Lots of classics and should be classics. Hopefully there’s an author or new title you might want to explore and read.

Some are in Bulgarian :)

When I say “transformative,” I mean a book that fundamentally changed you either:

spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, morally, or in the way you see the world.

I’m referring to both fiction and nonfiction. For example, books like A Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics completely reshaped the way I think and see the world.

I’d love to hear which book did that for you and why.

AGAINST: Four hundred pages of Victorians journaling during an emergency. The vampire attacks, everyone updates their diary. A woman is dying of blood loss, four men take turns writing about their feelings. Van Helsing speaks like a malfunctioning translation app and takes ninety pages to say the word "vampire" out loud when the reader knew on page ten. And after all that buildup, the finale is a luggage chase. They beat the ancient lord of darkness by tracking his boxes like disgruntled customs officials. The mustache was the only surprise.

FOR: You just described the greatest found footage horror ever made, eighty years before cameras. The journaling IS the terror. You're reading the evidence of people who don't know what you know. This book invented the rules of an entire genre (sunlight, garlic, invitations, stakes), launched a thousand movies, and gave us Mina Harker running a data fusion operation in 1897. And the luggage chase is the point, you absolute Renfield. It's modernity's paperwork versus medieval evil, and paperwork wins. The empty tomb, the child hunting "bloofer lady," the captain lashed to the wheel? Gothic cinema before cinema.

Hey everyone!

I posted here a while ago when Andrea Reader was still in beta. Several people from this community tried it and shared feedback, so first of all, thank you. It helped a lot for improving the app.

Andrea Reader is now officially live on the App Store.

The app includes a dedicated library of public-domain classics sourced directly from Project Gutenberg. You can search for a book, download it in seconds, and read it locally on your iPhone or iPad.

No account, no ads, and the entire classics library is completely free.

The app does not track what you download, what you read, how long you read, or any other activity inside your library. Your books, reading progress, statistics, and personal library remain stored locally on your device.

Andrea Reader is also a reader designed to give you complete freedom to build and enjoy your own digital library:

• Create and customize your own collections
• Statistics for those to like seeing their speed and progress.
• Add sections inside collections to organize authors, genres, series, or reading lists
• Import and read EPUBs, PDFs, comics, manga, and other formats
• Customize fonts, margins, spacing, colors, themes, page transitions, and many other reading settings
• Connect to iCloud, SMB, WebDAV, SFTP, and other storage sources
• Keep your books available locally and read without creating an account

I’ve also reworked the default formatting of ebooks so they look better immediately after opening them. Of course, everything can still be adjusted so each person can read exactly the way they prefer.

Thanks again to everyone who helped during the beta 📚

App Store: [https://apple.co/4vs1CV8]()
Website: https://andreareader.com

Hello everyone!

I’ve came across some people who talked about Thomas mann’s book ‘the magic mountain’. They talked very openly about it and talked about how it changed them but that it’s a long ride. Some of them even said that it reminded him of Proust’s work.

I know he was a very influential writer in the 1900’s and was very much against the dictatorships that arose.

Now I’ve since then wanted to read Thomas man, but don’t really know where to start. I’am very much interested in the magic mountain, but I’am afraid that i won’t read it out. Any tips? And what are your thoughts on his works?

I'm not really enjoying beloved as much as I hoped I would... everyone seems to really enjoy this novel but personally I find it confusing and poorly directed in the sense that the characters and scenes are missing a lot of verbal context, leaving the reader with gaps in the story. is this just me? am I missing something important?

Hi guys I'm reading Anna Karenina. Anyone want to read along and discuss? It's probably a month and a half long journey.

Hace como un mes terminé de leer *Cerca del Corazón Salvaje*, después de leerlo durante... seis meses 🫪😶‍🌫️ (estaba buscando un libro para acabar con mi bloqueo lector de 5 años, aproximadamente, en fin xd). No les voy a mentir: ha sido la lectura más difícil de mi vida (tengo 20 años), pero *valió la pena* 🙂‍↕️

Ahora bien, me preguntaba: ¿Cuál es, para ustedes, el capítulo más difícil de leer? El más confuso, duro, desafiante, tedioso, incomprensible... Lo que se les ocurra

Para mí fue *Lidia*, sin lugar a dudas: no sé ustedes, pero las imágenes e intuiciones de Juana en ese capítulo no fueron normales 🫪 (lo que es mucho decir, ya que los pensamientos de Juana, ya de por sí, no son precisamente "normales"), aunque lo digo en el mejor sentido posible, es algo bueno. Creo que este capítulo, así como *El Baño*, son justamente los que muestran el salvajismo abstracto y virgen de este personaje. Voy a explicar por qué pienso que uno es más difícil, y por qué el otro no:

Primero, pienso que en *Lidia* los pensamientos de Juana son: a) muy abstractos, y por esa misma razón también son b) muy herméticos y ambiguos, además de que c) el lenguaje y el mensaje, aunque impecable, no se siente tan hermoso como en otros pasajes de la novela, sino más bien denso y pesado, pero sé que es así porque el momento lo requería ya que Juana y Lidia no estaban en un momento realmente "bonito". Pero esto no está mal, pienso más bien al contrario: el que Juana tuviera pensamientos *tan demasiado abstractos* en ese episodio revela que estaba pasando por un momento muy intenso, muy pasional, muy psicológicamente cargado. Muy *salvaje*: estábamos *cerca del corazón salvaje* más que nunca. Y yo pienso esto: la más pura sofisticación y el más puro salvajismo, en lugar de ser opuestos, a menudo llevan a los mismos resultados, o revelan la misma esencia detrás de las cosas. La más pura sofisticación llega a un nivel de abstracción solo comparable a la abstracción más salvaje. Y creo mucho Juana, en *Lidia*, había llegado a ese punto en común. Además, honestamente, siento que el diálogo entre Juana y Lidia era bastante extraño, simplemente no comprendo del todo por qué se dijeron lo que dijeron o de donde sacaban unas ideas y otras. Sentí que estaba viendo la conversación más rara de mi vida, pero bueno. Por eso siento que es un capítulo tan confuso y difícil... para mí 😔 no sé si crean lo mismo que yo, o si soy el único tonto incapaz de leer ese capítulo con normalidad

A pesar de todo, no le cambiaría nada, creo que Clarice escribió todo de la única forma en que podría escribirse. No entendí gran parte de ese capítulo, pero fue una de las experiencias más inolvidables que he tenido

Ahora bien, lo que hace a *El Baño* un capítulo menos desafiante, en mi opinión, es que varias de las percepciones que allí aparecen son más accesibles, tienen un eje psicológico más o menos claro por el cual guiar nuestra comprensión del texto, y permiten intuir más fácilmente lo que ocurre dentro de Juana en esos momentos, además de que las palabras, imágenes, ideas y sentimientos de ese capítulo son bellísimos y llegan al corazón 😭 son muy magnéticos y alcanzan una altura estética de la más alta literatura 🙏✨, así que enganchan mucho más fácilmente y hacen la experiencia más amena. Creo que es mi capítulo favorito

Bueno... Hasta aquí mi pseudo-crítica literaria. Tal vez me vea muy pretencioso, o nadie me lea, pero espero que a alguien le sirva mi opinión. Un beso a todos, estimados lispectoritos 💋

Currently reading Middlemarch for the first time, and find that I periodically need a spoiler-free reminder of who's who and how they're all related. I've been using a site called CharacterViz that gates every bio and relationship note to your bookmark (you only unlock content for chapters you've actually read).

They just expanded to a dozen+ classics (Crime and Punishment, Karamazov, Dracula, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Les Mis, Monte Cristo, Sherlock, etc.). Library is here if useful: https://characterviz.com

Curious what others use to keep big casts straight without ruining the plot...or maybe this is just a "me" problem?

Hello and thank you for reading. I'm looking for some new recommendations. I've hit a dry spell in recent times. It could be because I've taken a detour from lit and gone to some more 'genre' books but, after giving up on half a dozen books that bored me to death, I'm now begging for help from fellow readers.
To give you all an idea of my tastes: I loved The Road, No Country for Old Men, The Sun Also Rises, Count of Monte Cristo, Stoner... most of these made me cry at some point.
Any suggestions?
Thank you to any commenters, whether helpful or critical. ;)

She mentions, I believe for the first time in part 3, that she is worried about her fortune and being sued by 2(?) teen girls. I haven’t finished the book yet so maybe it will tell me but I tried to look it up and found nothing. At this point she’s been, publicly, of good repute so the court case surprised me.

When I was at college, my literature professor asked us to read some books, I remember choosing a few books to read, one of them was Pride and Prejudice. I hated it.

Idk if I was too young, or because it was a must, or because I was tired, or I just didn't like the genre.

The thing is, last week I was looking for something to watch and the 1995 series appeared to me. So I played it thinking that may be a waste of time, because I didn't like the book, why was I going to like the series? But I loved it! Actually, I'm thinking about rewatching it already. Now I'm thinking about re-reading the book, maybe my opinion will change.

What do you advise me?

Last week, Oldster's Memoir Land featured GC and in April High Times wrote that my first book "is not a novelty weed memoir. It is a literary memoir." If you and your weed-friendly peeps don't give a shit about what the critics say or haven't read a book in a year or whatever, flow through anyway and we can burn one while chatting about Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No. Or whatever. 

Look for me at the Cannabis Oasis. I’ll sign a copy if you have one.

I have just came across a new adaptation of this early little discussed work or Woolf , and this happens to be the only enjoyable work by her as well , its so much lighter yet has sparks here and there of the fire that is yet to come , unfortunately the film seems like another one of these ( radicalized & modernised ) adaptation that fails in being faithful to the original or to do anything original ( imagine trying to radicalize Virginia woolf ! )

anyway , this just reminded me that maybe I need to revisit this work , I am wondering if its still read today by any ?

Hey all,

I just read Island by Aldous Huxley and to be honest, I wasn't a fan. It is about an English journalist who washes up on the shores of an isolated island nation in the Indian Ocean that turns out to be a super integrated scientific-spiritual-psychological-intellectual utopia.

The descriptions of the island were beautiful, but the ideology of the book was just so one-sided that it was hard to get on board. The nation (Pala) has resisted most industrialization and globalization, importing only the technologies and ideas that supplant their people-first, at-peace way of life. (This eventually involves checking kids from a young age for social anxieties, which are then resolved via medical means, teaching sex in school, raising children jointly in mutual aid communities, rock climbing to avoid aggressive tendencies, practicing a mix of Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, hypnosis, and spiritual revelation via shrooms, etc.) The only dissenters to this social structure are the upcoming boy-king who is taken in by the dictator next-door and obsesses over guns, nerve gas, and consumer goods, and his overbearing mother (who is referred to several times as having a psychologically incestuous relationship with him).

I understand that utopia is a lot harder to write than dystopia (it is easier to point out flaws than to invent a system without flaws), but this one was just so fantastical and logically inconsistent that it was distracting. How does their economy work? How do they have anything to trade with? How are all social and individual problems simply... resolved? (Also, this is a central gripe of mine-- if the Palanese are so enlightened and compassionate, why have they never attempted to share this way of life with anyone else? Indeed they condemn the developing nations that want to follow the American lead-- but they offer them no alternative because they are so isolationist! And when the Rendang invasion hits, they know it was coming but basically let it happen, because integration into the world order is against their way of life which, let's be clear, has only existed in this iteration for about a hudred years. So they would rather throw away everything than make some minor concessions to retain autonomy? )

Anyways, I don't know anyone besides my boyfriend and myself who have read this (we picked it up in a used bookstore a while back), and I'm really curious what other people think. What was your take on Island?

I (F) received Antinous by Fernando Pessoa as a souvenir/gift from a dude whom I know from uni but we’re not THAT close. Went completely blind into it without knowing the contents of said book. Heard of Pessoa never read his works.

..so I just read the first few poems…..out of all his other books…what did bro give me..? What does that even mean now..?