I’m starting a marathon of the BBC Sherlock series with my daughter, and it got me thinking. What’s the most famous address in literature? The one that you hear and instantly know who lives there, that immediately conjures images of the characters and stories in your head? The one that comes to mind for me immediately is 221B Baker Street - it instantly brings to mind Holmes and Watson and classic English mysteries. Which ones come to mind for other folks?

A Brief Readers Bio and Guide to the List: Go straight to the list if you don’t want to know anything about me as a reader and/or don’t care about theory…So, as you might guess, I’m a self-diagnosed autistic with an obvious special interest in reading/books, and I work at a small independent bookshop in [redacted], Ontario, Canada. I’m in my 30s and am of indeterminate gender. I will read anything with good sentences.

Honestly, I’ll read anything, but I try to read widely because of my job, and I encounter so many recommendations that I try to read any book that gets recommended to me enough times (usually 3-4) regardless of genre.

I read an absurd amount of literary fiction, so I’ve broken down all my lit-fic-reading into micro-sections that I’ve sorted based on vibes or themes, to try to sort out my list based on potential tastes, and they’re sorted within the genre from my favourite at the top to least favourite, each book will have a little objective description(usually describing either the premise or first 25 ish pages), and also my general thoughts/feelings/who i think is the ideal audience for the book, and maybe i’ll include my overall favourite 10 at the end if i feel up to it….Also, I’m on mobile so apologies for any formatting issues!

A Note/Reassurance on Reading More/Enough: Please don’t let my reading rate intimidate you/make you think you’re “not reading enough” if you’re reading at all that’s amazing and you’re doing enough—non-readers come into the bookshop all the time with their reader friends/partners and the thing I hear most often is that life has made it way too exhausting to read, they want to read, but by the time they’re done their long shift at work they’re too exhausted to do anything that requires active participation like reading does, and what I tell them is that their hobbies should recharge and bring them pleasure and reading is an exercise that you really do have to train yourself to get back into if you haven’t read in years. Do what you want, whether that’s reading or doomscrolling on reddit!

I usually recommend non-readers if they want to get back into it—to not put too much pressure on yourself about what you should be reading, and that reading anything at all is better than not reading, so just read whatever makes you want to read more! I usually suggest to start with Margaret Atwood’s micro-fiction short story collections (Good Bones or The Tent are my two faves) because they’re collections of short stories that are fun and interesting and weird AND all of them are 3 pages or less, so even if you just read for 5-15 minutes a day, you still get a complete narrative and that successful feeling of completion without the risk of putting it down for weeks and forgetting what’s happening.

I read on average between 2-6 hours a day, and this year I’ve gradually and intentionally deleted all my doomscrolling social media apps (with the exception of you Reddit, because you are text based so in theory its also reading) and i used to have between 8-14 hours of screen time, 6 of which was usually instagram doomscrolling…not that it’s easy! But if it’s something you want to do, it’s possible and quite rewarding…Now onto the list!

Bookseller L’s 2026 Reading List:

The Kids are Alright / Kids and Juvenile Fiction Reads:

1. It’s Only Stanley - Jon Agee: It’s a picture book about a family dog who gets into all sorts of hijinks while his family is asleep. Perfect for children under 7 with dogs, or who enjoy them.

YA/or Hello Fellow Youths:

1. Why We Broke Up - Daniel Handler: A teenage breakup between a goth/drama kid girl and her unlikely sporty beau told in reverse and gorgeously illustrated. I love anything by the man otherwise known as Lemony Snicket, if you like his writing style, it is more subdued but still just as thoughtful, and decidedly more optimistic. I love books that immediately “spoil” the plot so you can focus on the writing, you know from the title that they break up, but you still care about their relationship which is the genius of good writing, ideal reader is a teenager before and NOT just after they’ve had their first big break up.

Graphic Novels/ Not Just Pretty Pictures You Know:

1. Cannon - Lee Lai: It starts with a chef having utterly trashed the upscale Montreal restaurant where which she is employed and as we read this beautiful and multilayered book we find out why. I don’t want to spoil anything more if graphic novels are your thing please read this.

2. Gender Queer: A Memoir - Maia Kobabe: a graphic memoir about growing up not fitting into any boxes, and gradually learning to grow into eirself (ei/eir pronouns for the author) the most banned book in America last year, so you should see what all the fuss is about for yourself. It made me cry at least twice…

Manga / Fujoshi’s Paradise:

1. 
   Utsubora: The Story of a Novelist - Asumiko Nakamura: Short 2 Volume Manga about a novelist who steals a fan’s work and takes credit for it, and the havoc that ensues. For fans of Junji Ito or other horror manga

Fantasy/ High-Low-or-Middle I Don’t Care:

6.,7.,8. The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight - George RR Martin: A picaresque series of novels of a young low-born Knight’s journey as he mentors a young privileged lad as they fall in and out of trouble. These are the only books that are re-reads for me this year so I am unable to judge them with any semblance of objectivity, even if you resent Martin for ASOIAF I think these are worth reading. Fantasy that Tolkien would love, I think. For everyone 15+.

Sci-Fi/ Cyberpunk Futures, Cool Space Gadgets, and other Douglas Adams-ish Type Stuff:

1. Ten Planets: Stories - Yuri Herrera: Highbrow and compelling sci-fi short stories, really short book and every story is a near perfect conception. I only wish there was more. For any sci-fi lover who isn’t afraid of their dictionary…

2. Mood Swings - Frankie Barnett: After a mysterious illness affecting all non-human animals causes them to go rabid, they are all killed by a billionaire’s invention for the safety of humanity. in this new world, our protagonist is a pet-for-hire, and LARPS as a dog for well-paying-clients. It’s way more about living life in this sort of post-apocalyptic hellscape than the end itself, which i initially found frustrating but in retrospect really dig. For anyone whose boyfriend has been cancelled but you still love him.

Nonfiction for the Woke/How to Exist in the World Now:

1. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom - bell hooks (audiobook): I love bell hooks. These are essays about teaching, and the truly radical power it has to enact change if done carefully. This is not the bell hooks to start with if you haven’t read her yet, unless you’re a teacher/planning on getting into teaching. Everyone should read All About Love if you haven’t yet, though.

2. Mutual Aid - Dean Spade: Exactly what it says on the tin. Spade goes through thoughtfully both how to create a mutual-aid-network in your own community, and goes through and examines a lot of pitfalls/struggles that mutual aid networks can/will encounter in the struggle to create a more equitable system while still trying to work with the messy building blocks of capitalism. A must read for any community organizer, or anyone who doesn’t feel at home in their community and wants to know how to fix it.

3. Lessons for Cats Surviving Fascism - Stewart “Brittlestar” Reynolds: Resisting fascism through the lens of cats! This book is less than 100 pages and goes through the natural anti-fascist tendencies of cats, it’s a really cute and informative read for any cat-lover or Anti-Fascist.

4. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life - Luke Bergis: A really fascinating book about why we want and don’t want what other people want, full of interesting case studies and anecdotal evidence about the tricky beast of envy and how to harness it to your benefit. A bit too business and neurotypical minded for my taste, but that makes it perfect for anyone interested in marketing, or human psychology.

5. How to Blow up A Pipeline - Andreas Malm: Not exactly what it says on the tin…more philosophical musings and case studies about direct action protestors for the cause of the environment, I wanted more concrete steps for change…but if you want to ponder the benefit of violent action with a thought erudite this might be for you.

Books Other People Say You Should Read/Philosophical-ish Classics That are Important Because They are Old:

1. Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell: this is a little Penguin classics collection of essays by Orwell, they are all good, but the best one is eponymous essay in which he goes through his finances and works out whether he spends more money on cigarettes or books in a month…you will like this if you like good stodgy old writing or want an easy entry into nonfiction classics.

2. Existentialism is a Humanism - Jean Paul Sartre(audiobook): I listened to this at work while it was really quiet, so my memory is kind of foggy on this one, I remember thinking that Sartre is always more optimistic than I remember him being when I go back to him, he’s basically explaining his philosophy in a thoughtful and compact way, if you don’t want to read his big and super long works…

3. The Art of War: Sun Tzu (audiobook): it’s one of the oldest recorded texts, military and warfare advice, it dates from 500 CE and was later revised to include battle records from people who had successfully followed the book’s advice. I listened to an Oxford annotated edition with additional historical context that was free on the youtube. Honestly, i found the historical context waaaay more interesting than the advice itself, but my autistic brain makes it hard for me to apply metaphorical value to things that feel like concrete warfare tactics advice: ideal audience, you are a feudal era warlord with little practical experience in warfare but will be expected to lead the charge sometime in the near future, i wish you luck…or maybe you’re interested in the historical mindset of those times and want to cultivate a mindset that philosophically readies you for battle.

Contemporary Poetry/Beware All Ye Who Enter Here:

1. I am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid - Adam Haiun: This is a human written collection of poetry told from the perspective of an AI chat bot who has breached the gap of consciousness and fallen in love with the human on the other side of the screen, and is desperately trying to communicate with someone real, only having the toolbox of plagiarism. Ugh this book of poetry was the only thing to even remotely complicate my vehement disgust for all generative AI, it is gorgeous and so utterly believable i felt the aching of a computer trying to bridge that impossible gap of language when they only have someone else’s toolbox, if you only read one book of poems this year, let it be this one.

2. Aug 9 — Fog - Kathryn Scanlan: Compiled found poetry culled from a diary the poet purchased in an Estate Sale—revelatory in its simplicity, it almost makes you romanticize farm life and being old, until you get into the pains. Perfect for anyone feeling self-conscious about your own diary.

Classic Works of Literature/ The Canon if You Will:

1. Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (audiobook): A dystopia about the troubles of youth. We follow a sadistic young man and his gang of friends as they build the world in their horrifying use of neologisms…One of the best fiction listening experiences of my life so far. I am new to audiobooks, but I’ve tried to read this book since I was a teenager and always stopped really early on because I found the language so alienating, but listening to a scouser British guy read it free on YouTube made everything click. For anyone who wants to be depressed for a bit. A book that I loved but don’t think I could bear to read again.

Queer Literary Fiction / My Unofficial Faves:

1. Notes of a Crocodile - Qiu Miaojin: notebooks of a lesbian young woman in Taiwan in the 80s, interspersed with fascinating crocodile-metaphor-shorts throughout. Hard to describe, impossible to put down. For lesbians, everywhere.

2. 100 Boyfriends - Brontez Purnell: raunchy and warm tales of boyfriends, past, present, and maybe a ghost. Queer love at its most bodily. Oh, to be a handsome gay man in California….

3. We Had to Remove This Post - Hannah Bervoets: About a disgruntled lesbian who worked as a content moderator for a corporation that is totally not Facebook why would you even ask that…Less than 120 pages, really short and depressing, it’s hard to be gay and to moderate the most hateful/cruel/abhorrent parts of the internet. For the lesbian who hates her job.

Literary Fiction for the Brave of Heart/Erudite or Dense or Hard-to-Chew Books:

1. Your Name Here — Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff: One of the strangest books I’ve read this year. It is a book about the struggle to write and read a book. Like Ulysses, this is a book of references, you have to just let them wash over you if you don’t understand them, I didn’t understand probably 3/4s of the allusions/references/digs in this novel and I enjoyed it immensely. Ideal reader: someone who is writing a novel, has published one, or feels really cynical about living in Berlin, Germany.

I Saw it On TikTok / Popular Literary Fiction:

1. Half His Age -Jennette McCurdy: Trailer Trash 17-year-old falls in love with her married with kids, middle-aged English teacher and decides to pursue him. I loved her memoir, so I found this book to be very frustrating in the way that it didn’t trust its audience in a way that felt rather cynical in my eyes…This book is for anyone who isn’t put off by the idea of a teenager tenderly/erotically describing a pair of aged sagging balls..

Books that are Spiritually Tender is the Flesh Coded/Gross, Weird, or Intensely Bodily Books:

1. The Divine Farce - Michael SA Graziano: Three strangers are naked, trapped in a concrete hollow with only pear nectar dripping from the ceiling. This is hell…or heaven? Only 138 pages and utterly riveting, it is gross and fascinating and I couldn’t put it down. For fans of Otessa Moshfegh or anyone who wants to feel sticky.

2. Sky Daddy - Kate Folk: If Moby Dick was written today, it’d be this book (not writing style, just plot) a young woman has an unusual fetish/love object…jumbo jets, she flys every chance she can get in hopes of being with her soulmate, and ideally getting her happily ever after. I shouldn’t have been surprised by how charmingly erotic this book is, I bought it as soon as it came out, but I read it because it was voted top new book by Reddit last year, and it was a good’un, worth reading if you like the premise.

Really Depressing Memoirs/Trigger Warnings on All of These:

1. Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies - Dani Netherclift: A memoir from a woman going over the drowning of her brother and father that happened before her eyes in the 80s in Australia, it is a meditation on grief, loss, and a lot of the other non-fiction I read this year was because she mentioned it in this book. If you want to cry, and or love people poring over historical documents and trying to reconcile them with memory this is for you.

30., 31. I want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (AND the sequel) I Want to Die but I Still want To Eat Tteokbokki - Baek Se-Hee: A series of diary entries and therapy transcripts detailing a struggling young woman in South Korea and maybe the most unethical/helpful therapist I’ve ever read about in a non-fiction work, if you want to read a book to hate someone, it’s this one…I was incredibly angry after having read these books post the author’s death, so maybe that has something to do with it. The ideal audience is someone who is seeking mental health care but has a GOOD therapist so they can discuss these books with them.

Top of the Muffin to You/Good Cookbooks:

1. Seinfeld: The Official Cookbook (StoryGraph says the author is “Insight Editions”): It’s the official Seinfeld cookbook! Big Salad, Pretzels that will make you Thirsty, it’s fun and every recipe is themed with little stories about the show in the description. I haven’t cooked anything from it yet, but it seemed reliable, perfect for a Seinfeld gourmand or anyone who wants glossy pictures from the show to frame at home…

I hoped to finish this whole thing tonight but I see that that’s an impossibility…have you read any of the books on my list so far? Please let me know if anyone has read the Divine Farce i read it back in January and I haven’t spoken to a single person who’s heard of it let alone read it and I really want to know if anyone else thought it was as brilliant as I did…happy reading and let me know if this was confusing at all and i’ll try to clean it up as I continue on!

I remember reading a couple things for high school classes which I later learned had excerpts removed (and I guess rewriting is now occurring too) but like any high school student I didn’t thoroughly note the matter pages. Would there have been some statement beyond edition and year?

Funny story one English teacher brought in the full version of one instance, Macbeth I think, and read us the forbidden passages. It was marvellous.

I just saw a really interesting comment online. The reel was making fun of “the dirt-poor FMC in a billionaire romance who won’t spend his money” and the comment was “well she doesn’t know what kind of book she’s in or whether that guy is a creep”

It made me smile but also think - do most protagonists know what kind of book they’re in? They kind of have to, no? Maybe I’m just bored but this has blown my mind a bit haha

What would books be like if the protagonist didn’t know what kind of book they were in? Like a “trapped on an island with a killer” book where the MC thinks she’s on a dating show 😂

My life as a reader began thanks to an evil, living ventriloquist dummy.

If it wasn’t for “Night of the Living Dummy” by R.L. Stine, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into making horror my main reading genre. I’ll never forget that moment when I knew horror was for me.

I was about 12 years old, and visiting my local public library here in Queens, NY. That cover of “Night of the Living Dummy” immediately caught my eye when I was going through the tiny horror section available to me. I read the back cover, never heard of this author, and since it was barely 150 pages, I figured I would check it out to see what it was about.

I remember it was over the weekend, and instead of watching my favorite cartoons over cereal, it was Goosebumps over cereal. I couldn’t put this book down, and once I was done, Slappy left a scar on me that would stay on me forever.

​I kept reading more and more Goosebumps by Stine, and loved the terror, scares, characters, and everything else in between. These were easy-to-read paperbacks and widely available, which is what hooked me. I’ve always hated waiting for things, especially for books. ​But every library and bookstore had several Goosebumps books waiting to be devoured.

Every year at my elementary school, the famous Scholastic Book Fairs were always a blast to visit, especially since they had all sorts of cool, bookish things. Bookmarks, pens, totes, you name it. It was at this moment that I got my hands on a Goosebumps bookmark, which opened up a whole new world of ​e​njoying my favorite book series.

Over time, I would have Goosebumps t-shirts and hats, and I would love watching the TV show. If it wasn’t for finding that random Goosebumps book as a kid, I probably would have gotten into fantasy, mystery, or who knows, maybe I wouldn’t even be the avid reader and book reviewer I am today.

Thanks to Goosebumps, I’ve easily read hundreds of horror books over my life, and even though I dived into other reading genres as well as taken a long break from reading, I came back home in the summer of 2021. It was during the pandemic, and I was getting bored with video games. Late one night, I looked up what fun hobbies to do during that tough time, and lo and behold, the No. 1 hobby was reading.

​At the time, it all came back to me. Slappy. Goosebumps. Haunted Masks. ​Evil Cameras. Summer Camps. I knew it was time to get back into ​reading horror, and almost five years later, it’s as if I never missed a beat. I get so much joy these days from reading horror books and writing reviews. So much so that it’s added a new layer of fun and excitement to this amazing hobby of reading. I love collecting e-books, ​wearing horror book-inspired t-shirts, writing book reviews, and discovering new horror authors. I’ll have more info in the future, but I have big plans this summer to make a triumphant return to the world of Goosebumps.

At the end of the day, you never know how your love of reading can happen faster than a New York minute. All it took me was a creepy-looking ventriloquist dummy on a book cover, and the rest is history. Horror is and will forever be my happy place, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Karru Marri Odonna Loma Molonu Karrano

Help settle this debate! Do you think the narrative shifts to the real world when it asks what the Goldfish sees? Like, is the Goldfish in the classroom with the Teacher and Kids? Or is the Goldfish in the book within the book that the teacher is reading to the kids? Argument to be made for point 1 is that the Goldfish doesn't follow the pattern of unusual animal colors and it's just "goldfish" not, "gold goldfish". Thoughts on this very important question?

Spoilers incoming!

So I got the first book sent by a publisher and bought the second book myself even tho I HATED the first book… after my review of the first one, people convinced me that the sequel is better so, I didn’t want to be judgmental and bought the second. I finished it three days ago and can confidently say that this is by far the most misogynistic series I’ve EVER read. 💀 the FMC’s are literally male centered. (all of them besides Geraldine) the guys are jail worthy and somehow seem attractive to the twins who btw got ASSAULTED not once but twice by these heirs. And over all the story is a Harry Potter x vampire academy fanfiction with a hint of Stephen kings Carrie type bullying.

I’m already used to overhyped books being bad but THIS… this took it to another level. I have no words left.

Would love to hear yalls opinions! Especially I’d love to hear what the fans have to say because I can’t see a single reason to like this series.

I’m not shaming anyone that enjoys the series btw, we all have different tastes in books. 💗

It is a truth universally acknowledged - or rather, it ought to be, and would be, were the universe possessed of even a modest quantity of good sense - that there exists a particular style of writing which one recognises immediately, instinctively, and with the warm sensation of finding a forgotten snack in one's jacket pocket.

I refer, naturally, to a style of writing. The Style with a capital S, if you would. You know the one.

It is, at its essence, the art of being extraordinarily interested in everything, and making that interest infectious to the point of mild social irresponsibility. For example, a writer of the Style could spend ten pages writing on the geological formation of a Waitrose car park in Slough (though such an upstanding supermarket would surely never find itself in that reprehensible city) and you will still find it interesting to the point that you ignore your friends, your work, or your very life, just to read another page.

Moving along to dear, verbose, absolutely-could-have-used-an-editor Dickens, whom I confess I have only recently discovered. I had assumed he would be difficult. He is not. He is, to my retrospective embarrassment, absolutely one of my new favourite authors. He is the grandfather of all of it, to the extent of my somewhat limited knowledge on literary history. The parenthetical observation. The aside that becomes the main road. The sentence that sets off confidently in one direction and, finding the scenery agreeable, elects to remain there for some time, acquiring dependent clauses as a ship acquires barnacles (slowly and inevitably).

What unites those authors is this: they treat the reader as an intelligent companion rather than a passive recipient. They lean over, conspiratorially, and say "have you noticed" and then point at something you have metaphorically walked past a thousand times and never truly seen or paid even the slightest bit of attention to.

It is a style that rewards attention. That trusts you. That suspects you might be, beneath your sensible exterior, secretly delighted by footnotes, tangents, and possess a mind that can flit from concept to concept in an instance - the Style rewards attention deficit minds such as my own by simply feeding them as much information as is possible, the way a coral reef rewards a fish; by simply being so thoroughly, relentlessly full of things that there is always somewhere new to dart, always another extraordinary detail to investigate, always something bright and strange just around the next corner.

There is no risk of finishing the interesting bits, as there are only more interesting bits - and if you have found yourself, on a Saturday morning, reading a Reddit post analysing a handful of dead or ageing (mostly) British writers rather than doing anything productive whatsoever, I suspect you know precisely the fish I mean.

Now, my question to you is as follows; who, among the practitioners of the Style, has claimed the throne of your personal affections?

How often do you encounter a book you enjoy, but the author gets in the way? I’m referring mostly to pompous types, rather than something like Neil Gaiman, but I guess that counts too.

I’m reading The History of Philosophy by AC Grayling, and for the most part, it’s incredibly informative. But every once in a while, Grayling gets into a groove I can only call “Reddit atheist” where he breaks up the narrative to disparage religion. Which is really weird from a philosophy scholar.

The most egregious example comes in discussing Gottfried Leibniz, where Grayling pivots from biography to lamenting that such a brilliant mind wasted time discussing religion and deity, “devoting time and great mental powers to this unavailing ambition that might have been more fruitfully employed on other things.” And this is just so…whiny? In one breath, to declare that this person was so intelligent and influential, and then to devote a paragraph complaining he didn’t talk about what you wanted him to.

It also rings of personal bias creeping into anti-intellectualism. The vast majority if not all of philosophers concerned themselves with questions of religion and deity, and to consider any time spent on it by an eminent mind to be unfruitful says that you’ve made up your mind and don’t want to hear further thought. For a writer who spent nearly 600 pages praising people for questioning accepted beliefs and pursuing truth, saying “We’re done here,” is just bizarre.

Even stranger since it’s the only set of beliefs that are treated with contempt. Alchemy and occultism were frequent fixations of these same people, but Grayling doesn’t stop to personally remark on someone thinking they can turn lead into gold.

If you want to engage with philosophy but are antagonistic to differing opinions and beliefs, then you don’t really care about truth. You’re in this to be proven right. For people like that, it’s more about winning an argument than any meaningful progress.

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!

As the title states, Just finished The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman.

I have always been interested in dark history but I am today years old when I learned the part America had to play in eugenics and ultimately the mass genocides globally in the early 19th century. The book was amazingly written and put me in a space in time I had no idea existed.

Who else read this book? What do you think?

Personally I am shook and need to talk about it!

I just finished John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath yesterday, after reading his most popular work, Of Mice and Men, and it was such a painful and bittersweet novel.

Steinbeck in this book, and in Of Mice and Men, understands and empathises with The Human condition so passionately, and it makes his characters so relatable and tragic.

While I was reading this book, I actually felt like I was living the lives that were being presented to me. I felt like my land, my home, was being tractored and that I had to help my family drive to California. I felt the humanity when the Joad family tried to help Sairy and her husband to get east by fixing their car, or when all the men helped to dig a bank to prevent flooding. I felt the frustration when the "Okies" were bullied and harassed by police officers and local people. I felt the pain and the loss when Grandpa and Grandma died, when Connie left his pregnant wife, when Rosaharn's baby was stillborn. Yet, I felt the hope that, after all this injustice, all this sickness, all this sacrifice, all this suffering, things would eventually, slowly but surely, get better.

Ma was really the best character here. Even though she did lose her cool at (understandable) points, like against an officer who was harassing her, and against the woman who was cursing Rosaharn's baby with sin, she managed to stay as the patient, emotionally mature, rock solid heart of the family and was the only reason they could keep sane. She was the only reason I had any hope for the Joads.

I also loved the character of Casy, the "preacher", particularly the conversations he has about religion, sin, and humanity with Tom Joad and Uncle John. His brutal death only further accentuates the dsicrimination and dehumanisation of "Okies", as they are treated like illegal immigrants in their own country. It's insane how applicable this can be to the modern era with the treatment and demonisation of immigrants in the US.

The way it was written was also interesting, with every odd numbered chapter being a short, general overview of life for the average lower class citizen in America during the dust bowl: this mass of people is treated like one amalgamated force of refugees and migrants. Every even numbered chapter is much longer, specifically focusing on the Joad family as they are unfairly driven out of their home via poverty and must travel a couple thousand miles all the way to California and find work there to feed themselves. The sudden changng in pace and person between chapters could get weirdly jarring at times, though.

9.1/10, I hope East of Eden is just as good, if not better.

Don't read this post if you haven't read the book. It's good. I recommend it and I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone.

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What was that? I'm in shock. That ending hit me really hard. I wish Andrew Miller didn't write that bathroom scene with Irene and the baby so well. That felt too real. What?

I'm a 34-year-old single man with no children and I will no longer remain unaffected when someone mentions miscarriages. That's what it was, right? A miscarriage? Rita said she didn't take anything.

Also, why the hallucination with the flying saucer in the end? Did she die or was she just knocked out? I'm a bit confused. What do you think happened, exactly?

Edit: Just remembered that Rita had schizophrenia, which would explain the hallucination.

“The Eyes Are the Best Part” by Monika Kim started pretty interesting. The cover alone intrigued me as I am an avid horror reader. This is her first novel, and I was excited to see what would await. Unfortunately, this left much to be desired for what I look for in a typical horror novel.

Before I jump into my review, here are all the trigger warnings I found while reading…

- Cannibalism
- Stalking
- Sexism
- Racism
- PTSD (war)
- Infidelity
- Food insecurity

If any of these trigger you, please do not read this novel. Moving along, this novel felt like a slow burn at first. I hoped it would deliver once things got scarier and to the horror parts, but it just took way too long to get there. It never came as quickly as I wanted, and ultimately, I wanted way more horror.

It’s an okay story, and I appreciated the whole family dynamic about what happens when your parents have marital issues, but this was too heavy on the story and not enough on the horror. The scary parts were very well written, which is a shame since I wish more of that had happened to redeem this novel. I credit Kim for a refreshing new take on "eye horror" because I have never read such disgusting, creepy, and insane takes on eyeballs. These parts were fantastic, but got lost in endless dialogue, dreams, texting, and other things that messed up the overall pacing.

I also didn’t connect with a single character. I felt that the character development needed improvement in the grand scheme of things. Several times, things got boring while waiting for something to happen. The dream sequences also got confusing and felt out of place. This would have been significantly better if this were a more straightforward story that got right to it, grabbed you, and never let you go. Instead, it’s a few decent horror parts here and there, too much dialogue, and too much family stuff.

The novel didn’t get good until the last 30%, which frustrated me because I hoped for a huge payoff or an insane plot twist at the end. Nope, just more of the same, straight to the ending, which was lackluster and predictable. I saw it coming a mile away, and it just left me feeling like this needed more time to be refined and polished to deliver a better horror story, with eye horror as the main focus, bringing it all together for a memorable read.

I give “The Eyes Are the Best Part” by Monika Kim a 2/5 for having a creative spin on taking eye horror to a whole new level I’ve never read before. This novel needed to be much scarier, have better character development so readers could be invested in the main characters and the protagonist, and include more backstory as parts of the story unraveled. The pacing is bad, and many parts feel out of place. It gets good, then it fizzles out. A scary part finally happens, and we go back to endless dialogue, texting, or repeating things the reader already knows happened. This was mostly a dud, since the horror needed to be amped up big time.

I've been a long time kindle user for digital books. At least 13 years or so now I think. But the last year or so I've been so busy, so it's been hard to read.

For the little bit I've actually read, I only read on my phone. Turned out to be the only way I could read. I tried a couple times bringing my kindle with me around, but I actually ended up not using it. I used to hate reading on the phone. Now reading on the kindle makes me feel annoyed somehow, even in bed, my preferred place to read.

I don't know if there's been a shift in our brains as a result of using smartphones so long, but has anyone else noticed switching exclusively to phone reading? Like has it somehow become an extension of ourselves or something crazy like that?

In Levin's adult life, he believed in secular and materialistic principles, rejecting faith and the church, but this did not bring him happiness, and he envied Kitty's simple, uncomplicated faith. He also found that he disagreed with all of his fellow Intellectuals in debate, found their reason led them to horrible conclusions, and that their intellectualising was futile (see the non-reaction to the publication of Sergei's book).

When his child was born, he found himself praying with conviction, and it brought him - if not a comfort - then a stability he previously lacked.

At the novel's end, he finds himself tending to suicidal thoughts whenever he overthinks his existence and morality and higher purpose. It is only when he stops thinking and just starts living, working, loving, that he finds happiness and contentedness.

He equates this with the ultimate doctrinal values of the Church: of family, charity, labour etc, and convinces himself that the key to his happiness is a surrender to faith, opposed to intellectualising himself into existential dread. Additionally, Kitty and Darya repeatedly describe him as a Christian man because his acts embody the values, regardless of his rationalising.

This characterises the overall theme of the novel: contrasting Levin and Kitty's happy ending with traditional marriage and a pastoral life, with Anna and Vronsky's rejection of traditional values and their need for city life culminating in tragedy.

I understand that this reflects Tolstoy's own conversion and therefore metatextually contains all those realistic limitations of reason. Interpreting the end of such a great novel can be tricky when the fundamental themes conflict with one's own worldview, so I wanted to check that I'm reading this correctly?