Within regular literature, Emile Zola and Honore de Balzac set out to write epic cycles exploring through every section of French society. Such can also describe the project James Joyce set out on with Ulysses. In fantasy too I've read enough books that really set out to put their alternate realities on the page.

> Or try writing about our world and capture all of its intricacies. Wouldn't be easy, right?

When I think about fantasy books that capture all the intricacies of their world, I don't think about The Lord of the Rings. I would say the saga really skimmed across the surface of the world. I never came away with a particularly meaningful image of what Gondor and Rohan are like as societies, what cultural quirks they have.

When I was reading it I felt the language was too modern for the story it was telling. The narration, not the dialogue. "Yep, this is a book of the twentieth century." They say that his writing gets more and more antiquated as the story goes on, but I can't say I perceived any of that.

I read Truman by David McCullough around the same time. It was an odd contrast, seeing the other path in life a Missouri farm boy could take.

I believe Madame Bovary and Northanger Abbey are said to be critical of the effects of being too fond of novels.

Want to develop your character? Read some Russian literature lmao

The Mirror of the Sea is Joseph Conrad's major nonfiction work, in which he says everything he has to say about what it means to be a sailor and struggle with the wind and waves, visiting adventurous ports.

I really want to read A Russian Journal, his recollection of visiting the Soviet Union. In his fiction, I'm curious to see if The Wayward Bus is good.

Look for The Planiverse. I was very happy to see it ask what it would mean for flatlanders to have biology and gravity and all that.

I said “only have a sliver of the,” not “only have a small portion of the shelves be dedicated to the”

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouAllMeetInACell

> I’d guess only 20 or 30% of the store is new releases.

80% of a regular-sized store is maybe a small percentage of the size of the building you'd need to gather up every book in the language that's been through multiple print runs. You need a warehouse.

I'm not talking about the quality of individual books. I'm talking about the selection. Your Barnes and Noble will only have a sliver of the books that have "been through a few printings," while carrying a much higher percentage of the books that have recently been released.

A regular bookstore's selection of books published more than a few years ago will range from okay to abysmal.

It's the likelihood of finding books that no one in the world has read or even thought about in the past 20 years. An intimate feeling, between the author and me. "I'm the only one who knows who you are."

> I guess my observation is that given the number of people and serious writers who disagree with you, you might be lacking the self awareness to measure the difference between "I don't like" and "is bad".

As with Philip K. Dick's work, it seems very common to be highly critical of Foundation's technical quality.

> generation were the first to reflect on this post war political climate where technology was being seeing as the driving force of societal development and prosperity so became key milestone works within the genre.

I would say this is highly inaccurate, given that the same could be said of Verne and Wells.

Before Lovecraft, there were Algernon Blackwood and Robert Chambers, of King in Yellow fame.

I'm moving between continents next month. It's definitely not great for the luggage situation that I bought so many books over the last few years.

It struck me as a markedly inferior version of what China Mieville would write given the same basic premise, though I haven't gotten far into his book Kraken yet.

There are a lot of incomplete history book trilogies that have been started in the past 20 years. I'm waiting on part 2 of Rick Atkinson's American Revolution trilogy, which should get past the Battle of Saratoga.

What kind of practical things?

I don't like reading about heretics being killed in pre-Reformation Europe very much.

Yes, as happened with a quite a few novel series that are in total shorter than War and Peace. And also as one volume, with a silly-looking cover.

Across the past sixty or so years, there have been quite a many fantasy series that think harder about how magic would change human societies. I've heard particular buzz about the Commonweal books by Graydon Saunders.