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The Award-Winning Novelist Who’s Under Fire for Simply Depicting an Israeli: After reading R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story, I can now confirm that this controversy is even dumber than I suspected.
https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/rf-kuang-israeli-taipei-story-gaza-book-booktok.html
https://redd.it/1tijcb3
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Autobiography of Ben Franklin
I've been on a biography kick this year and this one is worth mentioning. It's interesting for a number of reasons, the first being that that it was written at three distinct points in his life and really has three distinct voices and narrative styles.
The first part, written in 1771 explicitly for his son to read is absolutely the most interesting and compelling. It covers his misadventures as a young adult and his struggles with his family who he seemed to think underestimated him at every turn. It's pretty interesting as it details the evolution of the printing and newspaper industry in the 18th century. It also gets into his love life which is pretty interesting too. He developes his own moral philosophy and gets involved with another printer who tries starting his own Christian sect, honestly fascinating.
The next voice, being written in 1780-81, seems quite a bit more circumspect and self assured. He talks about advertising contracts for the English army, financial concerns and a bit (really not enough) about the American revolution. At this point his voice seems thoroughly self aware, he is no longer willing to admit any mistakes or defects or character. He developes a system for perfecting his morality, and his only flaw is that he is disorganized. Certainly states to seem like an unreliable narrator in my opinion. This is the point in his life that others claim to be characterized by his whore mongering and general unseriousness. He doesn't hint at it at all.
The last voice, parts 3 and 4 in the book were written in 1788-89. He basically ceased being a character altogether in my opinion, this section attempts to use his lifetime as a textbook in civics and public administration. The narrative is completely absent. Others claim he's infected with syphilis at this point in his life. He never admits a single sexual act in the entire book, let alone with a prostitute, but the cognitive decline is evident.
He dies in 1790, book is published in 1793. Pretty interesting book in my opinion. Anyone else read this? Any other autobiographies has similar discrepancies in voice?
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2026 International Booker Prize Awarded to Taiwan Travelogue by 楊双子 and translated by Lin King
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-taiwan-travelogue-international-booker-prize-2026-winner
https://redd.it/1ti162u
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Sally Rooney to publish Hebrew translation of Intermezzo with BDS-compliant publisher
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/19/sally-rooney-intermezzo-hebrew-tranlsation
https://redd.it/1thyuiz
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Book Immersion
How you ever been so immersed in a book that it makes want to go to that particular destination describe in the book or crave whatever the character is eating. For me it happens with a variety of books that describe a scene so well.
Had this happened to anybody? What book or scene from a book made you feel like getting up going to that particular destination?
I read books that had lighthouses as part of the story line and it gave me the urge to go and see one.
https://redd.it/1thr181
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Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/media/future-of-truth-ai-quotes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.DmAU.xoeway4ZxxTr&smid=re-nytimes
https://redd.it/1tho8kb
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Barnes & Noble CEO backs selling AI-written books in stores
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/barnes-and-noble-james-daunt-ai-books-b2978925.html
https://redd.it/1theciq
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Could you spot an AI-written book? An author set up an experiment to find out.
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/488541/ai-books-publishing-experiment
https://redd.it/1tgumbd
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Fictional friendships that destroy themselves from the inside
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since finishing A Separate Peace, which I read a while back and haven’t been able to put out of my head.
What makes it so uncomfortable is that there’s no real villain in it. Gene isn’t a bad person and Phineas isn’t oblivious out of cruelty. What happens between them accumulates through misreading, through assumption, through the quiet stories each of them builds about the other without ever checking if any of it holds up. Gene reads rivalry into a friendship that Phineas seems to experience as entirely uncomplicated, and that gap between their two versions of the same relationship is where everything slowly goes wrong. Knowles never exaggerates any of it, which is exactly what makes it land so hard. The jealousy sits underneath the surface, shaping things invisibly, and by the time Gene understands his own feelings well enough to say something honest, the moment for saying it has already passed. The book made me think about how much of adolescence is just this: two people who care about each other deeply, each operating on a set of assumptions the other has never actually been shown.
I read William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf around the same time, which is much less known but stayed with me in a very similar way. It follows two boys whose friendship becomes a kind of shelter for both of them, though an uneven one. The dependency runs deeper on one side, the emotional stakes are higher for one of them, and neither quite sees the imbalance clearly until it has already done its damage. Maxwell writes with enormous restraint and the prose has this quality of observing everything from a slight distance, which somehow makes the feeling underneath it more intense rather than less. What I found most affecting about Lymie in particular was how genuine his need for connection was, and how completely invisible that need remained to the person he most needed to see it.
Both books kept pulling me back to the same question.
Which fictional friendship do you think might have survived if the characters had actually been able to say what they meant to each other?
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Question about The death of the author - Nnedi Okorafor
Every year I try to read the sci-fi books that get nominated for the Hugo awards, and this year this has been the first in my list. I was very excited, as this one has been finalist for several awards, but I have only finish it through sheer will and stubbornness.
It starts ok, but towards the middle the story feel aimless, I despised all the characters and they didn't make any sense to me, the love story feels empty and the story-within-a-story was terrible. But apart from this rant, I have an honest question. The main characters of the story are Americans of Nigerian origen, and I feel that maybe I couldn't understand them because I know nothing about Nigerian culture.
>!When Zelu gets the chance to use the exos and be able to walk again, almost her entire family is horrified. Not only the American family, but some of the African relatives are also against the idea. I cannot imagine how you can be against a device that may help a paraplegic walk again. I see no argument. And I don't see them in the book either, their relatives insist on how it is a terrible idea, but they never say why. It took me out of the book, I couldn't understand those people at all, they seemed mad to me. Is this related to any part of Nigerian culture that I don't know about?!<
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Appreciation post
I just got myself all 8 books of the vintage classics virginia woolf collection and they are so pretty I want to cry. I might not even enjoy a book or two (say, flush cause that'sa biography and I'm a very fiction-fantasy person so I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it), but OMG are they well made. Every book not only has a gorgeous cover (art by Aino-Maija Metsola) but also the flappy thingys that fold into the books, despite being paperbacks, with really pretty decorations on the endsheets. Every book has an ex libris page in the beginning, and beautifully printed illustrations and pictures. They're just so high quality and I really commend penguin for putting this sort of work into classics. Vintage really never ceases to make me happy. I also recently got Kafka's complete stories, complete novels and letters to milena and to have almost all the works of an author in compact books that MATCH is just so amazing to me. Similar spines, similar covers, same sizes. That's the sort of consistency I am actually willing to spend my money for. I'm from India and the indian versions of the woolf collection, although official, are very poorly made, with thin covers and no cover flaps or decorated endsheets. I got the uk copies and I am so so glad I did.
https://redd.it/1tgll0j
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Reading has become a chore lately, how do you deal with this?
So I have always liked reading, but lately I find it harder and harder to read. Like i would still do it pretty regularly, but it is not the feeling of being super interested in the story and making time to read it and see how it develops, in the last 2-3 years I felt like that for Clavell's asian saga books which are my all time favorites, and for the spraw thrilogy by William Gibson and Murakami's "What I talk about when I talk about running". I am currently reading the Aubrey-Maturin series and a few non-fiction books, but it just feels a bit like a chore, I just don't get super sucked into these stories to the point where I am excited to actually see where they go. The above books I read a few times audiobook and regular book formats in the past few years. I don't know where to go to now I just can't find a book that grabs me in the same way or just in general my interest has gone. I have tried reading some Michener books, the novel about Musashi, Lonesome Dove but none of them really grabbed me.
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Since publication, 'Sunrise on the Reaping' has sold more than 4.4 million World English copies—including print, e-books, and audiobooks—in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
https://www.scholastic.com/newsroom/all-news/press-release/scholastic-to-publish-trade-paperback-and-movie-tie-in-editions-.html
https://redd.it/1tgff51
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Ellen Burstyn loves the “For Dummies” series of books
From the New York Times Book Review:
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
When I first began reading, I read fiction. My favorite novel was “The Magic Mountain,” by Thomas Mann. Over the years I find that I am less interested in fiction and more interested in trying to learn about science and mathematics. I love the “For Dummies” series. I remember reading or hearing many years ago, maybe in high school, that the first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form. So, I was thrilled to learn there was such a book as “Thermodynamics for Dummies.” It was interesting reading, but I’m afraid I could not quote you anything from that book.
Full interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/books/review/ellen-burstyn-poetry-says-it-better.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
https://redd.it/1tgb4jz
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What is an opening that just made you close a book?
I’m curious as to what makes people stop reading immediately. What is a line or even a paragraph that made you “nope” a book to the point of not bothering?
I am personally turned off by character descriptions that come across as a list, the introduction of many names, or overly flowery language that isn’t a result of the time the book was written.
https://redd.it/1tg86jj
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Women’s Prize winner Rachel Clarke slams ‘empty and vacuous’ books that use AI: ‘How does that constitute art?’
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/ai-womens-prize-winner-b2962817.html
https://redd.it/1ticlm7
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What's the last book you read that was so bad that it made you angry?
I read The Rebel and the Final Blood War by K.A. Linde and I just hated everything about it! I don't know if the other two books in the series were this atrociously written and I somehow overlooked it, or if this was ghostwritten by a middle schooler. The author has no concept of sentence structure, and every other sentence is a partial/incomplete thing like "A woman who had delivered a death sentence with a candy bar."
This is an actual paragraph in the book:
"Reyna's eyes darted to her friends. Meghan and Jodie gave her an encouraging nod. Gabe winked. Tye smiled. They were all counting on her."
The ending was rushed and unsatisfying too. Spoiler: >!the villain of this whole trilogy gets de-vamped (turned back into a human) and just decides to stab himself to death immediately.!< This deus ex machina occurs on page 307 of the 320-page book.
What have you read recently that made you genuinely angry like this?
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Lady Into Fox by David Garnett: A Short Review
Once again, my local public library delivered. I had learned about this book through an article a couple of years back, and I thought I’d never be able to find it. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a translated copy of it in the library – and was an interesting book indeed.
Lady Into Fox is a 1922 novel (although its length would make it mostly a novella), by the British author David Garnett.
The quiet and idyllic life of Richard Tebrick in the English countryside, is suddenly interrupted when one day, his young wife Silvia, unexpectedly turns into a fox. From that point on, Richard tries to care for his wife and continue their lives as they were up to that point, although the Laws of Nature will quickly overcome his attempts at normality.
There are a lot of ideas cramped into such a short novel (less than 100 pages). The whole magical affair between Richard and Silvia, who, although at first still retains human characteristics despite her metamorphosis, starts to change even more, can be read through various different lens: as a commentary on the traditional, patriarchal family and the role of women in it, the relationship between the modern Man and the natural world, and the meaning of being “Human” more broadly.
The novel is pretty short as I said, and it’s in the public domain, so it can be easily found in a site like Project Gutenberg. If you like stuff like Aesop’s parables etc., you can treat this story as something similar, in a way. It’s quite easily digestible.
https://redd.it/1thzpco
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LitHub: A prize-winning story published in Granta was (very likely) written by AI
https://lithub.com/a-prize-winning-story-published-in-granta-was-very-likely-written-by-ai/
https://redd.it/1thxhxi
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Two Years Before The Mast is surprisingly good
At a friend's house recently I picked up "Two Years Before The Mast" for something to read. It was very enjoyable, interesting, much more readable than most 19th-century books I've encountered.
It's a 1840 memoir of a college kid who signed up as a seaman on a clipper ship to fix his eyesight (which is weird, but ...) Went around Cape Horn twice, once in mid-winter!
Told in a straightforward way, it gives a really good picture of the often unpleasant life aboard ships as well as life in California before the gold rush.
I can definitely recommend it. You might want to skim through the sailing-ship parts which get a bit technical about sails and lines and whatnot!
https://redd.it/1thpd0m
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Simple Questions: May 19, 2026
Welcome readers,
Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.
Thank you and enjoy!
https://redd.it/1thh3pi
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Books that made you think about who gets to decide what we’re allowed to know
The Name of the Rose takes a while to get into. The opening sections are dense and demand a certain patience, but somewhere along the way it becomes genuinely addictive, and by the end it’s hard to believe you struggled in the beginning.
On the surface it’s a murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey, and it works well as one. Brother William is essentially Sherlock Holmes in a monk’s habit, his novice Adso trailing behind him doing a very credible Watson impression. The monastery itself, its hierarchy, its secrets, its strange cast of inhabitants, is one of the most vividly realised settings I’ve come across in fiction. Even in the smallest interactions you get an immediate sense of what each character holds dear and where their limits lie.
But the mystery is almost secondary to what the book is actually doing, which is asking a much more uncomfortable question: can knowledge be gatekept? And should it be? The abbey’s library sits at the centre of everything, a place of carefully controlled access where certain texts are kept from those deemed unfit to read them. The people responsible for this aren’t monsters. They have a coherent logic, a genuine belief that some ideas are too dangerous for certain minds. Eco makes you sit with that logic long enough to understand it, even as the novel is quietly pulling it apart.
It feels less like medieval history and more like something recognisably contemporary, which is probably why it has stayed with me.
It also feels like a novel that couldn’t be more timely. At a moment when book bans are accelerating and the arguments for them sound remarkably familiar, the idea that someone always believes they’re protecting others by controlling what they read, and always believes they’re the right person to make that call, lands differently than it might have a decade ago.
Which books have made you think most seriously about who gets to decide what knowledge is accessible, and to whom?
https://redd.it/1th2cuo
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle blew me away
I developed aphantasia in my late teens and was devastated that I couldn’t read books anymore in the way I used to. I was always a kid who had her nose in a book as I had undiagnosed adhd and a very abusive home life. I used to get grounded for reading too much. I also have agoraphobia due to, well, reasons.
I didn’t read for years, I kept trying and nothing stuck and I would just get frustrated and give up and go back to watching tv or playing video games.
Well, holy shit. This book just struck me from almost the get go. The way she describes Constance hiding when the door is knocked at, the way she shrinks when people are walking around the house and looking into windows, I had to keep rereading those passages because I couldn’t believe how well I related to what she was writing. And then I read that Shirley Jackson herself had agoraphobia and it all made sense.
i asked my boyfriend to read it as well and he was just like, yeah. It‘s fine. He didn‘t relate to any of it like I did and I waffled at him for half an hour about what I found so moving and he said he hadn’t ever read a book that moved him like that. I mean, I’m 36 and the only other book I found that moved me like that was the Harry Potter one where Sirius Black dies and Harry was broken. He thought he had finally been rescued from his abusive life and it was ripped away from him
Anyway, just wanted to tell someone, I guess. I really liked this book.
https://redd.it/1tgvj49
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Did you ever fall in love with a book character? How did that go for you?
I remember my daughter crying over Great Expectations\- she was 11 at the time.
(I remember her age, because I remember telling that later to a new school in small town Canada where we rocked up, who put her randomly in an ESL class because her name wasn't white- anyway that's a different story)
I was like - why are you crying? And she sobbed that she loved Pip and why was there no-one like him, and she wanted to marry Pip.
I loved Bilbo Baggins- I didn't want to marry him - he's obviously not marriage material, but I loved him very much and wanted desperately no harm to come him.
I also "fell in love" with Hamlet when "doing Shakespeare" at high school. I was shocked by his death, I hated how useless Ophelia was (yes, that was me as a teenager), and I wished so much I could be at that bloody court in Denmark and save him. I also loved Horatio, but not the same way I loved Hamlet.
I loved Emma from Jane Austen, and also Anne from Persuasion, and I would have married either of them in a heartbeat, if I could. I still would. I never really got that much into Elizabeth Bennet- she always seemed rather exhausting- all that witty banter! And running around in fresh air! But I definitely had moments where I aspired to be like her- and indeed, where I secretly thought I was like her. Lol.
I loved David, the biblical narrator in "God Knows", by Jospeh Heller. So funny, so gorgeous, so smart. I learned so much from him too.
Obviously I loved Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, and I just wanted to reach out into his world and be with him. I would have gladly traded places with Kurt.
Flaubert said he was in love with poor Emma Bovary. I read Madame Bovary, and didn't quite get the appeal, myself, but it might have been the translation.
Who are your literary creations you fell in love with? And what was it like?
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International Booker Prize tomorrow
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/17/what-should-win-this-years-international-booker
https://redd.it/1tgmjuw
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Which of Ahabs legs was taken by Moby Dick?
Before I go into more detail, try to picture the peg legged Captain Ahab in your head. Which of his legs is made of wood? His left or his right? Please make a guess.
The book has a whole chapter about his leg, and the leg is mentioned again and again. Ahabs bitterness seems to stem from this missing limb. But throughout the whole book Melville never bothers to mention which leg is actually missing. He never tells us. At least to some extent our picture of Ahab is just fantasy, because we picture him with a wooden leg without knowing which leg should be made of wood.
I wonder if I could make an educated guess, if I knew more about whaling. Maybe based on the way a whaler stands while throwing the harpoon there is a way to deduct which leg is most likely missing.
I recently found a book about art about Moby Dick. I have only flicked through the pages and looked at the paintings, and it seems most artists draw Ahab with his right leg missing. But there are examples of Ahab with a missing left leg, too.
I am fascinated that we don't get to know this basic detail about a crucial part of the story. I guess it's not really important which leg is missing. It won't change the story in any way. But it's a whole book about how angry a man became after losing a leg and we never learn which leg.
https://redd.it/1tgij0b
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What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: May 18, 2026
Hi everyone!
What are you reading? What have you recently finished reading? What do you think of it? We want to know!
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'Read This To Look Cool' Review: A fantastic humorous essay collection
It's a debut essay collection from Maeve Dunigan: a satirist with New Yorker and McSweeney's writing. I adored it so much!
The book is collection focused on anxieties, spite, and generally existing. It's closest to Little Weirds by Jenny Slate and I Might Regret This by Abbi Jacobson.
There's a fantastic essay on participating in a unspoken competition with all other women that I've had rattling amid my noggin since reading it.
"You see, I wholeheartedly consider myself to be in an ongoing, ruthless competition with every woman on earth, and I’m going to win. I’m going to be the Best Woman."
In the piece, Dunigan feels like she's fighting all women in existence for opportunities. I've often felt in competition with others, like when a similarly aged peer gets a high paying promotion well-before I do. I wouldn't openly admit such a feeling in real life. Being unpromptedly adversarial feels taboo, making Dunigan's essay all the more cathartic to read.
Dunigan's bristles with the world feel like she's learning to come into her own emotions. It's almost like a coming of age story told through essays.
Has anyone else read it?
https://redd.it/1tg87fp
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‘Ghost Nation' recounts Taiwanese history from contemporary perspective
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6295901
https://redd.it/1tg8ek5
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What’s the weirdest “small decision” in a novel that completely destroys someone’s life?
I read Strangers on a Train years ago and I still think about how it all hinges on one extraordinarily mundane thing: Guy doesn’t just get up and walk away.
Bruno is obviously unhinged from the moment he opens his mouth. He’s the kind of person who talks too much, too fast, too personally, to someone he’s only just met on a train. Any reasonable person would find an excuse to leave. Guy doesn’t. He stays, he listens, he even engages, and Highsmith never quite lets you pin down why. Is it politeness? Morbid curiosity? Some half-buried part of him that doesn’t find the idea entirely repellent? The novel refuses to answer, which is honestly what makes it so uncomfortable to read.
Guy isn’t stupid or reckless, which is the whole point. He’s passive. He drifts into catastrophe the way you drift into a bad habit, through small moments of not-quite-saying-no. Bruno doesn’t dramatically overpower him from the start. He just keeps showing up, and Guy keeps not slamming the door, and by the time the situation is irretrievable, Highsmith has made her argument almost without you noticing: complicity doesn’t tend to arrive with a bang, it just quietly accumulates.
It got me thinking about how many novels are built around this same idea, where nothing starts with a grand dramatic choice but with one small moment of not saying no when you should have. Accepting an invitation, replying to a letter, staying in a conversation five minutes too long.
What’s your favourite example of a small decision that ends up unravelling everything?
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