The Godfather is not a good book - the movie is fantastic

some authors clearly describe facial features and others don’t - if you want, after reading a description, google a similar type face for use as a reference?

It’s impossible to say - what we love now may fall out of favor and then come back strong or simply disappear … and who knows who will be “rediscovered” 100 years from now.

I highlight sentences and passages

It’s been years since I read them, but that’s not the vibe I recall

The last 100 pages or so of MD are as exciting as any in literature

I never regret reading anything - why would I?

from wiki:

French and English translations were published in 1887, and a German translation in 1889. European critical response was also largely negative, mainly due to the novel’s apparent formlessness and rambling style.^([70]) Morson notes that critics saw it as “a complete mess, as if it were written extemporaneously, with no overall structure in mind—as, in fact, it was.”^([71]) Typical of the western critics was the introduction to the first French translation which, while praising the energetic style and characterization, notes that “they are enveloped in a fantastic mist and get lost in innumerable digressions.”

Prominent modern critics acknowledge the novel’s apparent structural deficiencies, but also point out that the author was aware of them himself, and that they were perhaps a natural consequence of the experimental approach toward the central idea. Joseph Frank has called The Idiot “perhaps the most original of Dostoevsky’s great novels, and certainly the most artistically uneven of them all,”^([73]) but he also wondered how it was that the novel “triumphed so effortlessly over the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure.” Gary Saul Morson observes that “The Idiot brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway.”^([71])

It’s not really about a book, but more about a character or situation: if your favorite aspect of A Clockwork Orange is the rapes, the murder and the violence, aside from not understanding the book, you may be a bit twisted - same for American Psycho: if you read >!the nail-gun scen!

I don’t consider finishing a book an accomplishment, any more than I consider viewing a great painting or sculpture as an accomplishment: the accomplishment is the creation of art, not the consumption. Many of the books mentioned here I’ve read multiple times: Ulysses, Moby Dick, some volumes of In Search of Lost Time, - etc, length does not a masterpiece make: Heart of Darkness is a short work that very much challenges the reader and some of Shakespeare’s sonnets are as challenging as his plays. Art is NOT a competition, consider yourself lucky to have the ability and the circumstances to be able to read great works (but don’t make it about yourself)

what did you not understand?

it reads much easier as an adult