Sometimes a book finds you at the wrong time. You read it in your 30s, 40s, or later, and can't help but wonder how things might've turned out if you'd found it sooner. So what's a book you wish had reached you earlier, one you wish you'd read in your 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever age would've made the difference? (Not necessarily your 20s, it could be your 30s, 40s, or later, or just some period in your life that could've benefited from it) And what age do you think would've been the right one?

I just wrapped up my Frankenstein reread! Man, it hits so much harder the second time around,

Details I initially thought were just fun descriptions and entertaining storytelling, I now realized were all wrapped up motifs and foils integral to message of the story- right from page 1.

I felt like hs english teacher the way I was combing through every line for meaning.

A few themes and things stood out to me..

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Ambition and Ignorance

Right from the start, our book-end character-Walton, is a kindred spirit to Frankenstein with frontier ambitions of greatness. Sacrificing pleasure for pursuit

A story here entrenched in the bibilical tale of Adam and Eve, and the fruit of knowledge.

A constant theme I felt, is that Knowledge is.. overrated, especially when it comes at the price of simple joys. That our thoughts can be our demons, and being an ignorant animal satisfied with our base needs and desires might've been better..

A character which I initially assumed as innocuous, Walton's "wholly uneducated" and unnamed ship master was given a suprising backstory, betrothed to the women who loved another. Instead of fighting for her love or resisting, he let go and even gave his fortune/estate to his rival.

During my first read I thought this was an irrelevant fun fact, on my second, I'm convinced that he is a purposeful contrast to Victor and Walton- and perhaps the monster too.

Someone described as ignorant, mild, and satisfied. A well adjusted man who knows his own limitations, and who has let go of his "Eve".

Ambition and pursuit of knowledge bring Victor's pain and destruction;

>"Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders the more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that word may convey us.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, concieve, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; it is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, the path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability"

The Creature's growing awareness, intelligence, and knowledge of his own wretched circumstance brings him greater pain, a fact he awknowledges and lements.

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Adam and Eve, God and Creation

Something I didn't realize during my first read, how obviously setup Victor's parents and childhood is in opposition to his own parenthood to The Creature.

>"...their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciosness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life,"

^ What an extremely on the nose contrast to Victor's complete lack of consciosness, responsbility or care towards his own "child". It even lays out how aware they were that Victor's future happiness or misery rested in their hands- their responsibility. Just like the creature's in his.

Duties and responsibilities emphasized by his parents, that he didn't even consider during his pursuit of creation. His mother self sacrificed herself for her adopted daughter Elizebeth.

With Elizabeth, his parents gave Victor his "Eve";

>""I have a pretty present for my Victor-- tomorrow he shall have it." And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine*-*""

I'm not sure if Shelley is trying to critique sexism with the obvious possesiveness or simply doing an authentic call back to the biblical pattern here.

Adam	Eve	Result
Victor	Elizabeth	Granted by Parents, anchor for Victor throughout the story
The Creature	Denied his Eve	Last hope for companionshop, parraleling Adam not having a parralel counterpart- but in this inversion, he's denied by his creator
Felix	Safie	Felix and his family destitue, banished/alone, depressed- parraleling The Creature's condition. Yet with his Eve, with Safie, came a return of happieness, showcasing that even when faced with solitude- if you have your Eve, happieness is attainable.
Walton's ShipMate	Betrothed Fiancee	In contrast to so many of the other character's, this ship mate happily reliquished to the possesiveness over an "Eve" and still lived a simple happy life.

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Justine Moritz and The Creature

The beloved family maid's background jumped out to me immediately on my second read.

She is The Creature. Justine's Mother- Victor Frankenstein.

Justine, just like the creature, was rejected and hated by her creator from childhood. But unlike the creature who had no one, Justine was taken in by Victor's kind mother.

When Justine's siblings all died, Justine's mother- looking at this as divine punishment for treatment of her spurned daughter, simultaneously begged for forgivness from Justine, and continued to hate and blame her for the sibling's deaths.

>"She sometimes begged Justine to fogive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the deaths of her brothers and sister"

This is the entire story told in a nut shell ^. Throughout the book Victor both awknowledges his own responsbiility, but more often, continues to blame and hate the creature.

Its part of the conflicting nature I noticed with Victor- just as Victor tells Walton this story as a warning agaisnt ambition, he also chastizes and attempts to convince Walton's crew to continue pursuing that same ambition..

Ofc unlike Justine, the creature really did kill Victor's family, but there is a poetic similarity of the "divine punishment"

And with the framing of William's death on Justine, the creature makes Justine- his foil character, feel as he does.. framed, accussed, assumed wicked when not.

And its an inversion down to the details, in court Justine is described,

>"..for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have comitted. "

Justine's beauty naturally affords her kindness and expectations of innocence, and all the evidence must be used to overcome that bias,
For the creature his ugliness judges him wicked, and he'd need all the evidence and pursuasion to overcome that bias.

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Conclusion

There were plenty of other recurring ideas that caught my attention on a reread, but these were the ones that stood out to me the most.

I'm curious what everyone else noticed or is their favorite part of Frankenstein, themes or moments.

And its not just in the incredible themes and motifs the book constantly makes you ponder, but also in the storytelling itself.
Its an incredibly poetic and chilling premise, an Artic explorer coming accross this half dead man who relates to him a wild story warning agaisnt uninhibited ambition.

I have a few questions,

• Was the possesive nature around Eve an intentional commentary on misogyny or simply an incoporation of the biblican elements? I'm leaning towards the latter.
• What about the details around Safie's duel religion, which to me feels like a black and white critism of Islam?
• Was Victor's descision to deny The Monster his Eve, meant to be fustrating and folley, or a geniune valid and selfless concerned?

I haven't done too much research into the author herself, I'd love to know any interesting thoughts, observations, opinions, etc.

I haven't read very many classics, but this is one of my favorite books so far. This book was a fantastic tight narrative, unlike the terrible Lotr or Moby Dick and Don Quixote which have left bad taste in my mouth for classics.

Whenever the question about overrated classics is posed on this sub or elsewhere, a frequent answer is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I myself have propagated this sentiment. When I read Kerouac's opus, I found it incredibly tedious, boring and ultimately pointless... but maybe that's part of the point.

When I zoom out from the actual experience of reading the novel I see that On the Road is a story about being lost, rudderless, completely unmoored from any responsibility or duty. Dean is a creature of pure impulse who seems indifferent to the consequences of his actions. He is, in that way, a personification of youth. He moves from one thing to the next at breakneck speed, each time trying and failing to satiate whatever hunger he is feeling but can't diagnose. I think he's searching for meaning but keeps getting let down, because he's looking in the wrong places. Instead he just ends up feeding on the resources - whether spiritual, mental or financial - of other people until they are spent or can't be bothered with him anymore.

After ruminating on the novel for some time, I realized that Dean is actually a much more contemporary figure than I had initially thought. That chase, that unstoppable urge to hunt for purpose and satisfaction, reminds me a lot of my own generation, the Zoomers. Much has been said about Gen Z's "meaning crisis," and I don't want to litigate it as a phenomenon here, but when I think about Dean, I keep relating him to some bleary-eyed teen or 20-something laying in bed at 2 AM scrolling through their bottomless feed of attention traders, trying to find the right thing. It's a pointless quest, because they're is looking in the wrong place, but one often doesn't even realize that they're doing it in the first place. One is gambling with time, precious milliseconds, each time betting that the next thing to be algorithmically offered will be worth one's while.

As one moves through the literary canon, it becomes clear that crises of meaning or purpose are not unique to Gen Z, and I think that Kerouac's protrayal of it in On the Road is actually quite a compelling one. The complete lack of structure or narrative thrust serves its themes about the chaos of young adulthood. It leaves you staring at the final page thinking both "that's it?" and "thank God that's over." Based on what people in their 30's and above say, that is very much the dichotomy with which many people retrospect on their youth.

I think the disconnect with myself and other readers is that the book's narrator (which I understand to be a stain-in for Kerouac himself) seems to think that Dean's lifestyle is aspirational. He seems to admire Dean's carelessness, even when it makes life more difficult for everyone around him. If Dean was portrayed as more tragic, or if he ended up having to atone for his selfishness, I think it would make for a much more narratively satisfying end for him, but I think that the lack of narrative satisfaction illustrates a fact about life, which is life doesn't resolve the way we want it to. Life is messy, jagged, disproportional, asymmetrical, unjust.

When I think about the experience of reading On the Road, I think about how bored out of my mind I was, how miniscule details were lingered on for way too long, how dislikable all the characters were, how badly I yearned for the end and wanted for there to be some sort of reckoning. I went into it expecting greatness and all I found was mediocrity, and worse still, celebrated mediocrity. You learn nothing. There is no justice. The reading experience mirrors the anomie of the novel. "You read these 300 pages and thought you would get some life lesson or catharsis? Jokes on you. Everything is fucked, no one knows what they're doing and no one cares about anything. Welcome to life."

That is my take on what On the Road, a book I still dislike very much, does right. I like thinking about the book far more than I like reading it, but thinking about a book is also part of the reading experience. I would of course have prefered to enjoy my time reading as well, but that's not the experience I had, so I might as well get something worthwhile out of the hours I spent trudging through the text.

Cheers :)

Edit: spelling/grammar

So far I’ve read 13, and aim to collect/read them all, along with as many honors books as I can. I’ve recently read all of Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, and almost done with Stephen King, and now I’ve set my sights on children’s literature as my next big goal. Curious to see if anyone else is reading their way through this list.

Hello readers and welcome to our Weekly FAQ thread! Our topic this week is: What are your favorite reading positions? It can be very difficult to read comfortably; what have you discovered is the most comfortable way to read?

You can view previous FAQ threads here in our wiki.

Thank you and enjoy!

Basically what the title says. Aggie Bluth Thompson writes suburban/mom noir based in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) area. Thompson was originally a crime reporter and it does show in some books.

I’m not here for spoilers,but to give my impressions.

Overall: she’s a great writer. I love reading about the upper class, and references to people who may be connected to government. I like her style enough to rip through five books in a few weeks, so I recommend her.

Notes: lots of drinking, a there’s a few plot lines that depend on that. There’s an investigator, Jon Block, that shows up in a couple books but not others, which disappointed me because I like a minor recurring character. There’s a reliance on conspiracy against the main character; which doesn’t need to have as many people.

I would still recommend because the characters a plot are engaging and it’s called out when someone is I vasir. Also the twists work.

Has anyone else read her? What do you think? I just finished The Neighbors are Watching and Tori Price is an idiot and an insult to therapy.

I just want to say, this lady is really a poet. And so imaginative and inventive! Exit Zero is a short story collection and most of them were well worth reading and provokingly surprising. She knows how to come up with stuff I wouldn't have thought of. I will definitely be looking for other books of hers to see how they are.

In the first one, a flock of thousands of parakeets got away and judged her. From a distance.

In the second one, old boyfriends fall from the sky.

In the third one, her dad either finds or becomes a unicorn.

In the fourth one, well, we'll let that one go. I'm not going to skip this story when I re-read the book, which I feel sure I will, but... we'll let it go for now.

In the fifth one, she is aged and she inherits a portrait of Cher. In a cab accident.

The sixth one starts, the year I gave college a try.

In the seventh, a balloon arrives to a lady who gardens only at night.

The eighth is really remarkable. Well, the first few were remarkable too. This one is, er... remarkable. Homuncular.

In the ninth, she's a movie reviewer that goes to a movie that changes her life.

In the tenth, there's a cathedral, a peacock, and a tightrope walker, and it very convincingly gets a kid up onto that tightrope and walking it. Outrageous as it sounds, I was sold.

In the eleventh, her mom has hernia surgery and becomes demanding. Very demanding.

The last, I think you can skip. I wouldn't have wanted to skip any of the others though. I might be a different person than I was when I started the book. It's hard to tell; maybe.

I was recently reading The Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones and after roughly 500 pages of the book I had to give up, because I was fed up with the story progression that in my opinion was all over the place even though I cannot say that it was a poorly written book. For me it was a though decision mainly for two reasons:

The first is that for a long time I have been the type of reader that thought that you have to push through regardless of how little you enjoy the reading, so I am not used to quit on the books.

The second reason is that, even now that I want to be more flexible on this aspect, I would like to have a sort of checkbox of things , that I realized I currently lack, that if I see a lot of these elements on a book I know that I can quit it without worrying about losing a possible gem that maybe starts to shine later on, because there have been situations like this in my previous experiences for example with Dante's Hell and the Decameron.

So, I was wondering if you all had some sort of criteria that make you say, whelp I can comfortibly drop this read, and if so what are them? There have been books for which it was truly a struggle to decide whether to stop reading or keep on gonig? Do you also feel this FOMO when you stop reading a book?

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!

(Spoilers for a 2011 Stephen King book. This isn't a full review, either. I just finished it a few weeks ago and had some thoughts about the way time travel works in it that I felt like I needed to expound upon and share. I think it's good until the end, with some caveats, but I want to keep the focus sharp here.)

Ahem. In the novel 11/22/63, the main character of the novel, Jake, inherits a time travel portal from a dying friend of his, along with a mission: save JFK from assassination. Most of the rules of the portal are quickly and elegantly established, and along with that comes the first three costs that the form of time travel in this book exacts.

To wit - the portal always brings a person traveling from the future to a precise moment in September 9, 1958, and on the return trip the time elapsed since entering is always around 2 minutes. The time traveler (and anyone near the portal on the future side, a strong suggestion that this isn't creating alternate timelines) is unaffected by any changes that may occur, but - crucially - every trip down is a reset of the timeline. Changes to the past are possible as a result, but attempting to do so runs into strange and difficult coincidences that seem to push back the more significant the changes would ripple throughout the future.

Thus, we have our first three costs:

1. The time traveler is exempted from the changes, but they still suffer whatever they're going through. All time in the past is time on the clock for their health, lifespan, etc, so if you spend the requisite 5 years until the Kennedy assassination, you'll return 2 minutes into your relative future but 5 years older. All injuries or health problems are permanent.
2. The world doesn't want to be changed. Commiting to a course of action that could result in, say, a family not being slaughtered by their father will throw up obstacles. He has to deal with a sudden illness, a man threatening his life, breakdowns of his vehicle, and other stuff to fight through and make it happen. He partially succeeds once, and works things out a little better the second time before getting ready to face his longer-term task. Trying to save a president and change a major event in American history faces massively greater tolls, with commensurate and permanent damage to him.
3. Every trip is a reset, which means that in order to review the results of his work, Jake has to risk starting over from the beginning every single time. This actually didn't come up much because he committed to the long haul after a couple short trips, but it's constantly on his mind. He knows that, should be succeed in his mission but not like the results, starting over would be difficult if not impossible. Five years for a young-ish man is hard enough, but ten? His friend literally died of cancer in the process of his own attempts.

So far, so great. This is an awesome set of rules that helps to drive drama and gives the reader a sense of the stakes and what it'd take to overcome them. You can imagine, from that, what you might do in Jake's place with that portal and that information.

Where I think it falls apart is in the last few pages of the book, when he returns battered and broken from his mission only to be confronted with a temporal agent who tells him to go look at what he wrought, then to reset it. It's not even that the future he created sucks - that's fine, that's what I would consider a "good" cost for time travel - it's that the universe is literally tearing itself apart.

That's right! A final rule is introduced in the final few pages of the book:

4. If you make pretty much any change to history (via this method, at least,) your actions will result in the utter annihilation of all existence.

So, yeah, ultimately Jake decides to reset and never re-attempt anything.

I know it's not uncommon in thrillers or horror for the final result to be "Well, you never should have messed with it in the beginning, huh?" Indeed, it's almost de rigeur, but it's rare for me to feel quite that cheated. It makes sense to me now why the ending of the 2015 video game Life is Strange happened the way it did, and why it didn't really make sense to me as written. Though the method is different, the result (any degree of time travel causes massive disasters, even if it's not quite as severe) is the same.

Matter of opinion, of course, but I personally think the fourth rule kinda sucked and that the first three rules were sufficient in themselves to make the cost of time travel difficult and interesting.

This is maybe old news but I don't think it was well publicized. For the uninitiated, Henry Darger was a janitor who grew up in an institution for "feeble minded children", but in his adult life he quietly produced a vast, sprawling epic novel, over 15,000 pages long, and many vast accompanying paintings. These works were only discovered shortly before his death, when he moved from his small apartment into a charity nursing home.

I've been interested in Darger's work for a long time but the majority of his novel has been inaccessible until relatively recently.

Based on popularity, recommendations, and my own deep love for fantasy and sci-fi, I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl. I found the premise engaging enough, but Carl strikes me as a nothing-burger of a character, and the plot featured the same repetitive motions of "find mob" and subsequently "explode-mob's-head" (usually accompanied with graphic Gore and Marvel-esque quippy sarcasm.)

I found the book creative in moments but insufferable at times. However, whenever Carl stepped OUT of the game, and engaged with the greater narrative (Borant, the universe at large the, etc...) I found myself enjoying the book much more.

So simple question: does the series wallow in goblin-squashing for the majority? Or does the narrative expand beyond the dungeon?

Does it become more nuanced as it goes on?

I'm reading Suburra by Bonini and De Cataldo (really recommend the Netflix series btw, one of the best productions of my country in recent years). It's a noir/thriller about 2011 Rome, where organized crime, politics and Church intertwine.

I went to read some reviews about it, and so many English-speaking (or writing) commenters went on and on about excessive swearing. I'm so baffled by this, unsure on what people expect? I've seen Pulp fiction and the like, so it's not like American gangsters don't use foul language lmao.

The funny thing here is that the novel actually depicts quite accurately our dialect. Swearing is a punctuation mark and a tool for emphasis so outside workplaces nobody really bats an eye. Street thugs, politicians and elite all swear behind closed doors just the same.

Is this because international media has created this myth of the gentleman mobster?

The premise of this book is a woman has an indoor/outdoor cat that returns to her new neighborhood on the first day with the words "Help Me" scratched into its collar. Not sure if it's a prank, the woman sends the cat out again with a collar that has a little bitty recorder attached. The next time it returns, she sees a woman covered in bruises and locked in a room. She does not go to the police, but sends it again. With no sense of urgency at all, she decides a few days later to check THAT feed, and finds the woman clearly stating her name, the name of her kidnapper, and that she needs help.

Armed with this, she finally goes to the police. The policeman literally tells her he won't look at the footage and that he's going to put her "under caution" due to the illegal nature of the recording device in the UK. We know this victim's name is already familiar to police because of flashback chapters. The main character then somehow is able to go on multiple dates and fall in love with a character who she is extremely suspicious of (red herring) and somewhat put this kidnapped woman out of her mind.

She next resolves to put an air tag on the cat's collar with instructions for the kidnapped woman, WHICH WORKS, and the main character still ends up kidnapped herself. She sends an email to the police officer she originally spoke to saying she's handling it with a link to the cat collar footage if he doesn't hear from her. Only extremely begrudgingly does he even watch the footage, THEN decides that maybe this is worth following up. Oh, and the name of the kidnapper is not an alias- it's his true blue name.

Maybe it's the optimist in me, and maybe because I'm American, but Jesus fucking Christ.... What?!?! A police officer has absolutely no curiosity about this kidnapping, not even enough to run the victim's name through a computer? The main character doesn't push things at all or ask to speak to a supervisor or try a different station? This was a fun read but I couldn't fully enjoy the book due to the police officers' mishandling of crazy amounts of evidence and the main character sometimes forgetting that a woman has been kidnapped and doubting her sanity because GASP she's a divorced woman.

Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in!

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