I enjoyed Embassytown by China Mieville, but I spent most of the second act wishing it was a book about Immer travel instead.

Then again, I guess there's plenty of books about interdimensional travel and not too many that explore the sociopolitical impact of language via aliens that have two voices but can't lie.

If it's my first time reading a book, I'll almost always get it from the library (especially now I work at an academic library with access to two huge interlibrary loan networks). If I can't find it at the library, or I've read it before and know I want to read it again, I'll buy it secondhand.

My goal for next year is the same as my goal for this year - read only books I already own. I did not succeed this year, but we've since inherited my grandfather-in-law's classics collection (with a focus on Henry James), which should be enough to keep me going in between all the contemporary genre lit on our shelves.

In my experience, the majority of personal development books could have been summarized as a blog post, even with the ones with some sort of valid backing. I tried a couple when I was younger and (even more) insecure, but I don't bother with them now.

A personal favourite is one that spent 50 pages building up to the author's magical secret career- and relationship-seeking lifehack: "if you don't want to do something, do it anyway." And then the next 150 pages was testimonials from Twitter and comments in the author's Facebook page.

Right now I'm trying to get through everything my wife and I own that I haven't read. Most of the time I just look at what's on the shelf, but I did add most of it to my tbr on Goodreads and Storygraph. I like that Storygraph will show you three random books from your to-read - it's pretty helpful when I have no idea at all what I want to read next.

Are you talking about chapters?

I enjoy reading good criticism, even of books I like. "Thomas Mann sucks because he didn't write the exciting adventure I would have preferred to read" isn't good criticism.

It's the "superfluous man" novel. Probably the most famous example is Eugene Onegin, but other well-known books are A Hero of Our Time and Diary of a Superfluous Man.

I'll give you the latter, I guess I mean just "learns". To be fair, there is an entire subgenre of Russian novels about young men who do nothing, don't change or grow at all, and then die.

Complexity can be seen in more than just the book's plot. Henry James has some very simple stories (The Ambassadors), but uses complex prose that elevates it above what it would be if anyone else had written the same story.

On the other hand, Hemingway uses fairly plain prose to write stories which are sometimes incredibly simple on the surface level (Big Two-Hearted River and Old Man and the Sea, for example) - and yet their meanings and the complexity of their characters are debated to this day. Would you say that everyone who studies those works is wrong, and you can simply dismiss them out of hand because not much happens at the story level?

Not all books have to focus on the plot. Mann wasn't trying to achieve the same things as Dostoyevsky; you might as well say Tolkien is lazier than Sanderson because we don't get a videogame tutorial chapter explaining the rules governing Gandalf's magic.

Castorp learns and grows throughout the book. On one level it's about that growth >!and it's futility!<; on another, the characters Castorp meets allow the reader to explore Europe in the years leading up to WW1, as well as Mann's changing opinions on Europe and his hindsight about the war and the zeitgeist that led to it. It's notable that he began the book in 1912 and slowly revised it over the next decade, as the war changed his own viewpoints on Germany and on Europe as a whole.

@CallMeIshmael

Oh, I could squeeze that sperm forever! #whalefacts 47/?

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Edgar Rice Burroughs probably isn't popular enough at your library to justify the resources and staff time for processing 42 books (especially without a dedicated cataloging department, which some libraries don't have these days), or the shelf space (and making room on the shelf for 42 more books in one spot is also quite the undertaking!). In a lot of countries you can get books pre-processed and added to the catalogue according to your library's requirements

If anyone else would like to avoid this, firstly don't donate books you don't want to part with in the first place, and secondly always try to talk to a selector or at least have a look at the donation policy or collection development/management policy.

Until Buss, most translations of Monte Cristo were anonymous (and a couple of named translators were actually only editing the first anonymous version).

Unless I'm misremembering Chani's name (I am talking about the Fremen girl to whom Jessica says "history will remember us as wives), this definitely happens in the first book - multiple times, but I'm thinking of a particular time when she asks what it was like coming from a planet with so much water.

Yes. I don't know how one could finish Dune and not know this, since it's basically stated outright when Paul and Chani have the same conversation he dreamt about earlier in the book.