I definitely see that point of view, but I was shocked at how much more fun it was when I shifted to the immersive experience. It was something about the vocabulary and structure, where it seemed every word and phrase was intended to make you feel something rather than think it. It helped that I had the lexicon to be able to capture the nuances without getting lost in analysis, too.

I’ve known for a long time that this is an unpopular opinion! People hold these authors in very high esteem, probably explicitly due to how challenging it is to read their work.

I read a lot of classics and various styles of literature, and for me there’s a stark difference between an author who’s able to move me with a powerful story vs. one who seems to be writing mostly for themselves. I’m glad literature seems to have mostly gotten over that style. It was an interesting trend but thankfully an ephemeral one.

don't stop. one day you'll start a page-turner and realize that's the kind of book you've been wanting. and you'll be hooked

It depends. If the real person can prove that you included private, secret, personal information that you should not be airing to the public and you are only "disguising" it under the umbrella as fiction, then you are breaching their rights to privacy, you may be slandering (libeling?) I forget which is which) them.

Usually, when fiction includes a real person and facts about their life, the author has to include sources, either as a general bibliography or also with footnotes. If you're just making stuff up and happen to get it right...that's accidental and not your problem, as long as you can show that you had no prior knowledge about the facts/truth.

“It was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Substitute “a dad” for “tea”.

yup.

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Like reading the same thing and then discuss?

So long and thanks for all the fish

a book buddy I read with my friends sometimes

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What exactly do you mean by reading with someone else?

> Try picking books that really peak your interest

That's the thing is I do genuinely like most genres of movies and TV shows. Fantasy, true crime, horror, sci-fi, etc. But it's like whereas I may like to watch a movie, reading its novel equivalent seems great at first but again, I slowly lose interest as I said

No worries. You don't have to delete your post unless you want to, it has already been removed.

This is one of the interesting and entertaining set of books I've ever read. I loved it. That said,it is definitely not for everyone. It's big, complicated, and sprawling. It covers multiple intertwining story lines over decades and continents.

I'm a sucker for European history (fiction and non), so this really hit my sweet spot, The placement of so many famous Enlightenment period figures, from Isaac Newton to Louis XIV, and others besides, in proper historical context, but still as "real" people was great fun to read about.

I read the Cycle early last year. A few weeks later I thought to pick up the first book and "just read a few pages" because of how much fun it was. I was hooked,and completed the Cycle a second time.

Be aware that is is written in a Baroque style and is very wordy. To illustrate, my son and I have both read the Cycle, and also all the Jack Reacher books. After a passage in the Cycle, I compared the two...

"(Baron von Hackelheber) drew kis left hand up the outside of his thigh, black wool purring under his fingertips, and over the line of tiny silver buckles that fastened the rapier's black leather scabbard to the end of a broad leather strap - a baldric, it is called. - slung diagonally over his body. Continuing up and back, his hand passed under the skirt of his black wool coat, peeling the hem up to expose its black datin lining. He bent his elbows and supinated his wrist. The back of his hand glided up his buttock and over the black leather belt that kept his breeches from falling down, and stopped above his left kidney. He closed his hand on something hard, the handle of his dagger."

.........

".Reacher reached for his knife."

&#x200B;

One last comment -- Half-cocked Jack, the King of the Vagabonds is to my notion one of the great characters in fiction.

Not a doctor so I can't say if it's a disorder or anything. I personally have a hard time reading things that do not interest me. I wish I was the type of person to sit down with a non fiction book and learn something, but that is just not my genre. Even when I have an educational book on a subject I enjoy, I don't read cover to cover. I bounce around and read parts that pertain to what I am interested in the moment. Give me a dystopian sci fi novel and I will DEVOUR it. Have your tried 'Parable of the Sower' by Octavia Butler. That's the book that revived my passion for reading after a lengthy literature break.

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Also I can read with you if you want to*-*

I've struggled first time I tried to read in english but now it became easier, you can try reading with someone else, this one helped me so it may help you too

I remember A Wizard of Earthsea as one of the first novels I ever read as a child. I've recently just reread it and it's the only book I've ever reread. I plan to finish rereading the entire series soon.

As a related point of interest, when I returned to reading again last year, so many decades later, The Left Hand of Darkness was my choice of novel to get me back into it. It's one of the few novels that has made me tear up.

Try picking books that really peak your interest instead of going for the ones considered great. What genres or settings do you like in TV series or games? You can probably find a book that matches those interests and it will make your reading life way easier. The books you picked also aren't necessarily 'beginners' books I'd say.

Also, why make it a task by creating a reading schedule of number of pages? If you do that to motivate yourself to read, you could just try setting aside some time, e.g. before going to bed, during your commute, in between 2 tv episodes when binging… You name it!

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Start with some easy, fun books. I'm not saying you need YA-level books (not that there is anything wrong with reading YA when you're an adult) but there are plenty of very good stories out there with an easy, breezy writing style.

And try not to focus on page numbers or word counts. If you want a schedule, make it time-based - 20 minutes a day or whatever works well for the rest of your daily life. Whether that means you read 20 pages or 5 pages, you should like what you're reading and be eager for the next installment. Enjoy that time, enjoy the story.

I don’t really see a contradiction with what I said and what you’ve laid out here. What I’m trying to get at is that there is always an incongruence between societally accepted and recognized relationships, so we should take interpretations that rely on law or philosophy from the time with a grain of salt, especially when they seem to contradict primary sources from day to day life.

I’m aware of the Roman’s high levels of bottom shame, and, as I said above, it persist in modern culture. As you said, it would be a source of shame to be the bottom, and I will admit to a bit of purposeful omission regarding sex between soldiers. Most of the depictions we have of that are soldiers engaged in frottage, no one is “playing Juliet”, so to speak. But that’s the official party line, if we went off official attitudes in the military from the 70s in the same way we would have to say there were no gay military relationships at the time, and we know that’s just not true.

But to expand out on what you are saying, yeah it does seem to be a common theme in other cultures too, with variations, many of which also persist today. Some cultures it was seen as childish for a man to enjoy receptive sex, some controls conflated it with transsexuality and would only accept gay men who presented as women (usually in areas where the population has less sexual dimorphism). One of the big problems in my opinion is that we see just in recent times how quickly attitudes can change and fluctuate, and we know that cultures that rely heavily on persecution of out groups are more likely to destroy media and historical records, and given that homosexuality is a persistent out group, there is probably a lot of queer history that’s been destroyed. Like the works of sapho have been lost and found 3 times, and I think it’s telling that her work deals with love and lust outside of social institutions.

Just by the by, this is also why I think that the women’s liberation movement really kicked off the gay rights movement. The last 100 years have seen tons of pushback from subalterns of one sort or another, and I see that as being the “moral arc of history” and all that Jazz. But we see pockets of it throughout history. Like I had a professor get mad at me once for writing an essay arguing that Diogenes was the “ earliest recorded punk rocker” lol, but I really do think it has some merit. And there is a weird connection between being the receptive partner and rebelliousness, the term punk originally had an association with being a male receptive partner.