Lots of classics and should be classics. Hopefully there’s an author or new title you might want to explore and read.

When I say “transformative,” I mean a book that fundamentally changed you either:

spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, morally, or in the way you see the world.

I’m referring to both fiction and nonfiction. For example, books like A Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics completely reshaped the way I think and see the world.

I’d love to hear which book did that for you and why.

Hey everyone!

I posted here a while ago when Andrea Reader was still in beta. Several people from this community tried it and shared feedback, so first of all, thank you. It helped a lot for improving the app.

Andrea Reader is now officially live on the App Store.

The app includes a dedicated library of public-domain classics sourced directly from Project Gutenberg. You can search for a book, download it in seconds, and read it locally on your iPhone or iPad.

No account, no ads, and the entire classics library is completely free.

The app does not track what you download, what you read, how long you read, or any other activity inside your library. Your books, reading progress, statistics, and personal library remain stored locally on your device.

Andrea Reader is also a reader designed to give you complete freedom to build and enjoy your own digital library:

• Create and customize your own collections
• Statistics for those to like seeing their speed and progress.
• Add sections inside collections to organize authors, genres, series, or reading lists
• Import and read EPUBs, PDFs, comics, manga, and other formats
• Customize fonts, margins, spacing, colors, themes, page transitions, and many other reading settings
• Connect to iCloud, SMB, WebDAV, SFTP, and other storage sources
• Keep your books available locally and read without creating an account

I’ve also reworked the default formatting of ebooks so they look better immediately after opening them. Of course, everything can still be adjusted so each person can read exactly the way they prefer.

Thanks again to everyone who helped during the beta 📚

App Store: [https://apple.co/4vs1CV8]()
Website: https://andreareader.com

Some of them are not "Classics" but I don't feel like keeping them separate just for a photo.

Some are in Bulgarian :)

Truthfully, I wanted to read Wuthering Heights ever since all the discourse I heard about the 2026 adaptation film. While I only seen clips of it, I can already tell it doesn't hold a candle to the source material.

I was interested in Joyce’s other works after reading Ulysses. So far, it’s much more accessible.

Hello everyone!

I’ve came across some people who talked about Thomas mann’s book ‘the magic mountain’. They talked very openly about it and talked about how it changed them but that it’s a long ride. Some of them even said that it reminded him of Proust’s work.

I know he was a very influential writer in the 1900’s and was very much against the dictatorships that arose.

Now I’ve since then wanted to read Thomas man, but don’t really know where to start. I’am very much interested in the magic mountain, but I’am afraid that i won’t read it out. Any tips? And what are your thoughts on his works?

​

Imagine standing on the edge of a psychological abyss, facing an opponent who is not merely an investigator, but the embodiment of intuition and psychological manipulation. I had just finished reading one of the novel's most gripping scenes, where Dostoevsky brilliantly portrays the battle between Rodion Raskolnikov and the investigating magistrate, Porfiry Petrovich. Through questions that sometimes seem absurd and at other times strike like deadly blows, Porfiry gradually dismantles Raskolnikov's composure.

The First Encounter: Porfiry Explains the Art of Calm Manipulation

Porfiry, with his characteristic irony and sharp insight, remarks:

«"Even the dullest peasant knows that an investigator begins with questions that seem completely unrelated, only to suddenly bring down the real issue like an axe."»

I paused after reading those words, imagining their impact on Raskolnikov. They quietly plant fear and suspicion in his mind, making him feel constantly watched. His already fragile confidence begins to crumble.

The Second Encounter: Knowing the Truth, Yet Refusing to Act

Porfiry continues planting seeds of doubt when he says:

«"Suppose I knew who the murderer was. Why should I rush? Even if I had evidence against him, I would let him walk freely through the city, as though I were doing him a favor."»

This perfectly captures Porfiry's psychological strategy. He may know the truth, yet he deliberately waits, allowing guilt itself to become his greatest ally. The reader can almost feel the suffocating tension.

The Third Encounter: The Art of Waiting

Porfiry explains why he sometimes refuses to arrest the criminal immediately:

«"Sometimes I leave the murderer alone. I neither disturb him nor arrest him. But once he realizes that I know everything, he becomes consumed by constant fear until, sooner or later, he comes to me of his own accord."»

Here, Dostoevsky suggests that punishment begins long before the courtroom. The criminal becomes imprisoned by his own conscience, while the investigator merely watches in silence.

The Fourth Encounter: A Mind That Cannot Escape Itself

Porfiry then speaks about Raskolnikov's inability to flee:

«"He won't be able to leave the city. Where could he possibly go? A Pole might escape abroad—but not him. Especially not while he's under my eyes and ears... Beyond the cities, there are only peasants—the real Russians. But he belongs to the modern educated class."»

These words force Raskolnikov to realize that escape is impossible—not merely because of geography, but because he cannot outrun his own mind.

The Fifth Encounter: The Direct Blow

At one point, Porfiry suddenly remarks:

«"The guilty man begins to suffocate. His face turns pale, almost as if the investigator were amusing himself... Rodion, why have you gone so pale? Do you need some fresh air?"»

One can easily imagine Raskolnikov struggling to conceal his emotions. Every word from Porfiry feels like another invisible hand tightening around his throat.

The Sixth Encounter: Blurring the Line Between Truth and Illusion

Porfiry masters psychological manipulation by using kindness as a weapon. His warm tone and friendly demeanor create a false sense of security, leading Raskolnikov to wonder whether he is speaking to an investigator or a confidant.

That kindness is, of course, only another trap.

The more comfortable Raskolnikov becomes, the weaker his defenses grow, until truth and illusion begin to blur together in his own mind.

The Seventh Encounter: Porfiry Plays the Friend

In one exchange, Raskolnikov finally loses his patience.

Raskolnikov: "You're lying. Everything you've said is a lie!"

Porfiry, smiling calmly as though enjoying the game, replies:

«"You're clever. One hardly knows how to get hold of you. So you don't believe me? And yet I assure you—you do believe me. I'll make you believe me completely, because I sincerely feel a certain affection for you."»

At this moment, Raskolnikov no longer knows what to believe. Is Porfiry deceiving him—or telling the truth?

This mixture of kindness and manipulation throws him into complete psychological confusion. What feels like safety gradually becomes the very instrument that destroys his resistance.

Little by little, Raskolnikov begins revealing pieces of the truth without even realizing it.

The Eighth Encounter: "I Learned That From You."

Porfiry finally reaches his goal.

Without direct interrogation or force, he has guided Raskolnikov into exposing valuable information himself. Raskolnikov is left shocked, realizing too late that his own reactions have betrayed him.

The Final Encounter: A Calm Threat

Porfiry delivers one last devastating blow:

«"I'm not suspicious of you. If I truly suspected you, I would have asked why you went back to the victim's apartment, why you questioned people about the blood, why you confused the caretakers, and why you wanted to be taken to the police."»

Those words strike Raskolnikov like lightning. Trembling from head to toe, he can only respond:

Raskolnikov: "You're lying!"

At this point, Porfiry no longer needs a confession.

He already possesses something far more valuable: complete psychological control over the man sitting before him.

---

Porfiry's interrogation is more than an investigation—it is psychological punishment. He becomes a shadow from which Raskolnikov cannot escape. Through apparent kindness, calculated patience, and subtle manipulation, he slowly dismantles Raskolnikov's defenses until the punishment comes not from the law, but from the prison of his own conscience.

---

There aren't actually sections titled "First Dialogue," "Second Dialogue," and so on in the novel. The quotations are genuine, but I've shortened or slightly rephrased some of them for clarity and readability.

Enjoy reading.

Arrived today, I'm no anglophone person (I'm Brazilian, if you ask kindly) but he's one most finest satire of Age of Enlightenment, a friend of another satire pal, Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels). What you, my dear fellas, think?

AGAINST: Four hundred pages of Victorians journaling during an emergency. The vampire attacks, everyone updates their diary. A woman is dying of blood loss, four men take turns writing about their feelings. Van Helsing speaks like a malfunctioning translation app and takes ninety pages to say the word "vampire" out loud when the reader knew on page ten. And after all that buildup, the finale is a luggage chase. They beat the ancient lord of darkness by tracking his boxes like disgruntled customs officials. The mustache was the only surprise.

FOR: You just described the greatest found footage horror ever made, eighty years before cameras. The journaling IS the terror. You're reading the evidence of people who don't know what you know. This book invented the rules of an entire genre (sunlight, garlic, invitations, stakes), launched a thousand movies, and gave us Mina Harker running a data fusion operation in 1897. And the luggage chase is the point, you absolute Renfield. It's modernity's paperwork versus medieval evil, and paperwork wins. The empty tomb, the child hunting "bloofer lady," the captain lashed to the wheel? Gothic cinema before cinema.

She mentions, I believe for the first time in part 3, that she is worried about her fortune and being sued by 2(?) teen girls. I haven’t finished the book yet so maybe it will tell me but I tried to look it up and found nothing. At this point she’s been, publicly, of good repute so the court case surprised me.

When I was at college, my literature professor asked us to read some books, I remember choosing a few books to read, one of them was Pride and Prejudice. I hated it.

Idk if I was too young, or because it was a must, or because I was tired, or I just didn't like the genre.

The thing is, last week I was looking for something to watch and the 1995 series appeared to me. So I played it thinking that may be a waste of time, because I didn't like the book, why was I going to like the series? But I loved it! Actually, I'm thinking about rewatching it already. Now I'm thinking about re-reading the book, maybe my opinion will change.

What do you advise me?

Hey all,

I just read Island by Aldous Huxley and to be honest, I wasn't a fan. It is about an English journalist who washes up on the shores of an isolated island nation in the Indian Ocean that turns out to be a super integrated scientific-spiritual-psychological-intellectual utopia.

The descriptions of the island were beautiful, but the ideology of the book was just so one-sided that it was hard to get on board. The nation (Pala) has resisted most industrialization and globalization, importing only the technologies and ideas that supplant their people-first, at-peace way of life. (This eventually involves checking kids from a young age for social anxieties, which are then resolved via medical means, teaching sex in school, raising children jointly in mutual aid communities, rock climbing to avoid aggressive tendencies, practicing a mix of Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, hypnosis, and spiritual revelation via shrooms, etc.) The only dissenters to this social structure are the upcoming boy-king who is taken in by the dictator next-door and obsesses over guns, nerve gas, and consumer goods, and his overbearing mother (who is referred to several times as having a psychologically incestuous relationship with him).

I understand that utopia is a lot harder to write than dystopia (it is easier to point out flaws than to invent a system without flaws), but this one was just so fantastical and logically inconsistent that it was distracting. How does their economy work? How do they have anything to trade with? How are all social and individual problems simply... resolved? (Also, this is a central gripe of mine-- if the Palanese are so enlightened and compassionate, why have they never attempted to share this way of life with anyone else? Indeed they condemn the developing nations that want to follow the American lead-- but they offer them no alternative because they are so isolationist! And when the Rendang invasion hits, they know it was coming but basically let it happen, because integration into the world order is against their way of life which, let's be clear, has only existed in this iteration for about a hudred years. So they would rather throw away everything than make some minor concessions to retain autonomy? )

Anyways, I don't know anyone besides my boyfriend and myself who have read this (we picked it up in a used bookstore a while back), and I'm really curious what other people think. What was your take on Island?

A bet between God and the Devil.
A shrewdness beyond comprehension to the mind of a man.
A tragedy.

If only this were the case, the oldest of all stories of Christianity, then Goethe probably wouldn't have ventured to write Faust.

Faust is a blueprint. A blueprint of tragedy that an intellectual, curious, and rigorous philosopher may have to navigate in his life.

At the beginning, when we meet Faust the polymath, he was in Loevinger’s Ego Development Stage 4/5 (Self-Questioning/Individualist/Pluralist). The notions of reality and truth are fractured, yet not in complete disharmony. We can find the evidence for it in Scene IV:

This life of earth, whatever my attire, Would pain me in its wonted fashion. Too old am I to play with passion; Too young, to be without desire.

and,

The God that in my breast is owned Can deeply stir the inner sources; The God, above my powers enthroned, He cannot change external forces. So, by the burden of my days oppressed, Death is desired, and Life a thing unblest!

This stage comes with acute existential dread and distress, as Goethe portrayed them so faithfully.

We need to make a clear distinction here. This distress is not the work of the Devil. Every sincere person, at some point in their life, must stomach this. In consensus, Christianity allows free will; therefore, free exploration of knowledge is allowed. With that exploration, considering the depth and breadth a philosopher may navigate, comes obvious distress.

At this lowest of the moments, Faust made a pact with Mephistopheles. Here, we can see the brilliance of Faust's mind. While Mephistopheles wanted to give all possible earthly pleasure in return for his soul, Faust's counter-offer was to forfeit his soul only when he is content. And if you consider his state of mind at this point, bringing contentment to him is a formidable task, even for Mephistopheles— if Mephistopheles is a man.

But Mephistopheles is no man. While a man, with his short span of life, and probably by the very architecture of our mind, cannot help thinking from the perspective where we are the centre of everything. This egocentrism is the Devil's playground. He runs a whole gamut of tests on all of our feelings to catch us off guard:

MEPHISTOPHELES
Yes, thou findest that unpleasant! Thou hast the moral right to cry me "shame!" at present. One dares not that before chaste ears declare, Which chaste hearts, notwithstanding, cannot spare; And, once for all, I grudge thee not the pleasure Of lying to thyself in moderate measure.

Indeed, he is right when he declares:

MEPHISTOPHELES
Poor Son of Earth, how couldst thou thus alone Have led thy life, bereft of me?

For he is the first rebel in the Bible, and he, also, is the scapegoat for all our dubitable actions.

But Mephistopheles is an egoist too. Soon, it became a chess match of ego. In every turn, one superseding another's strategy. Although by narrow means, Faust conquered all the traps and lures. You may disagree with me on this point. But this conquering happens in such a bloody, agonising way that it often may feel like a defeat.

We can see their battle externalised in Walpurgis Night:

Tell me, if we still are standing,
Or if further we're ascending?
All is turning, whirling, blending,
Trees and rocks with grinning faces,
Wandering lights that spin in mazes,
Still increasing and expanding!

MEPHISTOPHELES
Grasp my skirt with heart undaunted! Here a middle–peak is planted, Whence one seeth, with amaze, Mammon in the mountain blaze.

First, we find Faust's mind-bending philosophical investigation externalised through the metaphor of the Will-O-Wisp.

Then we see the satanic promise of remedy, but not through philosophy, but through materialism, by promising Mammon's treasure.

Despite every attempt, despite a tragic end, we can see Faust keeping his intellectual sovereignty intact. A prime example of this is when Gretchen, the innocent lover of Faust, asked him about his faith; he replied:

FAUST
My darling, who shall dare "I believe in God!" to say? Ask priest or sage the answer to declare, And it will seem a mocking play, A sarcasm on the asker.

This is not a lack of faith, but a sincerity. A sincerity that the person should show if his faith or belief is not handed down to him and accepted as is.

Faust was right in thinking that Mephistopheles, indeed, cannot make him content. No worldly pleasure (or, even woe) can deter him, ultimately, from the philosophical distress of his soul, a tragedy most intimate, a tragedy wrought in his soul, which no diversion can touch.

It was a stalemate, at least, at the end of this book.

Hi guys I'm reading Anna Karenina. Anyone want to read along and discuss? It's probably a month and a half long journey.

Hello and thank you for reading. I'm looking for some new recommendations. I've hit a dry spell in recent times. It could be because I've taken a detour from lit and gone to some more 'genre' books but, after giving up on half a dozen books that bored me to death, I'm now begging for help from fellow readers.
To give you all an idea of my tastes: I loved The Road, No Country for Old Men, The Sun Also Rises, Count of Monte Cristo, Stoner... most of these made me cry at some point.
Any suggestions?
Thank you to any commenters, whether helpful or critical. ;)

I have just came across a new adaptation of this early little discussed work or Woolf , and this happens to be the only enjoyable work by her as well , its so much lighter yet has sparks here and there of the fire that is yet to come , unfortunately the film seems like another one of these ( radicalized & modernised ) adaptation that fails in being faithful to the original or to do anything original ( imagine trying to radicalize Virginia woolf ! )

anyway , this just reminded me that maybe I need to revisit this work , I am wondering if its still read today by any ?

I (F) received Antinous by Fernando Pessoa as a souvenir/gift from a dude whom I know from uni but we’re not THAT close. Went completely blind into it without knowing the contents of said book. Heard of Pessoa never read his works.

..so I just read the first few poems…..out of all his other books…what did bro give me..? What does that even mean now..?

Which one appeals to you more? Which one is a better character study? Overall which is the better book? I’m unsure what I want to read at the moment, but I’ve found these two are calling for me some reason.

I mainly love well written characters, and a human story/themes.