What are you reading in 2025?

[Retros_x]

Eh. At least Lin's stuff has something resembling pacing and a plot.

Which Dostoyevsky has too? He is definitely not just flourishy sentences - you don't get to so much fame and influence when you are just writing flourishy sentences without any meaning.

Anyway Lin Carter is on my catch up list and I am looking forward to it.

I normally am not that way, but every once in a while, I read a book that is so profoundly good, that I feel pressure as to what I want to read next. Normally, I'll gleefully move between modes and levels of quality. I can enjoy Lin Carter as much as Dostoyevsky (even if the latter is certainly the better writer).

I need this switch, i need sometimes just an easy beach read and not something thought provoken. But I know the feeling when you are still stunned of a book and what I have somestimes: I would rather read the book already again than to start over a new one. Have to really push myself to read something else.

 

[overgeeked]

There are a few books/authors that I've bounced off. I can't read Tolkien and I ended up putting down Foundation. Both sound exactly like what I should like, but I just can't get throigh them.

As much as I respect Tolkien, dude seriously needed an editor. I’ve read The Hobbit a few times. Great book. I’ve read Lord of the Rings exactly once because I forced myself too. So long. So boring. So much walking around.

I read the first Foundation book but nothing else from the series. It was okay.

Which Dostoyevsky has too? He is definitely not just flourishy sentences - you don't get to so much fame and influence when you are just writing flourishy sentences without any meaning.

My theory is it’s all the college professors’ fault. They keep saying his stuff is important and assigning it for classes. Same with the utterly unreadable James Joyce. There’s a 50% chance anyone who says they read Joyce is lying. There’s a 100% chance anyone who says they understood Joyce is lying.

 

[Retros_x]

My theory is it’s all the college professors’ fault. They keep saying his stuff is important and assigning it for classes. Same with the utterly unreadable James Joyce. There’s a 50% chance anyone who says they read Joyce is lying. There’s a 100% chance anyone who says they understood Joyce is lying.

Nothing beats the joy out of reading than being forced to do it in school/college. I cannot speak for James Joyce -have him on my reading list for a long time, but didn't dare to read it for the reasons you stated. Although I can enjoy art that confuses me.

But Dostoyevsky is definitely not hard to read besides the typical adjustment period to older styles of writing. Although that might depend on your translation. I've read him not in English translations, but German translations and I always found his writing quite enjoyable. And his impact on literature and art and even philosophy is gigantic. Learning about what authors, philosophers and even film makers praised Dostoyevsky made me curious and I started reading his work not so long ago and absolutely loved it.

Still have his doorstopper works on my TBR, but "The Gambler" and "Notes from the Underground" were fantastic reads and quite short and fast paced. Especially "The Gambler", this book definitely has pacing and it feels like a fever dream.

This article lists some of the influences and does in general a good job of hyping him:

 

[cbwjm]

Nothing beats the joy out of reading than being forced to do it in school/college. I cannot speak for James Joyce -have him on my reading list for a long time, but didn't dare to read it for the reasons you stated. Although I can enjoy art that confuses me.

You're definitely right, being forced, or forcing yourself to read I feel really sucjs the joy out of reading. I had a flatmate who did 75 hard, and a daily requirement was reading 10 pages, not much but still if you have to rather than want to, I can't imagine enjoying it. And if you are enjoying the book, why limit yourself to 10 pages.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Nothing beats the joy out of reading than being forced to do it in school/college

This.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The thing about comparing Dostoevsky and Carter is they are writing for completely different different reasons, and they are read for completely different reasons. Dostoevsky wrote because he had something to say. Carter wrote to entertain. Both writers succeed in what they set out to do, comparison is meaningless.

There is also the translation factor to take into account. Something is always lost. 20,000 Leagues was the first grown-up book I read, but in English. My French is at the street sign level. I was helped by having read a heavily abridged children’s edition first.

Wells wrote beautifully evocative prose, but his stories I found too gloomy to be enjoyable.

Joyce is one of my partner’s favourite authors, but he didn’t pull any punches to sell more books. You aren’t going to understand Ulysses unless your are already intimately familiar with The Odyssey (and it helps to know your way round Dublin too).

 

[trappedslider]

As much as I respect Tolkien, dude seriously needed an editor. I’ve read The Hobbit a few times. Great book. I’ve read Lord of the Rings exactly once because I forced myself too. So long. So boring. So much walking around.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I cannot speak for James Joyce -have him on my reading list for a long time, but didn't dare to read it for the reasons you stated. Although I can enjoy art that confuses me.

It's been ages, but Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are both pretty readable. The former is a little more enjoyable/approachable, if I recall correctly.

I've read Ulysses and enjoyed the writing, but I agree with @Paul Farquhar that there're some practical difficulties with a complete understanding: a lot of it went right by me by virtue of my not being Irish or deeply familiar with Irish history and never having been to Dublin, never mind knowing it well, at the time. I read it without the standard concordance, which probably would've helped me get more out of it, but this was 25 years ago, and I wasn't carrying two books around. All things considered, I think I might have really understood a quarter of it at best. It's a book that would pay off using an e-reader if the e-book is annotated.

I owned Finnegan's Wake, read three pages, and then shut it, never to open it again. A bridge too far, that one.

 

[overgeeked]

Nothing beats the joy out of reading than being forced to do it in school/college. I cannot speak for James Joyce -have him on my reading list for a long time, but didn't dare to read it for the reasons you stated. Although I can enjoy art that confuses me.

I like some art that confused me. But I prefer that confusion to come from within the story rather than the language itself. Like Finnegan’s Wake. It famously begins mid sentence, ends in the middle of that same sentence (making the novel a loop), and has what…no puntuation in between. Or something similarly ridiculous.

And I say that as someone who took classes on surrealist literature and absolutely loved them.

But Dostoyevsky is definitely not hard to read besides the typical adjustment period to older styles of writing. Although that might depend on your translation. I've read him not in English translations, but German translations and I always found his writing quite enjoyable. And his impact on literature and art and even philosophy is gigantic. Learning about what authors, philosophers and even film makers praised Dostoyevsky made me curious and I started reading his work not so long ago and absolutely loved it.

Still have his doorstopper works on my TBR, but "The Gambler" and "Notes from the Underground" were fantastic reads and quite short and fast paced. Especially "The Gambler", this book definitely has pacing and it feels like a fever dream.

This article lists some of the influences and does in general a good job of hyping him:

I can appreciate that others rave about an author or book while still finding that author or book boring as hell. That’s the trouble with caring what other people think about certain books, especially so-called influencers. You force yourself to read the book which, as mentioned, generally sucks the joy out.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Which Dostoyevsky has too? He is definitely not just flourishy sentences - you don't get to so much fame and influence when you are just writing flourishy sentences without any meaning.

Anyway Lin Carter is on my catch up list and I am looking forward to it.

I enjoy Lin Carter's work quite a bit. I also think that if you want to understand Conan's place in Appendix N, the Carter/De Camp stories are important reads, even if they don't always hit the mark set by REH's originals. "The Thing in the Crypt" was a direct influence on the Conan the Barbarian movie.

I need this switch, i need sometimes just an easy beach read and not something thought provoken. But I know the feeling when you are still stunned of a book and what I have somestimes: I would rather read the book already again than to start over a new one. Have to really push myself to read something else.

I think I spent a good 15 minutes looking through my to-read pile trying to figure out what to read next.

My theory is it’s all the college professors’ fault. They keep saying his stuff is important and assigning it for classes. Same with the utterly unreadable James Joyce. There’s a 50% chance anyone who says they read Joyce is lying. There’s a 100% chance anyone who says they understood Joyce is lying.

I somehow never read Joyce or Dostoyevsky in college. Still haven't read any Joyce, but all the Dostoyevsky I've read has been on my own. Having to read on a deadline (alongside a bunch of other things you have to read on a deadline), then regurgitate the plot and themes, rarely helps people love a book.