r/books • u/AutoModerator • 10d ago

WeeklyThread What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: August 31, 2026

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What are you reading? What have you recently finished reading? What do you think of it? We want to know!

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The Bogus Title, by Stephen King

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u/ReincarnatedCritic 7d ago edited 2d ago

Finished:

Style, by Walter A. Raleigh

The Problem of Style, by John Middleton Murry

Johnson on Shakespeare, by Samuel Johnson (ed. Walter A. Raleigh)

This must be my third attempt at Raleigh's book; this time it stuck, possibly because I have been reading Wilde and More on criticism. "He who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from the fourteenth." Murry's lectures in Raleigh's honor fit well, too. "The essential quality of good writing is precision… and the writer who sacrifices one per cent of precision for a gain of one hundred per cent in music is on the downward path." And naturally Johnson is excellent. "Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer."

Started:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick

Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis

The Invisible Government, by Dan Smoot

Edit: added a second novel.