Lord of the Rings was not a trilogy. It was a single novel that was too large to publish as a single novel so the publisher found two dividing points and sold it as three books.
It wasn’t a trilogy. It wasn’t a series. It was a single story. (Which is why the version I have is in a single book now.)
It’s the difference between eating sugar and eating fruit.
Without the name of the series, I can only provide some very basic thoughts.
The first of these will likely upset you, however. There is, barring actively harming someone, no such thing as BadWrongFun™. Saying that you didn’t like it because you expect more depth is fine. (I’d even agree.) But there was a very strong streak of disdain for those who do not share your tastes in your post. This, IMO, is not fine.
The second of these is that I actually thank authors who make huge series. It tells me that they aren’t serious people and that I won’t enjoy their works. A novel is a very long format for writing. If you can’t get a good, complete, story that actually ends in a single novel, you’re probably not an author I want to read anyway, so thanks for the warning.
That’s … comms talk, right? 5×5 means max strength and clarity, I think. In the pipe, not so clear.
My dad always said “let’s rock and/or roll” for departure.
The Bear and the Nightingale seems to fit the bill. It’s a folkloric fantasy novel that is written by Katherine Arden and addresses that clash between valuing domestic life and family while also standing firm in an identity that’s a bit wild and untamed as the protagonist, Vasya, navigates that tension between tradition, intuition, family bonds, societal standing, and personal identity.
Did you?
It specifically talks about one form.
And it implicitly talks about the USA.
And with your performance here, I can see why books are dying in the USA. Reading is for lefties, amirite?
Are you an AI? Because you speak with such confidence while not backing anything up.
Yes. We should contribute further to the culture of rental life.
Here’s a thought. Maybe it’s time for techie shits to die.
An abridged version would be losing what makes this novel so important to Chinese culture. The story of 红楼梦 is not the most important point (though it is important). It’s whose eyes the story is told through, his interactions with the people around him, and the daily life that reveals it that matters.
If you have ever read any kind of “fall of a family” style of story you already have read A Dream of Red Mansions. You might as well not bother with an abridged edition. The value of the novel lies precisely in the stuff that would be elided away by an abridgement.
This is a very big, very heavy, very deep novel. (How deep? You can get university degrees in just this novel in China.) And you’ll be reading it through the haze of translation and of cultural confusion. It will not be an easy read even if you get an excellent translation that’s stuffed to the gills with explanatory footnotes. (Like, for example, the poetry won’t resonate … and there is a lot of poetry in the story!) I can’t tell you if it’s worth reading because I’m not you. I can warn you, though, that reading it will be work, not light passing fancy.
In my experience (and I freely admit this is purely subjective), the term “literary fiction” is used as an academic bludgeon by people who sneer at certain styles of fiction, in particular SF, fantasy, and horror (but not only those). There is, however, no coherent definition of the term I’ve ever seen.
For instance one definition you’ll see includes “based on real-life”. Yet Naguib Mahfouz is regarded as a “literary fiction” writer, despite half his oeuvre consisting of obvious fantasy (Children of the Alley and Arabian Nights and Days for starters). Iain Banks (as opposed to Iain M. Banks, who is the same person but the “M.” means he’s wearing his SF author hat) is also a “literary fiction” writer … yet his works are full of fabulism.
One could argue that “literary fiction” is more a set of descriptive priorities (character, theme, style, psychology, the “human condition”) etc. than it is an identifying checklist and as such genre works could be literary, and non-genre works could fail as literature as well.
So, to the root question, what are your favorite non-fiction books? I’m not particularly into fiction, and to the extent I can be, it’s just not the season for me right now to get into it. The fictional books I’ve wanted to read, I have. And if I ever want to read others, I’ll read them when fiction is in season for me (whenever that happens).
Person: What non-fiction books can you recommend?
Internet: Here’s a bunch of fiction books. Don’t ask what to read, just read what you want to. Here’s some more fiction.
Don’t ever change, Internet! 🤣
道德经/老子 (Tao Te Ching in the common, but dated, latinization). It’s the perfect thing to read when you’re not distracted by microscopic online sound bites. Get two translations so you can get how differently it’s viewed by people outside the culture.
I have a related question. I have some very, very, very nice editions of books that are in pristine condition. They were held in protected cardboard boxes and the boxes did their job well while the books were in long-term storage for almost a decade. But the boxes themselves are in very rough shape. The actual surfaces are fine (except for a minor scuff mark on one, but I already know how I’m going to get rid of that). The problem is that the lids are coming apart at the corners, turning the lid into a flat piece of carboard with four flaps instead of, you know, a lid.
What would be the best way to repair those corners so that it looks at least passable to casual inspection. The boxes are cardboard covered with textured black … something paper, but not card stock, nor regular paper. Where they’re torn at the corners, the card stock, no longer contained by the black covering layer, has kind of, over the years, puffed out and gone feathery, so even if I glue the corners back together with something, they won’t be that nice textured black all the way.
Does anybody have any ideas how to repair this, or should I just embrace the look of covers which did the perfect job of protection and look like wounded warriors or something?
There are oh-so-many “you simply must read this!” books in my trash bins over the years I could likely open the worst bookshop in the world with them as stock.
In school I was forced practically at gunpoint to stare at poetry and regurgitate the teacher/professor’s opinions about what it means. It killed my ability to enjoy poetry for over two decades.
Reading something that doesn’t engage with you is not helpful. Ever.
I think you’ve mistakenly lost yourself on the path to the “c/stridentpolitics” group. This is “c/books”. It’s an easy mistake to make, seeing as the names are nearly identical.
There’s always room for people in this wild world whose opinions are wrong.
Yes. What has no place is snobbery over what form of entertainment people take on. There is, short of causing harm, no such thing as BadWrongFun™.