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.
I mean, from oral storytelling around a bonfire through mailing handwritten letters to book printing, there were many variations in how we've engaged with fictional and non-fictional narratives. The Internet was a big shift from passive to active textual information sharing and democratized reading and writing. But AI language models could be the next evolutionary step. I'm not talking about books generated with AI or helping writers brainstorm, but it seems like this is the first time interactive fiction has the engine it's needed since its early days (like those adventure books where you could choose events and flip pages).
Don't you think we should see LLMs as a new medium the way our ancestors viewed letters, theater, books, and movies?
I was working on extending AI capabilities for scientific research purposes, and as a reader/writer myself, I realized that the complex, self-evolving architectures we created for another field work extremely well for interactive fiction. I tested it for a few weeks and was really impressed by what these "roleplays" could do. I genuinely believe literature has always been about pushing boundaries from ancient verses to postmodern works.
So why do readers let the most transformative technology become merely an advertising generator instead of exploiting possibilities that printed text never allowed?
The project I developed was an immersive experience where you lose track of time, exploring worlds and characters as you wish. You can affect the story while it remains consistent. You're the protagonist, writer, and reader simultaneously something that was never possible before. It's such an intense experience that I can't keep quiet about it. If you like literature, this would be a huge adventure for you, with sophisticated and complex narratives, detailed scenes, and interactions with objects and characters in any genre. (General AIs are too general to maintain narrative consistency. Most AI roleplays are fantasy or anime-themed with poor memory and inconsistent logic.)
Yes, books written by humans are important because they're created by humans, and we understand ourselves through others' experiences. I totally agree. But in this new medium, human writers would establish the rules and directions still grounded in human experience we all connect with. It's simply a new art form for both writers and readers.
Since my interactive fiction AI is just a side project now, I can't share it yet. But if you're interested, I might finish it and show you. So, what do you think? Could this be the next evolutionary step for literature? Would you be interested in trying it?
Yes, we need a megathread for this topic because it is blowing up. However, I find that this article succinctly explains why Olga Tokarczuk is wrong to try and minimize the effect AI has had on her work.
Summary (their title not mine):
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.
I’ve had two existential crises in my life.
>Henry: I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.
Debbie: Death?
Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.
- Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
Toni Morrison’s “early stuff” occupies a stratum in world literature that is difficult for any writer to live up to. This week, The Guardian’s panel of 172 literary luminaries declared Morrison’s Beloved the second greatest novel in the artform’s history, placing her work above that of every fictionist who ever lived apart from George Eliot. Hardly surprising, then, that Morrison received fewer adulatory notices at 84 years of age than she did at her zenith. Still, I can’t help feeling almost personally affronted by the myopic ingratitude of some of the elite critics tasked with assessing God Help the Child, the eleventh and final novel (she was working on a twelfth when she died) by this generation’s literary doyenne. Kara Walker of The New York Times compared it to reality TV and dismissed it as a “curt fable” aimed at provoking “outrage.” The Independent complained Morrison’s characters were “prototypes for an idea rather than real people.” In The Washington Post, Ron Charles was by turns tone-deaf (“the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma, throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling”) and snarky (“If thoughts like that strike you as both fresh and somehow eternal, you’re in luck: There are a lot of them here”), at one point helpfully pointing out that “You not the woman I want” was “a jarring bit of Ebonics” in the mouth of a character with academic bona fides, as though America’s most celebrated poet of everyday Black speech had accidentally misplaced a helping verb. Charles managed one salient insight in dispensing his breathtakingly disrespectful review: “Because her latest work offers curious reflections of where she began in The Bluest Eye, it’s tempting to read God Help the Child as a capstone of her jeweled career.” In context, this observation was merely another opportunity to insult a national treasure, but he was right about the shared genetic tissue tying Morrison’s 1970 debut, about a Black child who longs to look whiter, to her 2015 swansong, about a dark-skinned woman who outlives the consensus that Black is ugly.
The relationship between the two novels has frequently been noted, but a 2015 Essence interview with Morrison confirms my suspicion that it runs deeper than a shared interest in colorism within the Black community. “[Racism today] is certainly not like The Bluest Eye,” Morrison said. “God Help the Child is set in 2007 or 2008, so it’s quite different. I felt I could hang on to that; I could write about those changes.” Functionally speaking, God Help the Child is an unofficial sequel to The Bluest Eye. It consciously revisits the racial trauma Morrison symbolized in the paternal sexual abuse of young Pecola Breedlove in 1940s Ohio and examines the continued legacy of that trauma in the adult lives of twenty-first-century Black New Yorkers. God Help the Child may not always exhibit the formal inventiveness, heightened lyrical expressiveness, and raw power of the slim volume that catapulted Morrison from a publishing career to the pinnacle of world literature. But to understate the latter novel’s commentary on its seminal predecessor is to miss the source of its own substantial emotional clout.
PHYSICAL BEAUTY
The masterstroke of The Bluest Eye was the identification of societal conceptions of beauty as a subtle enforcement mechanism employed by racist white America. Yes, more conventional applications of racial violence are invoked in that book: white men forcing Pecola’s parents to perform for their own sexual gratification, a white gynecologist comparing Black mothers to horses, a candy store clerk shrinking from Pecola’s inadvertent touch during a financial transaction. But the greatest violence in Morrison’s debut is perpetrated by the impossible standard of white beauty. Pecola’s mother trying to emulate Jean Harlow’s movie star hair. A “mulatto girl” in a Claudette Colbert movie hating her mother for her blackness. The insidious consensus that “a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” This depiction of the weaponization of physical beauty by white America had personal magnitude for Morrison. The book is set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio, the precise time and place the author occupied as a ten year old.
God Help the Child demonstrates the legacy of that trauma in 2007 New York City. The characters are adults now. They are successful in ways that Pecola could only dream of: protagonist Bride is a cosmetics executive and her lover Booker (a name with as much explicit significance as “Breedlove”) is an intellectual with a graduate education. Yet God Help the Child is not an unmitigated Huxtable-esque success story. Every character in it struggles to overcome some form of childhood abuse. The unflinching focus on the permanent wounds of child abuse is reflected in Morrison’s preferred title, rejected by Alfred Knopf: The Wrath of Children.
In this context of trauma-haunted racial progress, Morrison asserts that the contemporary fetishization of Black beauty can be almost as unhealthy as the denial of it. The opening chapters retread the Pecola issues: its rotating first-person narration begins with Bride’s mother, Sweetness, confessing that she resisted physical contact with her infant daughter out of revulsion for her skin color. But when Bride comes of age, the world showers her with praise for her physical appearance. An especially effective moment in the novel is the way a white boyfriend attempts to act out Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, a 1967 film about a white daughter who teaches her parents to tolerate her boyfriend Sidney Poitier, for reasons that have nothing to do with racial justice:
>I remember one date in particular, a medical student who persuaded me to join him on a visit to his parents’ house up north. As soon as he introduced me it was clear I was there to terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept repeating. “Look at her, Mother? Dad?” His eyes were gleaming with malice. But they outclassed him with their warmth—however faked—and charm. His disappointment was obvious, his anger thinly repressed. His parents even drove me to the train stop, probably so I wouldn’t have to put up with his failed racist joke on them. I was relieved, even knowing what the mother did with my used teacup.
The boyfriend wants to weaponize societal antiracist frown power just to make his parents feel uncomfortable. Morrison doesn’t trust that sort of performative adulation of Blackness any more than she trusts Bride’s dependence on it: “That’s all she’s invested in,” Morrison explained to Essence. “She’s not complete. Either one of those things is destructive: Using it as a boost or being destroyed by it.” Of course, beauty has been the tool of the oppressor against women in general, and not just Black Americans, for centuries. Morrison is writing about the keen blade’s underside hidden in every introduction of “my accomplished son and beautiful daughters” or “the lovely Miss So-and-So.”
ROMANTIC LOVE
In both The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child, Morrison couples the idolatrous worship of physical beauty with that of romantic love. In one scene, little Pecola reflects on the men who are always loving and leaving women in popular music. “How do you do that?” she asks. “I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” Her mother, Pauline, the one exposing Pecola to old love songs, has long associated beauty and love in an unhealthy way: “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”
For its part, God Help the Child portrays the way that an obsessive romantic love based on attraction crumbles into tragedy when the beloved leaves. Bride is so devastated by Booker’s sudden exit that her body literally begins to change: “Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.” She becomes the battered victim who accused an innocent woman of child abuse in order to win her colorist mother’s love. Put another way, the proud, grown-up Bride regresses back into Pecola’s degraded form. In his review, Ron Charles saw the narrative risk Morrison was taking with this sole departure into Magical Realism and pounced, brutishly:
>In the semi-magical worlds Morrison has created before, such surreal touches seem both evocative and weirdly natural, but in the flat language of this novel, they're clunky symbols, needlessly explained.
In my view, though, that’s a lazy reading. It’s easy to dismiss such a sore-thumb stylistic move, but Morrison’s boldness pays off precisely because it is isolated. It gives her otherwise grounded prose permission to sing.
SELF-LOVE
Morrison’s antidote to these societal afflictions lies in expanded notions of beauty and love. In her introduction to a 2007 edition of The Bluest Eye, Morrison recalled an elementary school classmate who longed for blue eyes, the inspiration for that novel.
>Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it… In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
This radical notion of beauty as action as opposed to inherited appearance is played out in Bride’s heroic response to her own pain. Instead of crumbling like Pecola, she takes arms against her sea of troubles, embarking on a quest to find Booker and force him to account for his decision to abandon her. The nuance in this goal is crucial. Bride insists on a respectful separation, not reconciliation at any cost. Revisiting The Bluest Eye in a contemporary context gives Morrison permission to begin writing a healing process that eluded those characters in the first novel. Pecola never moves from self-contempt to self-acceptance. She bears her father’s stillborn child and never recovers. But the news in God Help the Child that Bride and Booker will bear a child of their own signals that that self-love is finally branching into shared love. Bride has learned the lesson Sethe struggles to learn in Beloved: “you your own best thing.”
BEAUTY IS SOMETHING ONE CAN DO
Throughout her glorious canon, Morrison never settled for merely depicting beauty as action. She modeled it in the act of crafting radiant prose of searing insight through shifting vernacular registers. The consistently generous moral wisdom of Morrison’s writing recalls that of her partner at the top of the Guardian’s list: Mary Ann Evans, who defied a world that thought her ugly by becoming George Eliot. In a sense, the Guardian’s selection of Middlemarch and Beloved as English-language literary exemplars is a logical pairing. Eliot’s novel championed a woman of conventional beauty but exceptional moral clarity. Morrison’s championed a woman seen as ugly who fought ferociously for love. Bride earns a place in that tradition.
Morrison never names the year God Help the Child takes place, but she told Essence that it is 2007-2008. In other words, the year that Barack Obama’s message of change temporarily filled the Black community with hope for healing and self-acceptance on a national scale. Today, progress from Pecola’s 1941 to Bride’s 2008 is under assault on the pretense that national racial healing has already been accomplished. The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child provide reminders that abuse leaves wounds that can only be healed by beauty in action.
What are some pieces of pre 1800s literature that are not:
Which you think deserve more attention?
You know that exact feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and think what is the actual point of all this? That’s basically Camus’s entire personality. But the coolest thing about him is that he doesn’t want you to spiral into a depression. He’s pretty much like: Yeah, life is completely absurd and meaningless, but so what? Live it anyway, enjoy your coffee, and spite the universe by being happy.
The Stranger: This one looks like a simple crime story on the surface but it messes with your head. Meursault is this terrifyingly detached guy his mom dies and he doesn't cry, the sun gets too hot so he kills a guy on a beach. But the real twist is that society doesn’t judge him for the murder, they judge him because he refuses to play along with their emotional script. It makes you question how much of our daily lives is just us putting on a performance for other people.
The Plague: A town gets quarantined because of a deadly disease. Honestly if you read this post-2020 it feels eerie, like he literally predicted the Covid vibe word for word. It shows you the absolute best and worst of humanity when things go south the people who profit off panic, the ones who give up, and the doctors who keep fighting even when they know they might lose. It's an incredibly beautiful book about human solidarity when everything is crumbling.
Camus wasn’t some miserable academic hiding in a dark room. He was a football goalkeeper, loved life, and basically argued that the ultimate form of rebellion is to look at the chaos of the world and smile anyway.
Any Camus fans here? Which book of his broke you the most, or did you just find him too cynical?💙
Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.
Weekly Updates: N/A
More than 1,100 artists have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of next month’s Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, over the inclusion of Israel “despite its ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
The letter was produced by No Music For Genocide, which calls for a cultural boycott of Israel in line with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Among the signatories are Brian Eno, Roger Waters, Macklemore, Hot Chip, Peter Gabriel, Paul Weller, Sigur Rós, Kneecap, Paloma Faith, and Massive Attack. Former Eurovision winners Emmelie de Forest and Charlie McGettigan have also signed.
Cesare Pavese
Ever had one of those nights where you’re surrounded by people, the music is loud, but you feel completely, utterly alone? If that’s a vibe you know too well, you need to look into Cesare Pavese. He is basically the patron saint of existential melancholy.
Pavese wasn’t some loud-mouthed ideologist trying to sell you a political utopia or rewrite the rules of society. He was just a deeply brilliant, hyper-observant intellectual who spent his life mapping the raw, unfiltered truth of human isolation.
For Pavese, loneliness isn’t something you cure by going out or getting into a relationship. To him, cosmic isolation is the default human setting. We build houses, we fall in love, we talk until our throats are dry, but at the end of the day, we are all islands. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He believed everything we do is just a desperate attempt to bridge the gap between ourselves and others, even though that bridge is always kind of broken. His most famous line sums it up perfectly: death will come and it will have your eyes. It’s dark, yeah, but it’s also incredibly honest. He saw life as a tough business you have to learn how to manage every single day.
His main great books
The Business of Living: This is his personal diary, published after he passed away, and honestly, it’s a masterpiece. It reads like a modern-day late-night internet thread but written with elite literary prose. It’s raw, painful, and brutally self-aware. You get to see a genius struggling with his own mind in real-time.
The Moon and the Bonfires: His absolute fiction masterpiece. It’s about a guy who makes it big in America and returns to his small Italian village after World War II, only to realize that everything has changed and you can never truly go home again. It’s a deep dive into nostalgia, trauma, and the search for identity.
The House on the Hill: This one follows a lonely schoolteacher hiding out in the hills during the war while everyone else is fighting. It’s a brilliant look at guilt, detachment, and the shame of being a passive observer while history is happening right outside your window.
Hello! I wrote an essay using a psychological study on task blindness called The Invisible Gorilla Experiment to talk about modern cultural blind spots while reading classic literature. I'm new to writing essays. I used to write book reviews on Goodreads, but now I'm trying to figure out how to write essays. This is my first attempt at one that did not come out of a book review. TIA! https://open.substack.com/pub/analysisforfun/p/the-gorilla-suit-in-pride-and-prejudice?r=6a4y0x&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I’ve been looking everywhere. A Nobel prize without her first work published in English or Spanish? I refuse to believe it 😭. Have any of you read E.E by Tokarczuk in either of these languages?
I'm reading currently The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I noticed that he often breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly.
here are some examples from the book:
I want to know if there's a reason why Bulgakov decided to use authorial intervention or what's the point/purpose of it. Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Hi all! This week's section for the read along covers Chapters 11-12 and the Wrap-Up
No volunteer this week so it's just going to be a bare bones post.
So, what did you think? Any interpretations? Did you enjoy it? Feel free to post your own analyses (long or short), questions, thoughts on the themes, or just brief comments below!
Thanks!
Next week is a break week.
I just finished reading catcher in the rye; I tried to read it a few years ago in high school but didn‘t really make it through (I’m not very good with reading) but now im almost 19 and finished it very quickly. I really enjoyed it this time around, I think because I really relate to Holden’s character due to the intense lack of direction or like feeling of being lost or whatever he has throughout the book? But also I‘ve been looking at what other people say about it and I know hes supposed to be like his own antagonist or whatever so maybe that says smthn bad about me lol. But when I reached the ending I just got really sad, I think similar to his character maybe I’m crazy scared about growing up. I just finished my first year of college and I’ve got no idea on where my life is headed. I’ve also been thinking a lot lately on how nothing good can come from being an adult, like I don’t think I can imagine any adult I know being properly happy. So that one scene when Holden is talking to Sally and he says how things will never be the same because they’ll be grown up or whatever really resonated with me, bc I’ve always kind of associated growing up with dying in a way and even now I’m having a lot of trouble finding joy in the things I liked as a kid and now I’m not really feeling like a person at all anymore if that makes sense. But anyways I was kind of hoping to find some sort of solution or answer through his character but what I took away the most was that your life really does end when you grow up? And that theres no escape or way to avoid it and everyone is awful. Idk I know there is probably a better takeaway from the book but I’m having trouble finding it.