I think it was a little bit of both

Would you mind sharing the new release you're talking about? Thank you!

Domestic violence against women as one topic and misogyny as component. My mental health took a mega-shit as a result of suddenly noticing and being unable to avoid everything I've just let roll off my back all these years. Reading books about feminism isnt helping. I can't avoid books written with men as a main character. Books that pass the Bechdel test happen to sometimes belong in genres I don't enjoy. And on, and on, and on... Ugh.

I've been 150 pages from the end of Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy for like a month now and can't bring myself to finish.

Any kind of animal abuse. I love Celeste Ng but I'm going to skip "Our Missing Hearts" because one of the reviews mentioned an upsetting animal death. I'm sure it's a tiny part of the book but I know it's there and it's completely put me off.

For violence and abuse toward humans, it depends on how it's handled and how graphic it is. There's nothing specific I avoid on principle but I will quit a book if it feels gratuitous. Authors have a right to tell those kinds of stories and I have a right not to engage with the content if it crosses a personal boundary.

I typically don't read horror as a genre (not never, but very very rarely) because if it's too scary I have to sleep with the lights on :)

Anything by Ian Banks. Never wanted to finish any of them.

Basically I stick to the 5 star system because that's what goodreads uses, and that's the primary online resource I use for tracking, rating, etc. In my own records I go from 0 to 5, in 1/4 increments (as of now I've only given 3 books zero stars, because usually if I hate a book that much and have no hope of a complete turn around I'll DNF it pretty quickly). I have tried scaled with more precision like 0-100, but I find that there's just too much movement over time, like I would have to re-rate too many books every few years, because now I think a book is 71 rather than 68, or 90 rather than 93.

It took me several tries to get into Midnight’s Children. Once I did, I read it pretty quickly and wondered what the trouble had been. The beginning wasn’t hard to read so much as, for me, it didn’t immediately inspire investment, but I did ultimately get engaged with the story.

Shalimar the Clown, on the other hand, I found accessible from jump. That one was great, if disturbing.

I just like less stars.

5 = I loved this book.

4 = It was a good reading experience.

3 = It was an okay reading experience with no regrets.

2 = I didn’t like it and kinda wish I had my time back.

1 = I hated it and I’d get a time machine to get my time if I could.

idk a 1-10 rating system feels like too much to me. If I’m in between then I just add half a star. I know some people give a 1-star rating if they do not finish (dnf) a book but I never rate dnf books.

Edit: Formatting.

I'm excited! My favorite Rushdie is "The Enchantress of Florence," a sparkling gem of a book.

Confession: I've started "Midnight's Children" 3 or 4 times and while I always get a little further on the re-reads, I've never managed to finish it.

How can you find out who edited a book? Who edited the novel "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"?

I wrote it as a Google topic. None of the hits I got seemed from the synopses like they'd give an answer. It would take a while to read the hits in full and it might still be a while before I found an answer, if ever. This might be fun sometimes, but it would be nice if there was a quick way to find out who edited a given book. I suppose some authors may not have an editor, or teams of editors may work on some books.

The particular novel was published by Viking Press which I think is a big press so probably there was an editor?

Haunting of Hill House and The Bell Jar are two of my favourites. I was never a huge fan of classics when I had to read them in school but The Bell Jar changed that for me for sure.

Because we're rating books, not Olympic ice dancing.

> On the same topic, there's also the unique challenge of sexual assaults on board.

This is also a lot different than 30 years ago. There's basically no public area of a modern ship not covered 24/7 by security cameras.

> Skirting responsibility: the book said most ships fly under flags of convenience and use concessionaires for their goods and services. An American cruise liner can then avoid the more stringent safety and labor law requirements of the states by sailing under the flag of a more lax nation.

This misses a bunch of the nuance. American maritime law is protectionist to a somewhat self-defeating degree. That is to say, probably cruise ships that operate in America probably wouldn't prefer to operate under an American flag, but that's irrelevant because they also literally can't.

Among other things, to be an American cruise ship the ship would also have to be built in America, and America currently does not have the industry to build a modern cruise ship. Basically, our shipbuilding is heavily specialized into ships that kill people. There is currently one cruise ship that is America flagged (Norwegian Cruise Line's Pride of America) which was basically built in Europe, like 1% assembled in America, and required a specific act of Congress to be considered American enough to do it.

Why you would even want to have a ship be American is a separate rabbit hole of American maritime law.

I will say, if you aren't too afraid to get on an airplane... you are much more crammed into a small space with lots of people even being in an airport than you will ever be on a ship.

Having just read through it, it's a hard one to explain. It's the blurry line of where inspiration stops and plagiarism starts. It's easier with writing and books, being able to compare one written text to another and note the similar sentence structures, phrases etc.

The author mentioned here did plagiarize, but it almost comes across as reusing someone's anecdote, to me anyway. I've alluded to people I know; their mannerisms, their backgrounds, their stories etc in my writing (not that I'm published, it's just for fun). When an anecdote is told orally and then you rejig it to fit a character or narrative in your story, most people wouldn't view this as plagiarism. We know of lots of authors who have used real-life people and their experiences as the basis of their novels. With already published text though, well, it's a far more clear-cut case. The question is whether it's done knowingly, maliciously, as a homage or just by genuine unconscious osmosis of others' works.

I don't know where this author falls. I would say that the text is far too similar to be some unconscious thing. Seems like the blog writer doesn't know either.

Nice! Two of his stories I really enjoyed are A Terrible Vengeance and Nevsky Prospekt.

I happened upon a letter telling her it's up to her what to do with them, but they should probably be withheld a good number of years because they discuss other living people.

Letter from 6 July 1932. Couldn't copy and paste on mobile.

I remember in my AP English class everyone said she was selfish

Gooseberry is/was a popular one in the UK. I also landed on Muppet, potato, loaf of bread/piece of toast, dipshit, lump, clod, lummox. Really any word for an inanimate object, especially simple/unremarkable objects, seems to do the trick.

Fr I'm Brazilian and I have this book translated to my language. Honestly? I don't understand a fuck what is written on this shit, but I love it.

[deleted]

I have a problem with #1. If you don't read, how can you call yourself a reader?

Not really classic litterature, most of his books were written fifty or less years ago...

It's okay that you didn't enjoy the book and wouldn't recommend it to people, but you're insulting other readers because you didn't like it. If you read the book, you know the book keeps most of the violence and torture off the page and leaves most of it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. You're being disinguous. It's not torture porn, because the book is not meant to be titillating. It's painful, it's heartbreaking, and the characters are morally reprehensible, but it's also (through the safety of fiction) exploring how people, especially children, are capable of heinous acts of cruelty and be disensitized to violence through their own environments or abuse. That was the actual crime that happened. The book fictionalized the crime, and it's actually way less cruel than the real events. By telling the story with the safety net of fiction, the author can be respectful to the victims without speaking for them, or the woman and children who committed the crimes. The book never intends to turn on the reader or excite them, and there are whole passages where the narrator grapples with how anyone could have that mindset. As for the narrator, it would be absolutely awful to read Meg's experiences from her perspective. As it's written, the book's major theme is violence and cruelty through complicity or inaction. By having the character be a side character, and outsider who becomes an insider to the story, the reader feels vulnerable, complicit, and unable to change the events, just like the narrator. So fuck you for assuming reading a specific book makes someone mentally ill or sadistic, and not intelligent or empathetic.