover wants to mean, even if they can't truly, then it brings this beautiful melancholy. Even though the events of your life before you meet a great love didn't have a purpose necessarily, didn't serve this love, they do feel as if they have propelled you toward it or prepared you for it. When love arrives, the whole past changes in its light. When love arrives, life moves at a different speed, which is that of fate.

If you place the verse within the story of The Lover, it becomes a physical love too, "with lovingkindness have I drawn thee," like being drawn into a deep kiss slowly and firmly, by someone who really wants you, but who does it gently, so that you have time to meet their desire with your willingness.

For the doctors you've got Chekhov, Celine, Somerset Maugham, Michael Crichton, and then on the other hand Flaubert, Kafka, GGM, and John Grisham representing the lawyers. I am including the dropouts like Flaubert (who was only a law student) and Maugham (never practiced medicine).

Do you seen any similarities in approach, aesthetics, or worldview in the two camps?

I'm having trouble defining this, but I love when a novel has a section that goes into greater detail regarding a peripheral character and fleshes out a micro narrative or side plot that, while perhaps not essential to the novel, somehow works.

It's usually in a novel that is more panoramic, maybe a limited omniscient narrator, and the section is somewhat self-contained and independent from the rest. The side plot could be excised from the story without really affecting the main characters, but for whatever reason it's kept in, perhaps because it expounds upon certain themes of the novel in a tangential or oblique way, or maybe because it makes the world feel more real.

Something like One Hundred Years of Solitude is almost this to the extreme in that it's made up basically entirely of tangential plots. I like when the side character almost becomes the main character of the novel for a few pages or a chapter. If you're too utilitarian, it might feel superfluous and annoying because it doesn't matter for the plot, but something about it is appealing to me.

Any thoughts?

I'm interested in other examples of this besides the most famous, in Madame Bovary. If you haven't read it, or need a reminder, Flaubert begins by grounding the narrator as a fellow student of Charles Bovary, but within a few pages the narrator fades completely into the background, the narration becomes more godlike and removed, describing scenes which the individual in the beginning could not possibly have seen. I know there must be other examples, I feel I have probably read a few but they don't immediately come to mind.

What I find exciting and artistic about this choice is that it functions as a kind of free indirect discourse sort of, but on a grander level than what is typical. If you read Madame Bovary always remembering the disappearing narrator, there are a few passages which take on a certain mysterious beauty because it's like the narrator seems to speak more subjectively, to appear again, like he slips back into this ever so slight sentimentality, which seems more human, more like the beginning, and you can't tell for certain if this is Flaubert speaking as the author, as the limited narrator of the first few pages, or if it is the tone which the novel is more known for, that impassive, removed, Demiurge-like figure who seems to look down on the characters with a bemused cruelty.

Is there any interesting criticism about the purpose or intention behind it? I want to believe it's more than just authors partaking in the conventions of the novel writers of their time.