r/TrueLit

I just finished Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn', and to say that I'm disappointed would be an understatement. Let me try and point out a few reasons:

• I didn't see a single original idea or a new poetic vision. The entire thing was very predictable once you understood his main preoccupation, which in itself is not particularly exciting. Relatedly, the writing is extremely formulaic, even if the formula is his own. 'I do this random thing, then I see this random object X, which reminds me of Y, who usually is a famous person or event in the past'. Boring as hell, and not realistic.
• In his attempt to support that main preoccupation (simply put, the pervasiveness of decay), much was exaggerated in a truly forced and brutish way and much was blatantly omitted lest it may expose the cracks in the author's one-sided perception.
• The writing lacks vitality to such a degree that I ended up feeling a mixture of repulsion and pity for the author. Inspiring pity for the author (not the narrator/hero) is in my mind the mark of very poor writing and, worse, of an imagination deprived of that artistic spark that's necessary for great creation.
• The whole book relied on a sort of nerdy cataloguing of others' original works and/or lives. I guess the sole value in the piece for me was that I learned some interesting facts.

Am I missing something? I can accept that there are of course differences in tastes. What I cannot understand is how can writing so sterile be considered 'great'. My point isn't against pessimism per se. I can love pessimist writers, when they're good. But even a pessimistic outlook needs some burning within, perhaps the burning of disappointment or lingering hope. Reading Sebald felt to me like dissecting a corpse.

Mornin', everybody, and thanks for joining us today! Here's the discussion thread for the second half of City of Glass, the first book in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

Here are a few random thoughts to get you started....

• The second imaginary Paul Auster is busy preparing an article (Ch. 10) to prove that Sancho Panza wrote Don Quixote. Do you think this is:
  • The luscious metafictional equivalent to a bulging pastrami and rye in an East Side deli.
  • Over the top and off the rails.
  • In between, both, or other.
• How did you respond to Quinn's essay about New York?
• How did you interpret Quinn's reasoning to stay on the Stillman case (end of Ch. 11)? Was it credible? Could you empathize? Did the real Auster, you should forgive the expression, leave something out (intentionally or otherwise)?
• How did you do with the ending? Did everything get wrapped up to your satisfaction?
• Speaking of the ending, a narrator who has been invisible since about page 3 comes back, loudly, in the last couple of pages. Any ideas on who that guy is?
• If you started reading City of Glass without looking at the copyright date, when would you think it was written or published?

Or anything else that's on your mind. I hope you'll enjoy this week's discussion and next week's dissection of Ghosts.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Every December, people post their Goodreads challenges showing they hit their 50 book goal.

I used to do this. I would speed read, listen to audiobooks on 2x speed, and pick shorter books just to hit the number. Then someone asked me to explain the core premise of a book I had read three months prior, and I drew a blank.

Volume is the enemy of depth. If you are racing to finish a book, you are not stopping to reflect, argue with the author, or apply the concepts. You are just letting words wash over your brain so you can check a box.

Reading fewer books, but reading them twice, taking notes, and discussing them, yields a massive return on investment. Reading 50 books just gives you a tweet.

Have we gamified reading to the point where it lost its actual purpose?

Hi all.

With the recent removal of the auto-moderator, there has been a large influx of posts that typically would have been filtered out. Given our mod community is small and busy in other realms of life, sometimes certain posts remain up that probably shouldn't have, and some which have straight-up broken seven rules make it through until we come back and see them.

So! Three important things:

1. All rules are in the side bar. You are expected to read and know them before making a post. If you have never posted here, this is a must. Given the influx of these types of rule breaking posts, repeat offenders will be banned. Your first post will be removed, and your second post will result in banning. These rules are not convoluted.

2. Please report! Not every report will result in removal. Moderators take many things into account. However, if you see a post that is possibly or definitely breaking a rule, please report it. This notifies us more immediately and directly, so we don't have to open reddit and scan through the recent posts on the page.

3. No AI in any circumstances. This is technically already stated in 5.3, but I am reiterating it here because the influx of AI written/edited posts is at an all-time high. There is no AI allowed for any reason whatsoever. AI use will result in an immediate ban. This is an anti-AI community. See yourself out if you disagree.

Thank you to those who help keep this community a great place to talk about literature. Let's try to keep it that way.

Lately I have found myself wondering whether we are living through a period in which genuinely great literature has become increasingly rare. I don’t mean that contemporary fiction is bad. On the contrary, there are many accomplished, intelligent, and beautifully written novels being published. Yet they often strike me as *very good* rather than *great* in the sense of works that fundamentally reshape our understanding of the novel or alter the way we read the world.
I realize that literary greatness can only be judged across time, but I also wonder whether we have become more hesitant, aesthetically or culturally, to produce works with that kind of ambition. Is this simply nostalgia, survivorship bias, or has something changed in the conditions under which literature is written and received?
For me, Elena Ferrante is perhaps the last contemporary novelist whose work feels genuinely canonical in scope and emotional depth, whose fiction seems likely to endure as more than a document of its historical moment. I would love to be persuaded otherwise.
Which novels published in roughly the last twenty years do you think deserve to be called *great* rather than merely *good*? I’m less interested in books that are currently fashionable and more interested in works that possess genuine aesthetic ambition and the potential for lasting significance. What recent novels should I keep an eye out for, and why?

For context, when this story won the Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean back in May 2026, its alleged use of AI led to Granta refusing to continue supporting the prize, citing a lack of confidence in the integrity of the judging process:

>The 2026 selection of the regional winners of the Commonwealth prize caused a great deal of controversy, based on the speculation that one or more of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated, accusations that were strongly rejected by the authors. For the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships. We will keep the Commonwealth prize shortlisted stories on our website in the public interest, and wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work.

The story, The Serpent in the Grove, contains the now-infamous line “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”; many commenters who read the story, published on Granta's site before they pulled out of supporting the prizewinners with publication, agreed that, even if the story wasn't AI-generated, it was... bad; full of strange similes that didn't seem to make any tangible sense, and imagery that felt too abstract to convey any real meaning. For example, this paragraph:

>Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink. She moved through that shop like heat through dry bush.

People also pointed out that the author's photo appeared either AI-generated or edited with AI, and his LinkedIn page, which boasted that he was a business consultant in 'organizational transformation and business expansion', included content that promoted LLMs.

In response to the controversy, the Commonwealth Prize judges announced that they had done a 'thorough review', and would not be withdrawing the story from consideration.

Interestingly, as per their own statement, they describe their review process as follows:

>We held detailed discussions with all regional winners about their creative process, and they collaborated fully in our review. We also examined evidence related to the development of their stories, including working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes. After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories. Therefore, we will proceed with the regional winners selected by the independent judging process.

But the author of the story in question previously explained away his lack of dated working drafts in an interview accordingly:

>“My writing process is unusual – it is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions which make sustained, desk-bound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech-to-text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing, along with the same process of speech-to-text. I have used this in my professional life and also to produce my story for the Commonwealth competition.”

So it would certainly be interesting to learn how he then produced the requisite time-stamped documents.

The story at the heart of the controversy has now been announced as the overall winner of the prize, chosen out of a whopping 7,806 entries, and I wonder what this says about the perceived merits of AI-generated prose, what about this particular story spoke to the judges, and what this means for writing prizes in general in an era where it's becoming increasingly difficult to definitively prove AI usage, even in cases where the writing itself seems to give away the game.

In 2025 I wrote a long profile of Vollmann for The Metropolitan Review.

Last week I was able to coordinate a visit, thanks to his publicist at Arcade (the publisher of Table for Fortune), and met with Vollmann at his Sacramento studio. We talked for three hours about Table for Fortune, journalism, and what he's doing with the time he has left. (We also went for barbecue.)

Early internet pioneers talked about a utopian future where every human had access to the sum of all knowledge. They pictured a global library where we would all become scholars.

We got the access. The knowledge is there. But the interface to that knowledge was built by behavioral psychologists and advertising executives.

They realized that a library does not generate ad revenue. A casino does. So they turned the feed into a slot machine. Pull the lever, get a little hit of outrage, humor, or novelty. Pull it again.

The tragedy isn't that the knowledge is gone. It is that it is sitting right there, buried under an interface designed to hijack our dopamine receptors so we never actually click the link to read the dense, difficult paper.

Are we permanently stuck with the casino interface, or is there a way back to the library?

This AMA has now ended.

A message from Charlotte and Liese:

"Thank you for all your questions! We hope you found the discussion interesting and got some more insight into how we put our 100 best novels list together.

You can read more on the story behind the list here and find all our latest books coverage here."

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Hi r/TrueLit !

We are Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, the joint head of books at The Guardian. We recently published our list of the 100 best novels of all time, and we're here to pull back the curtain on how it all came together.

With screens dominating our time, reading for pleasure is facing a quiet crisis—half of UK adults say they never read, and reading levels among young people are at a 20-year low. We wanted this list to be an antidote to that; a gateway back to the best of literature.

To build it, we polled over 170 novelists, critics, and academics (including Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and Bernardine Evaristo). Our criteria included any book published in English, regardless of its original language. 

But we are aware that compiling a list like this is never easy. It sparks fierce debates, tough omissions, and endless conversations about what truly defines a "classic" in the modern era. 

Whether you want to know how the data was tallied, why a certain book made the top ten, why your favourite book was left off, or how the landscape of fiction is shifting, we are here to answer it all.

We’ll be here on Wednesday 1 July at 11am EDT/4pm BST to answer your questions live. Drop your questions below!

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A little bit about the editors and their work…

Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer oversee The Guardian's book coverage, from cover stories for Saturday magazine such as our exclusive extract from Virginia Guiffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl and interviews with Richard Osman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood to breaking news stories.

With the Books team they bring together the best critics to review the most exciting fiction and non fiction releases, interview leading novelists and commission leading writers such as Rebecca Solnit, David Hare, Zadie Smith and Robert Macfarlane to contribute to their pages. Charlotte has also written two novels: The House Guest and The People Before. 

You can see Charlotte’s top 10 picks for the list here and Liese’s here.

We are Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, the joint head of books at The Guardian.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

The best opening sentences of novels have been discussed to death. I find it far more interesting to discuss books that get by without needing to make a huge impression in the first sentence. I personally vote for Red Dragon by Thomas Harris “Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.” Says everything it needs to say but doesn’t do anything interesting or noteworthy for the start of a such an iconic series.

I write literary fiction rooted in lived history — war, moral fracture, guilt, and the long echo of choices that follow a person through life.
My work is not genre‑driven; it deals with existential weight, memory, and the question of what survives in a human being after historical forces destroy everything around him.

I’m interested in how readers today engage with literature that confronts real historical experience rather than invented worlds.
Does memoir‑based or witness‑based fiction still hold relevance in contemporary literary culture?
Or has it been overshadowed by commercial genres and faster forms of storytelling?

I would appreciate hearing how readers in this community approach works that deal with truth, trauma, and the burden of memory.

Here is a list of my top 3 favorite books: 1. Fahrenheit 451, 2. The Metamorphosis, 3. Animal Farm

This has been a passion project of mine for two years, and I'm really happy to share the first part! I hope you enjoy, and you're able to catch some of the references!

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Following my previous post, these are the novels I read from the 1970s. Inspired to post this by someone else here who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. Of course I have a subjective experience of everything I read (meaning I have likes and dislikes that are purely based on personal preference) and I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Losing Battles – Eudora Welty (1970): This just didn’t work for me. More or less a painful slog, not sure what people see in this author’s writing. It just felt dead. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, but I don’t like novels that insist on either their character’s zaniness or the nonplussed reaction to it. It is not a quality I appreciate. Whooooooaaaaaaaaa this person is way over the top in a provincial kind of way. Who cares? I recognize this is just a personal reaction, but clownishness is just grating to me.

Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner (1971): Nicely layered text that deals with an interesting contradiction: on the one hand, Stegner asks whether or not we can ever see a place without our past and our beliefs clouding our vision, while on the other hand, he genuinely tries to celebrate place (namely, the West) as an aspect of human experience. This tension isn’t unique to Stegner but it’s the best executed attempt I’ve read. Genuinely a good writer, it takes one to examine a contradiction without dismissing it or finding a way around it. Loved the various framing devices the novel employs.

Chimera – John Barth (1972): Loathed it. I do not like anything happening here.

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon (1973): (note: due to masochism, this is the only novel I reread for the project) What am I supposed to say about this novel? Overall I do not like it. There are some passages where Pynchon shines, but overall it feels like drudgery. Difficult novels are always attractive to me but this one did not bring me any joy. I don’t care for the child molestation, amongst other aspects. Even if it’s not as bad as in V, you can sense the Beat influence in the characters (aren’t they just a little bit gonzo . . . or zany . . .). Mason and Dixon is still the only Pynchon novel I like.

If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin (1974): Baldwin is not only a great political thinker, but also a wonderful prose stylist. I’m not sure this is as good as Go Tell It On the Mountain, but it is still worthwhile. Beale Street dabbles in some of the religious themes his earlier novel deals with at length. It’s a book about love, of course, gentle love and fierce love.

JR – William Gaddis (1975): The third Gaddis I’ve read (after The Recognitions and Carpenter’s Gothic). While I recognize the talent, his writing has never really sparked me. There’s definitely plenty here and each time you open it you feel like you’re stepping into a fast moving river, it’s difficult to keep your feet. If I had infinite time on this earth I would reread it, but I don’t and I won’t. There’s an interesting play on the word “note” here. Musical notes, bank notes, written notes. I never put anything together regarding that, but perhaps there’s something there.

Flight to Canada – Ishmael Reed (1976): Of course this was a lot of fun and really good, coming from the guy who wrote Mumbo Jumbo. This is the kind of postmodernism I really like, as opposed to Barth’s hollow and forced style. Usually, I have a hard time with writing that is so relentlessly satirical and ironic but a) it’s quite short and b) it’s rewarding when you dig a little bit through the outermost encrusted layer to appreciate what he’s communicating with it. A more thorough understanding of the context and references, which I lack, would go a long way.

Players – Don Delillo (1977): I’ve read a good bit of Delillo before but not in the past decade or so, except for Ratner’s Star which I must have picked up more recently. Overall I think he’s compelling and when his writing strikes me as hackneyed I think it’s due to the fact that many have imitated (or drawn from, to be more generous) his voice and the themes he returns to, so that he can sound like just another writer concerned with the centrality of images in the postmodern era (and what not). One of the best writers I discovered through this reading project of mine, Rachel Kushner, shows his influence, which makes sense since he is one of her mentors. With all of that said and all due respect given, this isn’t his strongest work and I don’t find the subject matter (the disillusionment and sex lives of yuppies) compelling.

The World According to Garp – John Irving (1978): A good popcorn novel. For some reason it charmed me. Did we need this man’s perspective on all that this book gestures at, gender politics wise? Absolutely not. Was it a waste of paper? No, I don’t think it was. There are things about it that I look back on with some fondness. The titular character’s one successful literary excursion, a strange and dreamlike short story, followed by the many aborted attempts to write anything else that works. The scene involving a suddenly clenched jaw. The perhaps well intentioned, if not always totally up to date, portrayal of a trans woman (it really isn’t very good but I do appreciate that he wrote the character with love in his heart). All I’m saying is it could have been worse.

Sleepless Nights – Elizabeth Hardwick (1979): This one was painful from start to finish. The prose was well nigh unreadable to me. Do not recommend.

In the dog days of August 1992, Sebald set out on a walk across Suffolk hoping to dispel a feeling of unease accompanying the conclusion of a long stint of work. Under the influence of the Dog Star, he finds himself brooding on the ‘traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.’ One year later, he finds himself totally immobilized, lying uneasily in a hospital bed across from a window shrouded by black netting (to what end? to prevent jumping?) opening on a  monotonous blue sky. He fears that the world has been ‘shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot.’ And what is the world other than time, monument, things preserved, things obscured, and the perspective of he who levels his gaze and cleaves to all that is seen? Some things pass to memory but most lie forgotten like the ruins once serving some inscrutable purpose.

Gazing out of the inhospitable window draped with black pall (I take liberty here), he witnesses a maze of buildings and stone and tenebrous multi-story carparks; where are the people? Emerging from the fog of wonderful influence of painkillers coursing through him, likened to Thomas Browne’s Great London Fog of 1674, or to the mist that is said to rise from a freshly dissected corpse, he spots a vapor trail but not the plane (nor the passengers) which, he offhandedly remarks, ‘marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life.’ In classic Sebald fashion, no explanation is given. What was it that tore at him so? Was it the fear of being slowly subsumed? And if so, by what? By our creations, by time, by oblivion itself? Perhaps his thought cannot be made explicit. Perhaps it is of ‘the invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us,’ a preoccupation shared by Thomas Browne.

For Browne, writes Sebald, the world is a shadow in which the totality of perception is ‘no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance… We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, **it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are a reflection of eternity.’** It befit Rings to be writ small – while I cannot accept that destruction is its innermost essence, nor can I positively nor concisely state what it might be. Sebald accepts Browne’s premise, and offers neither solution nor prescription; his anecdotes often lead one to muse on the perpetually changing, overlapping, often grotesque aspect of order. Like Borges, who famously translated Browne for his own amusement, Browne and Sebald are obsessed with transience, symbolized by Borges’ description of Baldanders (translated as Soon-Another), who represents ‘the endless mutations of Nature, which go beyond any rational limit…’ a limitlessness that disturbed Browne, who took it upon himself to delimit the real from the chimerical. Sebald does not shy from the imaginary, representing as he does the ‘…continuous process of consuming and being consumed, \[in which\] nothing endures…’ so that it must be created. Such is Sebald’s task, whose knowledge of which confines him to the hospital bed wherein he imagines the novel.

I return for a moment to Sebald’s ‘single, blind, insensate spot’ symbolized by the hospital window obscured by the black netting. I can’t help but see a book, the great flattener of memory. In Rings, Sebald is free to regale, recall, embellish and invent as he so chooses. The novel is a tiny aperture opening onto a too-broad sky that can only be hinted at discursively; any attempt to distill it, as I attempt, is folly. Sebald is far from the first to comment on the futility of preservation, or the first to suggest its essentiality. Considering the burial urns which have survived the centuries only three meters below the turmoil of sword and plowshare that constitute the history of all lands, Sebald, through Browne, catalogues many wondrous things. It is a mystery, and perhaps a miracle, that anything survives at all, even for a day.

‘… how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Orisis in the Dog Star.’

The survival of these artifacts is, to Browne, analogous to the soul’s indestructibility (if not the transmigration so frequently observed in moths and caterpillars; a transmigration sought for by our cocooned author at the novels’ beginning). Again I circle back, for the final time, God willing, to the hospital bed and the window: the single, blind, insensate spot. Sebald hazily gropes through the fog for the book to be born. Considering Suffolk, he is called to act as psychopomp. But before leading us up sprawling hill, down dale; through once-prosperous towns and forlorn coasts, he reflects on the memory of two estimable colleagues: Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns. Sebald’s Parkinson; academic, bachelor and frugal to the point of eccentricity, ‘troubled \[by\] the dire responsibility of performing his duties under increasingly adverse conditions… I marveled at the degree of dedication he always brought to his work, that in his own way, he had found happiness, in a modest form scarcely conceivable nowadays.’  What happiness had he found? Parkinson’s work is surely entombed in some inaccessible East Anglian mausoleum. The work itself, the attempt to preserve Ramuz’ work, the solitary joy of contemplation, was this the source of his happiness? And of Janine Dakyns, Sebald writes that she was a scholar who ‘had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months… Janine mentioned that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of **stupidity** which he had observed everywhere… as if one were sinking in sand… Sand conquered all… vast clouds drifted through Flaubert’s dreams by day and by night… In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary’s winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara.’ And against the relentless spread, Janine constructed a mountain of papers, a bulwark against the conquering sands, ‘the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection.’ Janine and Michael apparently enjoyed a friendship whose intensity and innocence is rarely seen outside of those belonging to children. Michael died at 47 of an apparent heart attack and Janine was soon after ravaged by disease. Here, in memory which would come to form the opening chapter of The Rings of Saturn, these relatively obscure academics are preserved just as Patroclus’ purple cloth in Browne’s urn. Michael and Janine are dead, their works unknown to all save the most diligent academics, but their devotion and the generosity of their spirit are preserved for as long as Sebald remains read. Their memory offers those of us who find ourselves perplexed by ‘the only serious philosophical problem’ (ugh) – how to spend our days - firm ground to stand on. Here I recall, as Sebald will later, Borges’ ‘Quevedien’ translation of Urn Burial, written in total obscurity, as the known world is consumed by Tlon. What is the end to he? To me?

Sebald leaves us at the close of the first chapter with a single word, near the end of the final sentence, *transmigration.* Immobilized in his hospital bed, he settles on his next novel. Is he the same man as the one who walked Suffolk? Who will he become in the consumption of his greatest novel? As we consume, so will we be consumed. Nothing endures. All our works and days are doomed to memory until they too vanish without a trace. And yet there is some small hope that something long-buried may once again be excavated amidst the all-conquering sands.