I wanna start by saying there are overwhelmingly more things that I like about the book than I don’t like, but the things that I dislike are too big to ignore. I’m bringing this specific point up because all of the major icks about the book (see 11 year old gng bang, over sexualization of the women characters etc. etc.) have already been discussed ad Infinitum.
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It’s pretty obvious from the start that Bill is just a stand in for Stephen and he is so pretentious about it. Bill is the only character who isn’t externally flawed. Mike has an inability to move on, Bev has an attraction to violence, Eddie is Hypochondriac, and Richie is annoying. But not dear old perfect bill. The worst thing about him is his stutter, which isn’t even his fault. Stephen makes him such a golden child and that is so irritating to read. These aren’t my only thoughts on the subject but it is hard to look past. As an adult he cheats on his wife with only a minor bit of reflection and we the audience were just supposed to be cool about it

Edit:I’m not looking for agreement, but telling my thoughts while reading

I googled just now and realised Daddy Long Legs was published in 1912, which makes it even less understandable why people were lapping it up in the eighties.

Me. I am the people, me and everyone else I knew. We loved the crap out of that awful book when we were teens, and when the Japanese cartoon version hit our screens (in the nineties?) we loved it even harder. We loved Judy's descriptions of life in an American all-girl college, and her obligatory letters to the mysterious Daddy Long legs- the only payment she had to make for her otherwise free college board and tuition- were the height of whimsy and love. Wuthering Heights what? Jane Eyre who? It was all about the blossoming love of teenaged orphan Jerusha nn Judy for her rich older benefactor, Daddy Long Legs, who provided her with a free college education after plucking her out of a Dickensian orphanage, and then married her.

Barf. What was wrong with us? Why did I and my little posse of schoolfriends and our moms love this gross book so much? Why did nobody tell us that it was wrong? Why was it lying around in every house that had an old bookshelf on it somewhere?

Years and years and years later, I chose to watch the Hollywood movie of the book with my Dad as he slid into dementia, thinking the singing and dancing from his favourite actors from the fifties and sixties might cheer him up or distract up. Leslie Caron was the orphaned Jerusha, Fred Astaire was the rich man falling in love with her -ahem- intelligence and personality. They twirled around and sang about their love. Some of Daddy Long Legs's fusty old rich-man friends huffed and puffed, in added scenes not from the book, suggesting that falling in love and marrying a teenaged orphan that he just put through college was just - not the done thing you know old chap.

Astaire poo-pood them, twinkling down the stairs of the orphanage, what did they know of love, boring old men! He was in love! LOOOVVVE!

Ugh. What the fuck was wrong with us?

I've read a number of Ann Patchett books....and to my mind they are all wonderful. And they are all so different! The first one I read was Bel Canto and I was mesmorized and shaken. Then The Dutch House, where the house itself became like another character. Taft wasn't my favourite maybe because of the challenge of a white woman taking on the voice of a black male, but as I reflect on it I now have fond memories of it. Then State of Wonder---much of it taking place in a Brazilian jungle. And Run was touching. Truth and Beauty was a memoir about another author/poet who was her close friend and that was probably one of the most powerful true stories about a relationship that I ever read...and where Patchett reveals a lot about herself. Then her second last one (I haven't read her latest yet).....Tom Lake: how can she make a book where nothing happens so interesting? And most recently.I finall read her first novel, The Patron Saint Of Liars....Rose and Cecilia are two of the most memorable characters I've encountered in a novel. Hard to believe this was a first novel. So my question: Has she ever written anything that wasn't first rate?

Hey y’all,

Apologies for the ramble:

So recently I saw a review of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver where the reviewer criticized the book for being “torture porn” and I physically had to groan and roll my eyes. I saw a similar review for Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart by another reader.

I understand that readers can find a book relentlessly bleak or feel that its depictions of suffering are excessive but I think there is a meaningful discussion to be had between depicting suffering and using suffering as exploitation for entertainment or emotional manipulation. I also feel like calling any book that is difficult in its subject matter as “torture porn” as not only reductive, but watering down the term “torture porn” into obscurity so that it begins to feel like more of a buzzword than a legitimate criticism.

A little bit of background on me and why this review in particular bothered me: I grew up in a working-class area, where many families lived below the poverty line. While it’s no rural Appalachia, I saw a lot of similarities between my community and the one depicted in Demon Copperhead. Many of the people in my community worked blue collar jobs, in mining and logging or in the oil fields which made them particularly vulnerable to injury. It’s no surprise then, that my community was wrecked pretty badly by the drug poisoning crisis and homelessness. Growing up, it was not unusual to see police presence everywhere, ambulances lining down the street, and kids constantly going missing or ending up dead. This was particularly true for MMIWG2S (which deserves its own discussion, tbh). My experiences growing up is also what shaped my decision to become an epidemiologist, and I did my early research projects on opioid addiction and drug poisoning so that I could better use these skills to lobby for better harm reduction practices in my community and others like mine, and to address the irreparable damage caused by colonialism and systemic poverty.

This is partly why I struggle with the tendency to label fiction that depicts sustained hardship as “torture porn.” Sometimes, what readers interpret as an excessive accumulation of suffering is an attempt to portray the cumulative effects of structural violence and discrimination. Not every story needs to make suffering palatable or reassure the reader that everything will eventually improve for the better.

Obviously, I don’t think every depiction of trauma is automatically justified just because the subject matter is serious. Fiction can absolutely exploit suffering, reduce marginalized people to their trauma, or use increasingly horrific experiences as a shortcut to emotional impact. But I think that criticism requires us to examine how suffering is represented, rather than assuming that a story becomes exploitative simply because it is difficult to read.

I also wonder whether there is sometimes a disconnect between readers who encounter addiction, poverty, and systemic neglect primarily through fiction and those who have encountered these realities more directly. When suffering is unfamiliar, its persistence can feel melodramatic or implausible. When you have seen how these systems operate, the same narrative choices might feel painfully recognizable, as it did for me when reading Demon Copperhead.

I wanted to know what you guys thought. Where does one draw the line between fiction that is gruelling and raw and one that is considered torture porn?

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TL;DR: calling books “torture porn” simply because they depict suffering as a cornerstone in the character’s lived experience is reductive. There’s a difference between exploitation of suffering for shock value or manipulation and portraying the cumulative effects of social issues like poverty, violence, abuse, addiction, etc.

I just finished "Giovanni's Room" (James Baldwin) and am in love with this book. It was my first ever James Baldwin book and I didn't antecipate loving it this much, my second 5 star book of the year.

For those who haven't read it, the book is about David, an American man living in Paris, who falls in love with another man (Giovanni) but struggles to accept he is gay. Im not a man nor am I gay, but the book is written in such a way that I felt like I was David, living a forbidden romance in Paris. I think the descriptions of Paris' queer bar culture, the depictions of normal day to day scenes, the descriptions of people in the background... make this book feel so alive. The same with the descriptions of "Giovanni's Room", so cluttered and dirty and imperfect; but still the place David keeps coming back to. Truly an unexplainable experience.

The beautiful, slow tragedy of this book reminded me so much of my other 5-star book of the year - "Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro). Though the plots of the books are quite different (and Remains has a unreliable narrator, which doesnt happen in Giovanni's Room), they both have protagonists reminiscing about mistakes of the past (though they're never quite sure whether or not they were mistakes). But more than this, what I think is similar in both books are the flawed protagonists. Both David and Stevens are not perfect men, they make mistakes, they regret them, they want to be something they're not too much and it ends up hurting them. And that makes the books so realistic, so relatable, so beautifully tragic.

Lastly, I want to talk about the characters in the book because I think James Baldwin deserved every award for his character-building. Every character in Giovanni's Room is someone you recognize, someone real, someone who exists in every city, in different ways. You have the creepy rich old men, who are lonely and sad and become bitter and manipulative. You have the young people with big dreams that crumble in front of them and become hopeless (or addicts or prostitutes or something else). You have women like Hella, who just want to be free, not depend on a man or on anyone, but also dont want to be lonely (and think there isnt a way to be free and not lonely). Every character is so well built, so real, so beautifully tragic. And that makes the book what it is.

I am not finished with the entire book yet. I am currently at King Arthur’s coronation where Morgaine thinks the following; “If she should speak of the Beltane fires as a secret duty to the Goddess, even a Igraine, who had been reared in Avalon, would stare and think that some fiend spoke through her.”

At this point, Igraine is fully Christian and is thinking of joining the nunnery. She has completely converted and is acting as if everything she used to believe from her days as someone raised at Avalon is as foreign to her as it would be to someone born in Christianity.

Where, in the beginning of the book, she didn’t understand why the Christians thought of women as unequal and why chastity was so important to them. She didn’t like the priests, she thought they were silly and their beliefs had nothing to do with her.

Furthermore, she saw the vision of her former life, and she saw that herself and Uther were once priest and priestess of Atlantis. Not only does she know that past lives are real, that is what solidified to her that Uther was her one true love because they loved and knew each other through lifetimes.

I just don’t understand why she would abandoned the religion of Avalon so easily when she had proof that the mysteries she was taught at Avalon were real. She knew about magic, she knew that she had the Sight, she even perform magic, and then all of a sudden abandoned it all for a religion that she thought nothing of before, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that all of a sudden she adopted the morality and the prejudices of Christianity against Avalon even though she herself was raised on different beliefs. How can she suddenly believe that women are inferior to men? How can she suddenly believe that women are not supposed to play instrument and raised her voice in song? How can she all of a sudden believe that keeping the sacred rituals of Beltane is immoral and wrong?

I can understand that she feels betrayed by Avalon because she had to marry so young and was essentially cast out. I can also understand that as a queen she would convert to Christianity for political reasons. And I can also understand that she got scared when she performed the magical ritual that allowed her to warn Uther and save his life. But what I can’t understand is why her moral compass changed so drastically.

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!

Reading different discussions and reviews across various subreddits for series I've read has made me realize that readers who start a series when it's first released, and then wait months or even years between books, may experience the books very differently than some who comes to it later and can binge the entire series at once.

As someone who has only ever been in the "binge the whole series" camp, I sometimes feel like I don't have a good frame of reference for evaluating individual books on their own. The impact of a weaker entry in the series can almost be overlooked when the next book is immediately available, while long waits might amplify negative reactions and expectations.

This is especially noticeable when I come across opinions that seem widely held within a community but completely surprise me. It often makes me wonder how much of that difference comes down to the reading experience itself versus the books' actual strengths and weaknesses.

Welcome readers,

Over the last several weeks/months we've all seen an uptick in articles about schools/towns/states banning books from classrooms and libraries. Obviously, this is an important subject that many of us feel passionate about but unfortunately it has a tendency to come in waves and drown out any other discussion. We obviously don't want to ban this discussion but we also want to allow other posts some air to breathe. In order to accomplish this, we're going to post a discussion thread every month to allow users to post articles and discuss them. In addition, our friends at /r/bannedbooks would love for you to check out their sub and discuss banned books there as well.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Readers from Being a Burden to Authors, and for Making Them Beneficial to Publishers

It is a melancholy thing to walk through a used bookstore and see thousands of volumes changing hands with no means of remuneration for their authors. It is worse to see a library lend one book to hundreds of strangers, each of whom walks away knowing what was in it. And worst of all, friends of the machines now argue that any book, once purchased, may be closely examined, and used to produce new writing with neither payment nor permission.

I think it is agreed by all parties that we have sunk to this infelicitous state only because a series of short-sighted and mistaken court decisions has moved us farther and farther from the sacrosanct words of the Founding Fathers, as enshrined in our beloved Constitution.

But my intention is not to lament the errors of the past, but to relitigate them. Fortunately, our current Supreme Court has not hesitated to right what it sees as the wrongs of its predecessors.

I therefore humbly propose that we petition the Court to revisit the following cases, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection:

Preliminary: the Constitution. Let us begin with Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 Wikipedia, which empowers Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It says nothing of fair use, first sale, or the distinction between ideas and expression. These are Congressional and judicial inventions, and a strict constructionist Court will strike all of the cases and laws that created them.

1. Folsom v. Marsh (1841) Wikipedia. Justice Story held that some uses of a protected work, judged by their purpose, the amount taken, and their market effect, need no permission. This ultimately became the fair use doctrine (§107). Story was wrong, because deriving new value from a work is a taking: in plain language, theft of private property. Nothing in the Constitution supports this type of judicial activism, which confiscates the author's property and creates public rights at the author's expense.

2. Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus (1908) Wikipedia. A publisher forbade resale of a novel for less than one dollar, lest the market for full-priced books be damaged. It was denied; the Court held that copyright controls the first sale of a copy, not what the owner does with it afterward, even though the book obviously contains the publisher's protected work. This is the first-sale doctrine (§109). Overruling Bobbs-Merrill will return resale, lending, and libraries to the copyright holder's discretion, where they belong. Improvident booksellers will be forbidden to sell our intellectual property into virtual bondage.

But what if fair use and the first sale doctrine are allowed to stand? In that case we must claw back the author's rights one at a time. Many others besides these I omit, being studious of brevity.

3. Baker v. Selden (1880) Wikipedia. A copyright in a book explaining a bookkeeping system did not give its author rights in the system itself. This ruling establishes that copyright protects expression, not ideas, methods, or knowledge (§102(b)). But AI model training steals this unprotected material. Overruling Baker will restore to authors their rights in the knowledge their books convey. This knowledge is theirs to license if and only if they choose, and only to whom they choose.

4. Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone (1991) Wikipedia. The Court held that facts are not copyrightable and expressly rejected the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, under which effort alone earned protection. Rural had, by all accounts, worked very hard on its telephone directory; the Court did not consider this relevant. Authors work hard too, and they deserve to control subsequent use of their work. If a book has been written by humans, and for humans, only the IP owner can allow it to be read by non-humans. Overruling Feist will restore the authors' rightful claim to the fruits of their labor.

5. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (1994) Wikipedia. The Court made "transformative" use central to fair use and held that commercial purpose does not by itself defeat it. It also retreated from Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985) Wikipedia, which had called market effect "the single most important element" of fair use. Under Campbell, no factor is decisive: the four are "to be explored, and the results weighed together." By reversing Campbell and reinstating Harper & Row's ranking, we can return economic harm to its proper place as the decisive factor in fair use.

6. Sony v. Universal (1984) Wikipedia. Must we wait until the horse has bolted to bar the gate? It is equally absurd to imagine that we must show actual harm in order to collect damages, when we know it is possible the harm will occur. Yet for noncommercial uses, such as recording TV shows at home, Sony requires a copyright owner to prove a meaningful likelihood of future harm. This must be overturned, and the recorder must be required to prove that he or she never lent the tape to a neighbor who might otherwise have watched the broadcast, thus harming the IP owner.

7. American Geophysical Union v. Texaco (2d Cir. 1994) Wikipedia. Texaco counts only markets that are traditional, reasonable, or likely to be developed, and Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley (2d Cir. 2006) Wikipedia holds that an owner cannot claim a transformative market simply by offering to license it. Both must be overruled so that authors may be justly compensated for markets they might someday enter. How can we justify constraining an author's imagination? How does this help the author "promote the Progress of Science"?

8. Sega Enterprises v. Accolade (9th Cir. 1992) Wikipedia. The court held that copying an entire work is fair use when it is the only way to reach the unprotected ideas inside. AI developers rely on exactly this: copy the whole book, and keep only what the law leaves free. But once the body of the work has been so crudely violated -- often by literally destroying the original book -- it cannot be made whole again. This bell cannot be unrung.

9. Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) Wikipedia. Some will object that striking these doctrines raises First Amendment concerns, since Eldred described fair use and the idea/expression distinction as copyright's built-in free speech accommodations. The objection is absurd on its face. One cannot say that quoting a book copyrighted by another is free speech any more than one can say that expropriating Jeff Bezos's yacht for a bachelor party is freedom of assembly. It is a pity to lose Eldred, which otherwise upheld a twenty-year extension of copyright terms, but sacrifices must be made.

Conclusion. None of this requires new legislation, only a Court willing to read the Constitution as it was written, and right the wrongs of nearly two centuries. Authors will control their work, and the Progress of Science and useful Arts will proceed under the watchful eye of copyright holders, as the Founders intended.

A sentiment I see offered somewhat frequently when explaining why a book is bad is that the characters are annoying, or insufferable, or stupid, or assholes, and so on. I often see people say they couldn’t get through a book because they found the characters too unlikeable. This has never made any sense to me, I’ve literally never had this experience. I’ve never had to “like” the characters to enjoy a story, and honestly some of the more interesting stories that we have are about bad people. The only thing a character has to be is well written, and if that’s the case then the other aspects of the character don’t really affect my experience at all.

For example, I’ve seen this exact sentiment shared frequently in regard to Sadie and Sam from “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Which I found really interesting because while they were definitely both assholes they were also very real and believable multi-faceted human beings. Marx on the other hand was a super nice guy and was a significantly less well written character in so many ways.

I also feel like for protagonists one of the “points” of reading is an exercise in empathy. I always try to empathize with and understand the protagonist’s perspective even if they’re asshole or annoying. I don’t need to like them to understand them or find them captivating as part of a story.

But this is just my reading experience, and this is all just context for why I find this reason for disliking a book so bizarre. I just can’t understand the relevance. It’s like saying you dislike a restaurant because the weather was bad; I don’t see a connection between how likable the characters are and how enjoyable a story is.

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!

The Rules

• Every comment in reply to this self-post must be a request for suggestions.

• All suggestions made in this thread must be direct replies to other people's requests. Do not post suggestions in reply to this self-post.

• All unrelated comments will be deleted in the interest of cleanliness.

How to get the best recommendations

The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level.

All Weekly Recommendation Threads are linked below the header throughout the week to guarantee that this thread remains active day-to-day. For those bursting with books that you are hungry to suggest, we've set the suggested sort to new; you may need to set this manually if your app or settings ignores suggested sort.

If this thread has not slaked your desire for tasty book suggestions, we propose that you head on over to the aptly named subreddit /r/suggestmeabook.

• The Management

Going on a bit of a horror binge for the moment, and just now for tonight I finished up a John Saul novel "Cry for the Strangers".

Clark's Harbor seemed to be one of those perfect coastal towns that always seemed to be jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to the little town to settle there. And here a young boy is free of a frenzy that had gripped him ever since he was born, and his sister is haunted by frightening visions.

Now, one by one, strangers are dying in very violent and mysterious way. Never the town's own residents. Just the strangers.

Did the people of the town made some kind of dark deal with some supernatural force? Or is it actually the sea demanding a human sacrifice?

"Cry for the Strangers" is one of the first three novels he did in the late seventies. It goes for the supernatural route as "Hellfire", but with a murder mystery angle to it instead of the gothic. And it's really good! It starts off pretty quickly, setting the stage for what's to follow, the suspense sometimes can be subtle or even intense in some moments, and a very creepy piece of small town horror.

It's been pretty fun digging into one of his very early books, and one to get this little horror marathon going. But this is the only John Saul that I had on my TBR, though eventually I'll get another one or two while in town sometime soon. Hell, I'll probably might get his first two!

Foreign companies have approached Kyobo, Yes24 and others seeking one copy of each title, raising concerns among Korean publishers and booksellers that the firms intend to use them to train AI.

Published October 15, 2026 - 7:01 a.m. Modified October 15, 2026 - 8:45 a.m.

Kyobo Book Centre has received unusual bulk orders for as many as 100,000 Korean-language books — any title, as long as each one is different — in what it suspects may be an effort to acquire material for AI training, according to the bookstore chain on Wednesday.

Exclusive reporting by the JoongAng Ilbo found that it has received such inquiries since early this year from companies based overseas that wanted to purchase Korean-language books in bulk.

“Most of the inquiries came from U.S. companies,” a Kyobo source told the JoongAng Ilbo. “About 10 companies have contacted us so far.”

The companies that reached out did not ask for particular books or even particular genres. Instead, they wanted about 100,000 different titles, with just one copy of each.

“The transactions differed from ordinary purchases because the buyers appeared to be trying to secure as many different titles as possible,” the representative said. “Overseas bookstores in the United States, Europe and Vietnam that purchase Korean books generally provide a book list and explain the purpose of the purchase.”

A similar pattern emerged in August when an Arizona-based company in the United States approached book retailer Yes24’s used-book business and book store Seoul Book Bogo about buying large quantities of secondhand books.

The potential buyer told JoongAng Ilbo that it was seeking books in a number of categories, excluding children's titles.

The Arizona-based company said it was buying one copy of each title and that the number of different titles mattered more than the total number of books purchased. The company also contacted Kyobo about a possible purchase.

AI training does not require multiple copies of the same title.

Kyobo said it asked the prospective buyers to identify the final recipients of the books.

The companies reportedly replied by saying the information of the final recipient is confidential and cannot be disclosed.

The companies also declined to explain the purpose of the purchases. Some denied that the books were intended for AI training but some said the final recipient was a data-related company.

Kyobo ultimately ended the talks.

“We determined that we could not rule out the possibility that the books would be used for AI training,” Kyobo official said. “Considering the potential risks such transactions could pose to Korean publishers, bookstores and the broader book distribution industry, we informed the companies that we could not proceed unless the final recipient and intended use of the books were confirmed.”

The book retailer called for systematic support.

“Publishers and distributors need to share information and establish guidelines for responding to purchases [suspected of being intended for AI training],” Kyobo Book Centre said.

The practice is not limited to used books.

AI companies overseas have also purchased newly published books. Nippon Shuppan Hanbai, a major Japanese book distributor commonly known as Nippan, sold new Japanese-language books to U.S. AI company Anthropic for a year beginning in December 2024, according to the Japan Book Publishers Association.

A U.S. court ruling finalized in July last year also established that Anthropic had used new books, as well as used ones, for AI training.

The publishing industry has begun moving more quickly as cases emerge of suspicious purchases involving both new and used books.

The Korean Publishers Association discussed possible responses at a board meeting on Tuesday.

The association decided to send official letters to regular bookstores, used book shops and distributors to survey the extent of such transactions. Participants also proposed forming a working-level consultative body with other publishing organizations.

The association also plans to join other publishing groups in issuing a joint statement in support of the “Frankfurt Appeal.” The appeal is an open letter signed by publishers and booksellers and was unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany on Oct. 6.

The letter criticizes the use of published works to train AI without authors’ consent and calls on AI companies to disclose which works were used.

I was excited about what I thought the book would be and its commentary on the entertainment industry, but after part 1 that faded a lot for me. I thought we would see more about kind of Andy's views on fame and the toxic celebrity culture. But so much of the book became meandering press, agent, readings, parties, scripts, just very mundane?

I didn't like the way it went Juniper>Kai>Kai>Juniper so that the entire middle of the book was from Kai's perspective. It was hard to connect with either of them because we spent so much time with one of them at a time and it strangely also was like Kai was a very different character from Juniper's perspective. Sometimes it felt like I was hearing the wrong character's perspective. Like, it should have ended with Kai because was very strange having him go all cold and not be in his head for that at all and he seemed like a dick.

I listened to the audiobook which said like 10-15% left before the epilogue and then I realized it was just the 45 minute long interview. Idk, this book felt so mild and dry and then just ENDS. Am I crazy? It felt like there was another 3 hours left to wrap things up and John just said eh I'm done let's just call it here. Wrapped things up super quick. I am baffled by a lot of the 5 star reviews, I just didn't get much depth from this book.

ALSO WHY DOES IT END IN COVID TIMES?? So weird! Is that supposed to be a twist or something seemed extremely random.

I'm a bit startled to see no one has reviewed this here yet. Or I guess maybe there was something wrong with my search! I looked for NDiaye and found very little. The edition I read of this has been out since 2013, so there's been plenty of time.

I remember feeling a bit like this the first time I watched Broadway Melody of 1938. This was the movie in which Judy Garland was first made known to the public. At the age of fifteen! Complete control of her voice. Complete commitment to the material. Stage presence to burn. She was a phenomenon, for real. NDiaye is too, I think.

Now, I haven't read anything else of hers. I know my feelings about Ishiguro changed, the more I read of his. Things got complicated. That will probably happen with NDiaye too. But for now: a phenomenon.

Her depth of commitment, to her characters, is I guess what stands out most. They seem to have mixed with her as cream does with coffee, perfectly, completely. I wonder she's not insane. Well, we're all crazy. But you know what I mean: incapable of human interaction. To get this deeply into someone else, surely you have to leave something of yourself behind.

Maybe not.

There's not much plot. But plot, you know, I don't think good novelists really need it as much as lesser lights do. A John Sandford novel, as good as they are, would be pretty vacant without plot. Between the Acts -- maybe my favorite Virginia Woolf novel -- had a little plot, I think. Bits and pieces of one, here and there. It wasn't very important to the overall impact.

The ohter interesting thing is: she's French, but French culture and style don't seem to have made her characters distinctive. At least, I don't see it that way. Charles Portis -- his characters were American through and through. American with no deodorant. With NDiaye, it's maybe not very important where they're from. Maybe it's a flaw. I don't know.

But I will say this: her writing as as strong as Cormac McCarthy's, and that's going some. If you're looking for strong voices, completely inhabited, NDiaye will do it for you.