I never finished the series, but it was one of my favourites when I was a teen. My one gripe was that there were three different Earths - I wanted more of the fantasy realms, especially >!the cat dimension!<

> It's insane what the groomer panic has led to

Do you remember a couple years ago when right-wing pundits tried to tell us that furries were replacing school bathrooms with litterboxes? 😂

Historically, not as obsessed with status, certainly not as obsessed as Gatsby was. Those who have and flaunt it are (or, were) seen as a bit foolish. "Tall poppy syndrome" means that people will be cut down to size if they don't stay humble, although that's been changing since the 2010s.

Plus NZ didn't really have anything quite as extravagant as the Jazz Age was in the US.

I'm a Kiwi and to me it's very American. Especially for something set in the 20s. There's no way you could misread Gatsby as a Kiwi

All libraries involve a selection process, since no library can fit every book ever published. That's not a controversial idea. What is controversial is taking books about puberty out of high schools "because they're providing porn to kids", and taking books that acknowledge non-straight people exist at all out of elementary schools "because they're grooming kids". Neither of those justifications are true; nobody was providing 5-year-olds with PornHub membership or The Illustrated Marquis De Sade.

Shutting down this particular lending program doesn't mean the end of everything else the Internet Archive does, including the Wayback Machine and the provision of public-domain and CC works. So all the people acting like the Internet Archive is about to be dismantled and their servers thrown into the ocean are overreacting a little.

Most people who love both The Secret History and The Goldfinch agree with you about Little Friend, for what it's worth. I can see why people call Goldfinch meandering, but if you don't mind slow pacing or characters doing things you wouldn't (and don't have a problem with the idea of digressions about art and antiques similar to TSH's digressions about the classics) I don't think you'll have too much to worry about.

The fine is incredible, but reportedly something IA can weather.

Depends. I try to figure things out from context, and if I can't I'll only look it up if they seem important to understanding the text correctly. If I'm reading a book about East Germany I need to know what the Staatssicherheitrat is, but not if I'm reading a book about American hippies where a character says "you're such a nark, you belong in the CIA or the KGB or the Stasi "

I thought the Jobs' were always open about how they didn't allow their kids to use smartphones or tablets until they were teenagers.

Weird, it doesn't work with Firefox's reader mode. The two always seemed identical to me but I guess Safari's strips out more extra code

I'd be interested in an international study on this, since the article is implying it's an international issue and yet says a big part of the problem is the American "SAT-passing factory" approach to education.

Learning to skip subvocalisation is a big part of most speed reading strategies, but it's worth noting that speed reading (not to be confused with just reading fast) is also usually are correlated with lower comprehension (not necessarily bad comprehension - just lower, in the same individual).

It's okay, I appreciate the spirit of your comment. It's a bit of a sore spot for me having been the target of "attack helicopter" crap, so that's colouring my reaction.

Old time Reagan voter? I'm joking but this person's political identity would be obvious even without the catchphrase

I agree with your point but please remember that saying shit like

> that self-identifies as a goldfish

Plays right into their dehumanization of trans and non-binary people. Absolutely nobody is claiming their gender is "goldfish", not even goldfish furries.

I just want to know what "inonnence" is

Mein Kampf is well beyond the reading level of the vast majority of elementary school kids (and those few who could read it probably aren't in a normal elementary school). Plenty of universities (and even some high schools) carry it for their history program though.

Looking at your description via your profile (sorry, but I was too curious)... Yeah, that's like saying "an orphan discovers he is a wizard" spoils the plot of Harry Potter.

I liked her narration but all the 'umm's and 'ahhhs' and half-yawns got to me lol. Her Richard was much more bored with everything than my reading of him.

There are already at least dozens of services that do that with business and self-help books (e.g blinkist)

I actually read about a study on reading where eye-tracking technology showed that people reading news and social media online tended to read the first sentence of a paragraph and then skip to the last one, while readers of print books and print newspapers did that significantly less often. Correlation != causation, but it's interesting.

>Lest we forget that Fogg marries an Indian woman in the original book, anyway!

Exactly! The changes made in the adaptation ensure that it keeps the same spirit, and relationship to today's social mores, as Jules Verne's original had in its own time.

Try the library. If your parents won't take you, your library probably has an ebook app you can use (in the English-speaking world, the most popular ones are Libby/Overdrive, Hoopla, and BorrowBox/Bolinda).