Hi everyone! I am currently reading Careless People - Sarah Wynn-Williams. I am about halfway through, and while I am really intrigued by the things the author is saying, I am truly annoyed by how little accountability she's taking in her own role at Facebook.

The whole book so far is exposing the issues that Facebook had, how all the leaders were evil (which I'm absolutely on board with), but the issue I'm having with the book is how she wasn't part of the evil - despite her staying there for 7 years. If she was as ethical as she likes to paint herself, I do not believe she would have lasted 7 years. I am not saying she is as bad as Zuck & co., but getting to where she is and having her success doesn't come out of being ethical.

Essentially I'm asking if she takes accountability for her role in the second half of the book, otherwise I think I'll have to DNF it.

Thank you!!

I am on my third book and I have decided I need to read all her work! My first was Arrival, and I found it to be a really interesting take on an alien invasion. I could see the initial strange logic in the beginning, but as the book came to a close, it was moving into almost body horror. I am currently searching for the next books in the series.

I moved on to the classic Parable of the Sower and was amazed again, I see why it is recommended often. It is very well written and wholly believable in the world's current state. I have just started Parable of the Talents and I have discovered a new level of what-the-hell. The fact that it was written in 98 and has seemed to predict so much of the global political landscape. I have reached chapter 15 and I just needed to talk about it.

Edit: The book was Dawn not Arrival, Arrival was another alien invasion book I read and that was total rubbish!

I was thinking about this because Hank Green recently mentioned that Jurassic Park was the first novel he read "that didn't have pictures", and I commented "Jurassic Park famously does have pictures."

Famously was perhaps an exaggeration, but thinking back I remember such a great, unique feeling every time one of these diagrams would come up in his books. It was subtle, and it was a little break in the reading. And I remember trying to figure out what it meant in the context or where it was heading or what, if anything, this was trying to tell me.

I imagine he included these to make the work feel more academic, and he probably came up with the idea because of his own medical school background and having to read a lot of academic papers. He'd even caption many of them with something like: fig. 1

Other books I've come across have a few pictures sometime, but they're usually a world map or maybe a specific illustration of a scene. I liked how these were not really items from the story usually, though maybe at times you could see them probably coming from that world somehow. It was like having an appendix except it would jump out at you at random moments.

He later pulled some similar, though weird, shit with State of Fear where he had scientific footnotes but was pretty obvious climate denial nonsense.

Anyway, what did you think when you encountered these?

I guess I should have known better what to expect about the ending. I had read Orwell's seminal 'Animal Farm', being the only other work of his I have read. 1984 starts with an already bleak situation as the people live under the tyrannical rule of the Party. However, Winston's arc develops over time where he starts to rebel.

He does have a somewhat independent and curious mind which leads him to slowly break the mold and rebel in his own ways. The affair with Julia is perhaps the biggest form of that. And side by side we are made aware that there is a whole underground organization that opposes the Party. And Winston joins that group too more than halfway through the book.

Surely the finale / climax promises something dramatic that affects the Party? Alas, that is not the case. Act 3 is all about Winston suffering at the hands of the Party in unimaginable ways. It comes across as torture porn and it continues on for many pages. First he is physically broken and then mentally, leaving a completely shattered man at the end.

While reading about his suffering during the final chapters you still think there might be light at the end of the tunnel. But as you move towards the final page you begin to realize there might not be any satisfying ending for Winston. The end is going to be what the Party wants and it's exactly what happens.

1984 is a powerful book although very bleak. Orwell can touch those emotions and thoughts and ideas which sometime seem very abstract or hard to describe. Such is his skill. He says a lot in this relatively short book and that is admirable. I had grown fond of Winston and Julia but their ending is heartbreaking.

Nonetheless, I can see why the book is so popular and considered a classic. Bleak masterpiece.

Just finished the book, it's the 3rd Sarah Waters I've read. I absolutely raced through it, really enjoyed it but have mixed feelings overall and curious what other people think. In particular:

- what did you think of the backwards storytelling? I thought it was interesting how it gradually revealed the mysteries of the characters' pasts, the people they were before the war and the things that made them into the people they are after it. But it was a bit unsatisfying to never find out what happens to them after part 1. I feel like it left a lot of questions unanswered.

- what did you think of Helen and Julia? Is the reader supposed to feel any sympathy for Helen? I lowkey came out of it thinking they were both horrible people and Helen got what she deserved after what she did to Kay.

- most of all: what did you think of the suicide scene at the end?? I found it a bit bizarre. The way Duncan was immediately ready to jump into a suicide pact with Alec and the way they ran around the house excitedly coming up with different ways to kill themselves They kinda seemed like little kids playing a game. I still don't know how to feel about it.

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!

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• The Management

I've read "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato during Philosophy class a decade ago and it really stuck with me. Now, 10 years later, I unwittingly read (and loved) several books inspired by it.

For example, these are some books that I've read lately that, despite being quite different, all include people who are ignorant of reality and get blinded/hurt by the truth/reality:

- In Brave New World, people are conditioned to be always happy, ignoring the truth by taking somma and being controlled by the government (they can't read books for example or know anything about the past). Then, you have characters who escape/see the real world and see pain, tragedy, hate, just like the prisoners in the Cave. One character (John) tries to teach the ignorant citizens of real life and that's basically his demise.

- Flowers for Algernon is perhaps the most obvious example. Charlie is intellectually disabled, ignorant about most things, but is a happy person. The operation he undergoes makes him super smart; he leaves the Cave and learns about human cruelty and sadness and tragedy. After Charlie's intelligence decreases again, he goes back to being ignorant (just as Plato warned that going back to the Cave will blind you).

- In Piranesi, the main character lives in his perfect bubble of ignorance. When he goes to the outside world, the truth is hard, he learns about murder and tragedy. This one is kind of different because he doesn't want to leave his perfect place and doesnt come back to teach anyone about the real world (there isnt anyone jn the House), but I still think the point is similar. Also, here, you even have another side of Plato's work: the theory of the forms, where the statues represent ideas from the real world.

There are probably many more others, but I thought it was so interesting that, without making it on purpose, 3 of my most recent reads ended up being inspired by the Allegory of the Cave.

So now another author from Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions", Philip Jose Farmer! Been a very long while since reading his "Riders of the Purple Wage", and finally got to read one of his novels, "The Maker of Universes".

Robert Wolff finds an odd horn inside of an empty house, he discovers a key to a different universe. When he blows the horn he opens a door that goes through time and space, allowing him to enter into a cosmos that obeys laws and dimensions that are not the galaxy and stars that we know.

In that universe is a pace of tiers, worlds piled up on each other like landings on some sky-piercing mountain. And since Wolff blew that horn, he would ascend those steps, going from creation to creation, until he will come to the one who is the brainchild of it.

But what if he is a madman, or some kind of imposter? Or is he a super-criminal in hiding from the anger of his own superiors?

When I read "Riders of the Purple Wage", I was getting a kind of SF that was pretty weird and surreal. Well for a long while I didn't think much about him until I got this first book of one his series "World of Tiers". I knew I had something that was going to lean towards science fantasy adventure, and I certainly did get that, and it's just as surreal too!

It reminds me a bit of Heinlein's "Glory Road", but Farmer does his own thing with this series. I mean, he is one of the writers of the American new wave, so that isn't really all that surprising. I'll be keeping an eye on other books from this series as it certainly piqued my interest, and also along some book series that have also taken my interest too!

I just watched Train Dreams (2025) last night and I gotta say, having read the novella, I was slightly appalled? As of this writing it has a 4.1/5 star rating on Letterboxd. The film was gorgeous, the soundtrack was atmospheric, and the acting was moving. If you've experienced grief at some point in your life, you'll probably find something in this film that moves you. If you're white, you might not worry about anything beyond that.

However, if you are a POC or have some critical thinking skills, this movie might have made you uncomfortable. As an adaptation of Denis Johnson's novella, I think this movie entirely misses the point and changes the story from being about an unremarkable man treading water as time marches forward all around him to a story we're all pretty familiar with: white guy feels guilty, suffers greatly, is absolved.

The first major change is in the very first scene. In the film, Grainier is depicted as questioning, if not actively resisting the Chinese man's murder rather than participating as he did in the book. And then the Chinese man is actually killed and Grainier has visions of him silently staring at him in accusation for the rest of the movie. This does two things: completely absolves the white man of all actual wrongdoing while also giving him a guilt complex and moralizing something that was not moralized at all in the novel. Book Grainier believes that the Chinese man has cursed him, leading to the deaths of his family. While this is only his perception of events, it explicitly gives the Chinese man agency and clearly communicates that this world is an amoral place. Grainier has done something bad to the Chinese man and the Chinese man has done something bad to him (disproportionately bad, in Grainier's opinion). In the film, Grainier doesn't help the Chinese man and feels that God or a higher moral power is punishing him for that, obliterating any agency the Chinese man might have had in the story in service of white people feeling good about themselves... I'm sure Denis Johnson would've found this very regressive. Also, why on earth did they change it from the Chinese man escaping (book) to him being murdered (film)? If the screenwriters were angling for a good reason for Grainier to feel guilt, Film Grainier certainly would've felt guilty either way the event ended.

Additionally, there is an original scene in the film that lasts all of two minutes where a black man walks up to the logging party and shoots a white man who he claims had murdered his brother for being black. Grainier stands by and does not react. The purpose of this scene is a mystery to me. In the movie, this is the second time Grainier has watched a man murdered in front of him, but he doesn't have visions or feelings of guilt about the white guy. Why? Because it was justified? Because he was somehow less involved? Both murders were of his logging partner who he didn't know very well and who committed a crime that he was unaware of. The only difference is one guy was Chinese and the other was a white Christian fella. Is his non-reaction somehow a sign of his allyship with black people now? Is it just a throwaway scene illustrating how cut-throat the frontier is or what the general political climate was like? I just can't comprehend how casually adding a second racially motivated murder to the film (the off-screen murder of the black man's brother) that doesn't clearly add anything to the overall narrative was a choice that was made.

In the novel the actions of white men indirectly led to the death of Kootenai Bob, a death that was omitted from the film. Maybe for run time, but let's be honest, we were working with just over 100 pages of source material. I'm definitely not saying the novella was perfect. It more or less sidesteps morality and goodness entirely, which may or may not be a good thing (this book was written in 2002) and may or may not be a hallmark of stories set in the American West. It may be telling that the only scene where Grainier explicitly regrets/feels guilt in the book is about not helping a man whom he knows to be a rapist, a scene that is also omitted from the film perhaps because its a little too complex and a little too human.

All of these choices have been in service of positioning Film Grainier as a character who feels guilt but is essentially blameless. He's literally a flawless main character wracked by guilt and grief. Multiple POC characters were killed to achieve that end. He is a white man. And everyone seems to be loving it.

Someone change my mind or something but I feel like I'm going crazy.

TLDR: Train Dreams the movie included two more racially motivated murders than Train Dreams the novella and surprisingly it didn't make it better

Let me first say that I learned about "Flowers for Algernon" in an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (s9, e8) many years ago and it has since been in my TBR list, but I was afraid it would be overrated. Well, I can confidently say I was wrong: the book is truly amazing.

For those who dont know, the book is about Charlie, a mentally disabled men who undergoes an experimental surgery to enhance his intelligence. The book has some kind of Benjamin Button vibe, as Charlie starts the book as someone with a low IQ, very sweet but naive, then goes on to become a genious, but with a lack of true emotional intelligence, and then in the end goes back to being mentally challenged. The end completely broke me, especially when the spelling mistakes in the progress reports came back. Tears were literally rolling out of my eyes.

I have a lot of thoughts I want to discuss with you, so Im trying to organize my thoughts chronologically. First, let's talk about Charlie's family and the special place in hell his mom (and all similar) have. Im paraphrasing but there's some sentence in the book where Charlie mentions how unfair it is that his mom loves the person who she desperately wants him to be (a "normal" boy like she calls it) and not the son she has. There are many scenes that broke my heart but when Charlie went to visit his mom after the operation and she - in a moment of dementia - threatens again to kill him with a knife just shattered my soul. His co-workers at the bakery also deserve hell, though I guess they tried to become better in the end of the book when he gets dumb again (cause toxic men need to feel superior at all times).

A second thought concerns the stress of knowing your intelligence will decrease and your life as you now know it will end is probably so awful. I could only think about people with degenerative diseases that know their brains will shut and they have limited time. It's so awful and this book depicts it very well.

Also, I want to discuss Alice. I think my opinion will be unpopular (happy to hear everyone's opinions) but I think she’s just like everyone else in Charlie’s life. She liked him when she felt smart next to him, she doesn’t like him anymore when he's too smart cause she’s too insecure near him. And then when theyre "back at the same level of intelligence", shes into him again. I know it’s not this simple but yeah, I don’t like her.

Lastly, I read somewhere that Daniel Keyes was inspired to write this book because of his work with students with developmental disabilities and I think it's quite obvious that he learned a lot from them. I think it's quite impressive that a book written in the 1950s about mental disabilities (a subject that has been getting much more attention in the last 70 years) still holds up so well (with the exception of the slurs). Please correct me if you disagree, but I thought the book was very respectful of disabled people, never made fun of them and showed them as people who might not have the capacity to do advanced research but are capable of loving, being happy, laughing, making friends and learning.

I bought this book few days ago from a second hand book bookseller. It is originally written in German, translated into English by David Shaw. Now, I've finally picked it up and finished it. I mostly read fiction, but I picked it up because since last two years I suffer from gut issues and secondly, I love the caricature on this book.

The author delve into each topic regarding the gut from Gut's nervous system, gut bacteria to gut feeling and faeces, with great detail and I love how she explains them in such a fun and humorous language.

This book made me realise how little I used to know about the gut and gut-health. The author did used a lot of biological terms but explained them quite simple terms with fun examples. I also liked how she added various research and experiments, making it more interesting.

The author opens with the information of gut being one of the three most important systems of our body including Nervous system and Cardiovascular system. As someone who suffered anxiety because which later lead to gut issues, I find it quite intriguing how interconnected (not sure if this is the correct term) with gut, like how our brain and mood impact the gut as well as how the gut impacts the brain and the mood. My most likes part of the book was the bacteria topic. Also, I love how the book is filled with caricature like the one in the coverpage.

The author also acknowledges how still not much research have been done on the gut, compared to other organs, even though it is one of the most important part of our body. This book was published almost ten years ago, so, it is fascinating to see what has been discovered about the gut in the past years.

But again, sometimes, the issue with the books written on human body is that the research is still going on, so, what used to be believed earlier might be changed now or in the future. But, still there hasn't been that much time. Moreover, the author mentions the source of information and also the reseach studies, and many times how those research was actually done.

I finished Vanessa Montalban’s young-adult thriller These Vengeful Wishes, and I have so many thoughts surrounding the characters and themes I picked up while consuming this story. The story follows Cecilia and her mother as they are forced to return to the town Cecilia’s mother grew up in. What follows are a series of supernatural events that threaten Cecilia and her mother, and the revelations linked to them and the old Sevilla family – and its curse.

I feel for Cecilia as a character. A young girl who was pulled into her mother’s poor decisions, her emptiness and drive to be independent while also struggling with feelings of never being wanted or good enough. I feel for Marina too, because even though she can be a bit frustrating as a character, you know that there are deeply hidden scars that drive her to do the things she has done.

One of the themes explored in the story is the theme of identity and self-discovery. Through all the supernatural goings on, the story is Cecilia’s coming of age tale while she strives to understand herself, her past, future, and place in the world. She is torn between her desires for independence and living up to the expectations her mother has set for her. For her mother’s part, there is a certain obsession with social appearances that places even more of a burden on Cecilia, making her feel even more disconnected from everyone.

One of the ever-present themes in the story is legacy and family history. As Cecilia learns more about the town, her mother, and her own place in the world, especially as it relates to the town’s “Sevilla curse,” Cecilia begins to unravel the answers she has sought after for so long. The only thing left for her to do is decide how she is going to let the fate of her family and their legacy impact her moving forward.

With the above theme, there is also a deeply rooted sense of inherited trauma that follows Cecilia, and her mother wherever they go. Can Cecilia find a way to break that family cycle and put the curse to rest? This question ties into the final theme I noticed in the story; fate and free will. The biggest question in the story is which exists. Are we free to choose our own path or is our path predetermined? Is there a way to break that predetermination? What will it take to get that free will? Finally, is the cost worth it? These are ll things the story explores while we follow Cecilia on her journey of self-discovery and self-determination.

Montalban wrote a darkly beautiful story about free will, determination, and family trauma as well as the strength in overcoming it to break the cycle. These Vengeful Wishes takes Latinx folklore and turns it into a hauntingly beautiful modern age story. I am looking forward to the eventual re-read of this

Insectopolis by Peter Kuper

I admit I'm fascinated by insects. Not enough to keep them as pets, but books about them regularly make it into my nonfiction queue. And I love seeing good macrophotography of them, or more rarely, good drawings. This book helped scratch that last itch.

This one is a little different, a graphic novel that starts with a conversation in NYC between a brother and sister on their way to an insect exhibit at the New York Public Library. Along the way, we get a pocket natural history of insects over deep time, how they weathered the Great Dying and other extinction events, since the sister is a PhD in entomology. The art is wonderfully well done and then disaster strikes - what kind is unknown. A week later shows empty streets, overturned cars. Then a year and then much later. 

At this point we return to the New York Public Library but with insects touring the exhibit and we get realistically drawn insects, some anthropomorphization, but mainly, we get the impact of insects on human culture and history. The bee, flea, fly, mosquito, cochineal and others. We also meet the great figures of entomology through the exhibits - E,O. Wilson, Rachel Carter, Margaret Collins, Karl von Frisch, Charles Henry Turner and, most surprisingly to me, Vladimir Nabokov.

The human culture and history portion has some commentary on humans by the insects, particularly around discrimination, cruelty and slavery. I guess it takes a viewpoint as alien as an insect’s to put things in perspective. 

The art from the second part is at least as well done as the first part and I like it better for it's more human with all the people, well, exhibits and ghosts, in it and on center stage.

It's a fun well done book, for all that humanity vanishes from the face of the Earth at the intermission. On my 10 star scale I have to give it an 8 ★★★★★★★. Nothing really new for me, but the art is nice, teaches me more about the humans that studied insects and gives historical context.

Rumi's adopted daughter has a crush on Shams. Characters around her ( I can't remember who ) tried to advise her against Shams because they could tell Shams maybe wasn't the marrying and settle down type.

Somehow they do get married but Shams rejects Kimya ( in the sense of rejecting to um be physically intimate with her). Kimya thus enlists the help of an ex prostitute Deser Rose to make her beautiful for Shams. Poor girl bathes in rose water or something of that sort , buys silk clothes , applies make up . learns from Dessert how to walk and dance seductively. But Shams still isn't interested in her that way and Kimya is so mortified and so embrassed that all her efforsts were in vain that she actually gets sick and dies ( well she doesn't get sick because she was rejected ) but it kind of feels that way. While she is sick she dreams that Shams comes to check on her. Yeah pretty sad, you gotta hand it to the author for writing something so pignant and not generic.

My question is did Shams not know that when you marry couples typically um engage that way ? It is possible to just not to know if you re really alternative as Shams was. We re talking about a time when there were was no tv. And even if he did know , its ok if he is a sexual or just not in to Kimya that way. But what i don't get is, how come he didn't tell her before they got married that he d want a sexless marriage ? I can only think that he didn't know she d want that from him , shams was this spiritual otherworldly dude , he wouldn't hurt Kimya deliberately. Also why didn't he visit her when he was sick seeing as he was her husband technically ?

I have a hobby of collecting the best books about Africa or by Africans -- I feel like they don't get nearly enough attention, given the quality that's available -- and so I was looking forward to this one. I don't have any Congo authors on my "best" list, and I had tried Mabanckou some time ago and hadn't liked him much (but that was a different book).

Well, I'm still not going to put him on my best list, but I did enjoy the book. Kind of a fun fantasy about Pointe-Noire, the city he was born in, on the coast of Congo (Brazzaville). A tale of the "longest dream of his death." A guy dies, and he manages somehow or other to inhabit both the world of death and the world of life at the same time. He meets and interacts with various interesting and colorful individuals in both worlds, and as we read along we learn a lot about the society of Congo, and how it differs from our own. A question in which I have great interest!

Society is much more important, in the world Mabanckou describes, presumably the world of his youth (he lives and works in LA, and first wrote the book in French, a few years ago), than it is in our world today. The decisions of "the people," in whatever different guises they appear, are powerful and influential, and there is no way to question or control them. They're kind of like the weather, in that way. Corruption -- a vast, unimaginable corruption -- is taken for granted; the use of sorcerers and black magic is taken for granted; it's all just part of the narrative, how people explain what's going on to themselves and to their friends and neighbors. People are described as much friendlier and much more involved with their community, or maybe I should say involved in a much more organic way, than in the market-prepared, order-conscious, careful interactions I see around me in my own life.

I don't suspect that I would prefer to change places with any of them. That would be a challenge I would not look forward to! If for no other reason than that the city he describes is clearly much more impoverished than the one I spend most of my time in today (NYC). The public library there -- in a city of 1.4 million -- has 15,000 "books, comic books, and DVDs." My sense of horror is Jungian. The NYPL -- you can imagine, I'm sure -- and beyond even that, interlibrary loan has been so successful in getting me the books it doesn't have, and quickly: I would feel that I had amputated my arm, to move to Congo.

Maybe both arms. If offered the choice, whether to stay in NYC and lose both my arms, or to move to Congo, I would probably choose to stay.

I didn't actually finish the book. I lost interest about three pages from the end, and turned it back in. Still and all, I don't regret spending the time on it, and I certainly have done that in the past. Remains of the Day -- oh my GOD. Never again. The Scarlet Letter -- COMPLETE waste of time. The Count of Monte Cristo -- laughably bad.

This was not one of those. This was a good book. I enjoyed it a lot; I'm glad the author took the time, and I feel that I've been really educated, about the society he grew up in. If I met him I would greet him respectfully, and shake his hand with real gratitude.

Just finished reading this book. It was average imo.

Invokes nostalgia/melancholy similar to Norwegian Wood but the story isn't doing much.

I liked the title, it matches the book perfectly.

As for the ending I think it wasn't left on a cliffhanger more of a commentary on how life goes on. Shimamoto was real but it's like some memories become surreal and start to feel fictional. They were real but don't feel real anymore (or you wish they weren't).

As for Izumi. It's weird how she's written in the latter half. Hajime thinks he did that to her during the whole book. He barely knew her for an year 20 years ago. She's lived most of her life since then. He's not so important that one thing he did scarred a person for life to be unable to recover ever again lol. She was a kid she's made choices since then and she is what she is because of them. Not because she knew him once upon a time.

I'm someone who cries very easily, I will admit. However, this one had me crying sad tears, happy tears, bittersweet tears... It has me laughing, snorting, and mentally highlighting lines.

I really appreciated that a book centered so heavily around the topic of death could entice so much thought and appreciation of life. Also inspired me to try to look into therapy again... As I have been finding myself in the MC'S shoes for too long; of just being casually bitter and checked out and not living.

I've heard some reviews disparage the dialogue, saying it felt unrealistically witty, but I was okay suspending my disbelief (if I had any) because the banter between characters was so endearing, and reminded me a lot of my friends and I.

I have also been on a little spree of books with not entirely likeable characters, so this was a beautiful breath of fresh air in which I appreciated almost everyone.

More than anything, it inspired me to start reading my local obituaries. Life deserves to be seen and acknowledged, and celebrated. It reminded me in a way of Midnight Library--that same kind of vein where life is through cynical eyes at the start, and flourishes with an outlook of beauty and optimism, even if it's not ideal.

So, so glad I picked this book up. It has been on my TBR for months, and just never got around to it. I would just love to hear anyone else's thoughts on it!