Kwatz!

Haven't heard of that one - will have a look. Thanks!

Yes, that's a great example actually! It's been a while since I've read the two main Hyperion books but it's true that the shrike is totally non-human. If I remember right there's also the priest chapter which contains compelling examples of unique aliens. Can't remember if they were humanoid or not.

Dead Space by Kali Wallace

Have you read the Hyperion series?

Re cruelty, I think he is muckraking. Like Black Beauty, or Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Jungle, he is portraying social evils he sees to elicit a response of sympathy or outrage. However, even in 'good' families, the common forms of punishment for children then would be unacceptable today. Also criminal justice for adults at the time was severe and cruel.

Re antisemitism, readers at the time called Dickins out about Fagin. Dickins responded and later wrote better jewish characters,

https://tikvatisrael.org/charles-dickens-imperfect-teshuvhah/

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I liked it but I think the real love story is between Tish and her family. Or at least that's what hit me the hardest.

I went for a walk in the park and found a copy of the goldfinch in a little box library thing. Turned out to be one of my favorites ever.

My best story is: I was living in Sweden at the time, and was visiting my bf in my own country. We went to a second hand shop we had never been before and I was obviously soon browsing the book section. I saw this little red book with big letters "I love you" on it. I jokingly told my bf he had to buy me that book because he loves me. He bought it. After buying it we saw that the book was actually in Swedish, even though Swedish is not a major language where I am from.

I still cant believe I found a Swedish book on my visit home while I was living in Sweden.

When I was a teenager my dad came home and gave me a nice hard copy of Deathly Hallows he said he found on the side of a highway. It was in great condition lol

Last year I got excited about the idea of reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. One day I just found it among piles of books in my home. It felt like Campbell's work had materialized from nowhere... No one has ever admitted to giving it to me. And my memory isn't so bad to forget how I bought this book. Omg. :-)

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“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Someone left a copy of Verity by Colleen Hoover on my doorstep lmao. To this day I have no idea who left it or why. I still haven't read it though.

Not really strange but I saw an advertisement for a book called Daemon in IIRC a Wired magazine. The synopsis sounded like something I would like, so I grabbed the book... Ended up really loving it and Daniel Suarez became my favorite author. I have enjoyed every single book he has written, though I liked his latest story (about mining asteroids) far less than any other book he has written.

Did you like the book? It's on my TBR and I was intending to get to it soon.

Exposing Oliver's plight was the main point of the book.

Well, I think you definitely got lucky with your Vonnegut collection because I always try to find his books at the used bookstore and only very rarely do I find any by him. The last one I found was that Snuff Box book, I've been meaning to get around to it, I haven't gotten into it yet but it seems promising.

So, I have a thing against short stories (it's a flaw, I know). Vonnegut is a rare exception where I have read some of his short stories, but certainly not all. I own some of his short story collections, but I don't own that one.

It actually reminds me of one of my experiences in college that I totally forgot about. Same thing, one of my friends stole a book. But looking back on it, the book that he stole was extremely rare. There was a rare book shop near the campus, and for some reason he just walked in and swiped it off a shelf. But it was odd because I wasn't even a very close friend of his, he felt the need to give it to me, which was random. Eventually I ended up losing that book and then years later I remembered that experience and I tried looking for that book to buy a copy of it, that's when I realized how rare it was, I finally bought it but it was pricey, since then it's doubled in value which is nice though.

Hmm.. Lord Dunsany.. I'm not familiar with him.. Sounds interesting I'll have to read about him. Great story, thanks!

When I was in college a friend of mine stole (yes, I know!) an old Everyman copy of Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder from the library: it was a 1920’s oxblood leather-bound copy, beautiful and exciting.

I always coveted that book and remembered it.

20 years later I was telling a friend in another city about it. She managed to score a copy of it for my birthday, and gave it to me.

Less than a week later my college friend, whom I hadn’t spoken to in a decade or more, sent me the stolen copy in the mail. It was packaged carefully with a note saying he remembered how much I loved the book, saying he’d tried to give it back to the college library but they didn’t really want it as they’d moved to mostly digital systems and weren’t currently expanding their fiction collection.

So now I have two copies: they’re both my favorite.

What are books would you add to that category? I partially identify myself with your ideas here and want to disregard them completely.

In one way, I really strive to get the money that will allow a beautiful life on my terms. And somehow, it put me into a fantastic position at my age and in mg country.

On the other way, I want to keep being humble and not be so much influenced by this toxic mindset visible all over Twitter, Ytb, books, etc. These two ways are giving me lots of anxiety, FOMO, inner battle: “I could be doing more so I earn more. I want to live nicely and cherish my relationships.”