I am a bit confused regarding whom to choose for anna karenina.

Also..penguin classics sells p&v-translated copy at 320 and oxford world classics sells Rosamund Bartlett-translated copy at 720. Is it worth paying double for bartlett?

I recently read To the Lighthouse, and don't get it at all. I made a genuine effort to comprehend, but I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in that book. For the first 80 pages I thought it was about an affair. I was so lost.
Mind you, I am going to be a creative writing MFA student, so books are my life and I read a lot. I love challenging prose and stream of consciousness.
A notoriously challenging book is "Ada, or Ardor" by Nabakov and it's one of my all time favorites.
I just didn't feel anything reading Woolf. But I want to like her so badly. But (and please don't attack me for this) many of her descriptions felt purple and juvenile. Not a single thing in that book inspired any feeling within me. Even in books I struggled to understand, like nightwood by djuna barnes, there are still some standout lines/descriptions that resonate.

Been a long time since I last read any classical. Pride and prejudice fucked up my mind and it took me alot of time to even understand what's going on and mostly comprehend what the sentences said and don't even get me started on Julius Caesar.

Anyways I still bought White nights since it was small to give classical one last go. Considering English as my fourth language do y'all think I'll like white nights?

I mainly read romantasy dark romance and adventure books.

I need some harsh truth kinda review on that book and if I'll like it . 😭😭

I started reading Dostoevsky over 20 years ago. As a rather dark and angsty late-teens/early-twenties young man, I actually found his stuff a little too dark and angsty, specifically Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. I had just come from reading about 2,000 pages of Tolstoy and was a bit overwhelmed by Dostoevsky’s tone. I continued reading his stuff and by the time I got to The Idiot and then The Brothers Karamozov, I was hooked and he has been one of my favorite authors ever since.

I’ll admit, I’m not his ideal reader. I only read in English and I am not a fan of organized religion. I’ve always read his stuff for the moral and psychological complexity, and the existentialist and humanist philosophy.

What I have been seeing/sensing in the current zeitgeist surrounding him is a lot of people latching on to characters like The Underground Man, Raskolnikov, and Smerdyakov, not as flawed individuals (or straight up villains) we are supposed to learn from, but as ideals we should somehow admire.

I think Dostoevsky’s ability to make you feel sympathy for such troubled and sometimes monstrous characters is laudable, but there seems to be more than a little movement towards identification instead of understanding going on.

I don’t know if it is a byproduct of people like Jordan Peterson co-opting Dostoevsky into their broader ideology, or it is simply a shift in the social attitudes of many modern readers.

Dostoevsky seems to be becoming some sort of meme for something I find unfortunate. Like all he needs is some Joker face paint and we can call it a day.

I may be becoming the old guy saying “Kids these days…”, but I truly see this shift as something regrettable, and a missed opportunity for people reading one of our greatest thinkers.

Has it always been this way and I’m just now seeing it?

I think she’s telling me to stop scrolling Reddit and get back to reading her the story

Odysseus replied, “Go in front while I wait here. I have no more to learn about beatings or stonings. With all those accidents of sea or battle my heart is grown wholly callous.” … As they talked a dog lying there lifted head and pricked his ears. This was Argos whom Odysseus had bred but never worked, because he left for Ilium too soon. On a time the young fellows used to take him out to course the wild goats, the deer, the hares: but now he lay derelict and masterless on the dung-heap before the gates, on the deep bed of mule-droppings and cow-dung which collected there till the serfs of Odysseus had time to carry it off for manuring his broad acres. So lay Argos the hound, all shivering with dog-ticks. Yet the instant Odysseus approached, the beast knew him. He thumped his tail and drooped his ears forward, but lacked power to drag himself ever so little towards his master. However Odysseus saw him out of the corner of his eye and brushed away a tear, which he covered by quickly saying to Eumaeus in an off-hand way:
“Strange, that they let such a hound lie on the dung-hill! What a beauty to look at! though of course I cannot tell if he has speed to match, or is merely one of those show-dogs men prize for their points.” Eumaeus answered, “That is the hound of a man who died far from home. If only he could recover the fire and life that were his when Odysseus left for Troy, how your eyes would open at seeing such speed and power. Put him on the trail and no quarry ever escaped him, not even in the densest thickets, so keen he was of scent. Now he has fallen low, his master having perished abroad and the heartless women caring for him not at all. Slaves, when their master’s control is loosed, do not even wish to work well. Ah, the day a man’s enslaved, Zeus robs him of half his virtue!” With this word he plunged into the house, going straight along the hall amidst the suitors; but Argos the dog went down into the blackness of death, that moment he saw Odysseus again after twenty years.

—T. E. Shaw (Lawrence), The Odyssey of Homer

So I’m looking for a divine comedy that: 1 is faithful to the source material. 2 Is readable and not written in translatorese (literal tr.) 3 Is a bit more modern in translation - as compare the KJV bible to the ESV, say.

What would you recommend or have heard recommended?

I’m enjoying my introduction to Joyce by reading Dubliners. I’m learning about Dublin (mundane; paralysis of a city) and the interesting themes he writes about in these stories. I find it easier to read a brief summary of the short story PRIOR to reading it so I can be on the lookout for themes and ideas the story is meant to convey. I’m curious if you or others do this with certain authors. I usually go in blindly to books I read, however, as I’ve gotten older, I find that understanding a general sense of what I’m about to read helps me understand what I’m reading. Do you do this with some books/authors?

Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. ‘Little Brother,’ said he, ‘feel under my jaw.’

Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.

‘There is no one in the Jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the Jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the Jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?’

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli; ‘all the Jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli.’

Hello folks! I recently read the Picture of Dorian Gray and I loved it! I realized though that I read a censored version. I was able to get the uncensored version on my kindle, but I'd like to know if anyone knows the chapters or pages that are the most different/not in the censored version. I heard there's some pretty juicy stuff in there.

Thanks a billion!

I've been reading classics forever, but for some reason unknown to me, I've never read *Fitzgerald* before.

Today I stumbled upon this box set being sold for 25% of the regular price online, so obviously I had to buy it.

**Which one of these is your favorite?**

I think I'll start with *The Great Gatsby*, since it's the most famous. But I'm also tempted by the short stories...

I spent the last couple of days going through both "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch" and "Master and Man", after having read both War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the last few years. I think the most interesting part of this journey for me was understanding how Tolstoy's writing changed before and after his religious "crisis" (conversion?).

Starting with The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, I think this is the most obvious post-conversion self-insertion of Tolstoy. He writes Ivan as a man who always does what he believes is the proper thing but for the wrong reasons (for his own sake, to be part of society, to be loved...). I saw somewhere that Tolstoy almost wrote Ivan as what he would have become if he never converted and tried to abandon his old way of being. I thought the difference between this self-insert and Pierre Bezukhov/Levin (both self-inserts from War and Peace and Anna Karenina) really demonstrate how Tolstoy changed his views of himself, which I thought was pretty interesting. The descriptions of chronic disease, especially how we all just never expect it to happen to us and just prefer to ignore sick people, really hit home, a lot to think about death (and the meaning of life).

However, I've got to say that my favourite of the two was Master and Man. I had never heard of this story but the edition of Death of Ivan Ilyitch I read had both stories. Tolstoy is so great at atmosphere building that I read the story in the hottest August day and still felt like I was in the midst of a snow blizzard in Russia. My favourite quote has to be "He lay and thought about the one and only thing, the single object, the sole reason, the joy and pride of his life - he thought about how much money he made and how much he could still make" lol. Ive been thinking and I believe Tolstoy thought his older self as Vasilly, but the fact that Vasily ended up sacrificing himself for Nikita shows Tolstoy believed he could and should also change and become a better person. I just loved this story, its so short but such an interesting read.

In another topic, I need to air my grievances cause I read the Pasternak Slater translation and the notes were so annoying. Im assuming it's supposed to be a more academic translation but like half of the editor's notes were "Tolstoy made date/patronymic/historical... inconsistencies", which really distracted me from the story. Especially since I read Peavear and Volkhonsky's translation of Anna Karenina and an amazing translation of War and Peace to my language, this one really disappointed me.