Hello all!

This is my first post on here! And I’ve been going down a deep rabbit hole of my own bachelors degree. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. And although I’ve considered myself well read, I’ve realized now I’m only well read in English literature and not much else, which isn’t truly being well read.

What do you think of the western canon and what do you think is missing?

Sincerely,
A woman trying to better understand the world

“There is therefore only one categorical imperative, and that is this: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  This moral law, formulated by Kant in  \Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals\  and then in *  Critique of Practical Reason *, is vigorously rejected by Maurice Barrès in the first volume of *The Novel of National Energy*,  \The Uprooted** \. For him, the teaching of German philosophy contributes to detaching French youth from their roots.**

Maurice Barrès's \The Uprooted**  , published in 1897, describes the trials and tribulations of a group of young men from Lorraine. Influenced by Monsieur Bouteiller, a Kantian and Gambetta-inspired professor, they go to Paris to try to achieve a cosmopolitan destiny. The morality preached by the charismatic teacher profoundly affects them. In attempting to access the universal, the students detach themselves from their regional ties, their deep connection to the land, and a certain particularism. This "elevation" will, for many, turn into a fall, a perdition. Arriving in the capital, the poorest of the Lorrainers will find not glory, but only isolation and vice.

Bouteiller makes Kantian morality a rule of life. Convinced of the soundness of his teaching, he doesn't for a moment consider the corrupting nature of this law.  "Mr. Bouteiller establishes his dominance by deforming the souls of Lorraine, and at the same time prepares him for a broader role for which they are eager and capable."  In Barrès's eyes, Bouteiller's relationship with the moral law has a religious character. The intrinsic value of the categorical imperative cannot be questioned.  "In short, it would be absurd to suppose that a Bouteiller, who has taken Kant as his starting point and who now no more verifies him than a believer verifies revealed truth [...] can linger to weigh the consequences of his teaching and the risks of leading astray a dozen young people."

A disembodied morality

For Barrès, the categorical imperative is a morality of abstraction, a disembodied morality. As Péguy says in  Victor-Marie Comte Hugo: "Kantianism has clean hands, but it has no hands ." What disqualifies Kantian morality is that it does not take into account the existence of the flesh. The categorical imperative does not encompass the being in its totality. It is valid for a pure spirit but does not integrate bodily life, the specificity of the moment, or the urgency of the given context. It is an insurmountable horizon of morality. A law for gods, not for men.

But Kant is aware of this.  “In fact, it is absolutely impossible to ascertain with complete certainty through experience a single instance where the maxim of an otherwise duty-bound action rested purely and simply on moral principles and on the representation of duty.”  In Kant’s view, the moral character of an action does not reside in the action itself, but rather in the representation of duty that determines it.  “[…] when it comes to moral value, what matters is not the actions that are seen, but the inner, unseen principles of those actions.”

Kantian morality is the opposite of pragmatism. An action is only in accordance with duty if it is motivated by a "good will." This will can only be assessed a priori, by having access to the motives. However, this invisible dimension of morality, subjective and sometimes unconscious, cannot be objectively identified. Kant thus establishes the foundations of a morality that is not applicable in reality. Absolute disinterestedness, the condition of possibility for the moral act, is inaccessible to human beings, precisely because humans are not pure spirits, because they possess a living body that is situated in time and place. Human existence is necessarily embodied. Kantian law never takes into account this inevitability of embodiment. In addition to being ill-suited, it is sterile.

The morality of rootedness

But let's return to Barrès. His critique of the categorical imperative involves denouncing the reign of subjectivity. For the mature Barrès (the one who succeeded the Barrès of *The  Cult of the Self\* ), an incandescent nationalist, the morality of action is never fulfilled as well as when it is placed at the service of the nation. Individual morality is secondary to destiny and "national consciousness."

“After their ambitions were revealed to them under the guise of duties, none of these young people wanted to remain in their native land, and they greeted invitations to choose a corporate environment with almost equal disdain. […] They wanted to be individuals.”  Barrès adopts a holistic perspective (the primacy of the whole over its parts). However, Kantian morality, while possessing universal views, finds its foundation in pure reason, that is, at the heart of human subjectivity. For Kant, what should guide my actions is the imperative revealed to me by my conscience. In Barrès’s view, morality does not stem from pure subjectivity but from the will to fulfill a shared destiny. The only valid morality is that of the land and the homeland. In this, Barrès clearly thematizes a morality of rootedness.

In  \The Uprooted* , Barrès attacks the government in power. Through the voice of one of his characters, he asserts:  “Always act in such a way that you can will that your action should serve as a universal rule. Act according to what is beneficial to society… I should have handed over Mouchefrin… I recognized that society, in its dealings with Racadot and Mouchefrin, had not behaved according to the Kantian principle… If the individual is to serve the community, the community must serve the individual.”  True morality, therefore, only has meaning if it is all-encompassing and serves the national community. If Racadot and Mouchefrin committed a moral failing by murdering Madame Aravian, it is this logic of uprooting that led to their downfall. If the two characters had resisted their teacher's injunction and remained in Lorraine, their fate would have been entirely different.  “Following all the ceremonies of this imposing funeral, I was led to think that if one wanted to transform humanity and, for example, make citizens of the universe, men of pure reason, out of little Lorrainers, out of children of tradition, such an operation involved risks. […] Racadot and Mouchefrin are our ransom, the price of our improvement. I hate their crime, but I still consider them, in relation to myself, as sacrifices.”*

Kant's critique is explicit in this passage. By yielding to the temptation of both the universal and the individual, the group from Lorraine lost several of its members. The purity of Kantian law caused the weakest among them to lose all sense of direction. Only the wealthy survived. The dwarf Mouchefrin and the bull Racadot were dependent on the land they left behind. For Barrès, moral life is inseparable from this immanent consciousness. The soul is truly itself only when rooted. To abandon one's land is to lose a part of oneself. Kant wanted them to forget. They remembered, but too late  .

You can find the original article in french here.

So, I recently finished Crônica dos Bons Malandros by Mario Zambujal, and I realized that this book would not work at all in any other language than Portuguese.

For people who don't know this book, it's basically a crime/heist book about a group of criminals planning to rob valuable jewels from a museum in Lisbon, with the chapters in between being about the criminals' pasts and how they all ended up meeting each other. It's not the most complex story, but it's a ton of fun to read, and I feel a lot of it comes down to the prose.

The book is written with a lot of local slang that wouldn't really work in any language other than Portuguese. The fun of the book is in reading the narrator talk about the misadventures the characters live through (like seriously, Zambujal could have written his grocery list and it still would be an entertaining list).

Are there other examples of this you can remember?

I finished the book today, and honestly, I don't know how to feel about it. I really admired Stoner's ability to stay calm and let things happen around him, and no matter how horrible the situation was, he still could find some strength to go to the university and to live life. I liked that he didn't follow the path he didn't like and chose literature because he fell in love with it. I loved how he deeply cared about her daughter and how he took care of her whilst dealing with her horrible wife. On the other hand, the book was kind of depressing as hell. It felt like Stoner did everything he could but also sort of didn't? he barely held his life together, could never escape the toxic relationship, and lost control of her daughter, and most of all, he gave up on Katherine Driscoll, the woman he loved so deeply. He let things happen that weren't beyond his control. It felt like he didn't even fight for what he thought was right, or he didn't fight enough. I dont know.

He died and he won't be remembered and thats fine, his life wasn't full of groundbreaking events as well and that's real, people mostly live those kind of lives and not everyone is destined to be a great hero of their time but still, I feel conflicted about the book. I had admiration towards Stoner, and on the other hand, it made me rethink all my life decisions and question my current stage of life, whether I'm doing enough to live a better life than Stoner did.

So, what's your experience with the book? maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I'm not. I mean its lots of things I felt after finishing thr book and it's for me a sign of a really good book but still I had the feeling I didn't fully understand what John Williams was trying to conceive.

would be great to hear your perspectives on the book.

This observation seems to be fair.  I have read some of the literature in this genre (i.e. climate fiction) - e.g. Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, Stephen Markley, Amitava Ghosh, etc. In general, today's best-seller lists do seem to be dominated by inward/introspective stories/characters set in various genres with the most popular being romance, fantasy, crime, etc. Climate change doesn't easily lend itself to such writing because of the collective action aspect which is tough to write about. Folks are trying, though.

So for any fantasy fans out there, I'm also a fantasy fan. My pfp is from a fantasy manga so this question is not meant as an offence or looking down on.

Lately I've been reading a lot of classic literature and a question keeps popping in my mind, what is fantasy's excellence? What is that which fantasy appeals to that to look down on is wrong?

Real literature-"Real" here means taking place in the everyday-seems to be capable of keeping one just as engaged in a story and some do it better than some fantasies do. Doestoevsky keeps me engaged in seeing a man about to commit murder and the consequences that follow without any fantastical threat.

I also can't help but feel violent fantasy can be distracting in the sense the stakes can be so big compared to Real where something as little as murder is a big deal.

The question has be nagging at me for months now. I'm not bothered that fantasy is seen as childish. I really don't care but the question is important to me so I can know if I can look at a fantasy story and know I'm not missing much when I ignore it or if someone looks down on it and attacks with this same question "why read this when ordinary settings can tell this? I'm missing nothing by not indulging in imaginative indulgence".

I decided to read Of Mice and Men for the first time (been on a classic literature kick for a while). The twist was already known to me, but I wasn't expecting to hate Lenny as much as I did.

This man had zero remorse for his actions, even for the ones that he remembered. All Lenny could ever think of was how his murder affected him, not the people or animals he killed or their surviving family members. It was all "George isn't going to let me tend to the rabbits if he finds out" but not a word about "I took this woman's life because I broke her neck in a fit of rage. I'm sorry and I must take responsibility." And yes, I understand that he has an emotional or mental illness and has the mind of a little kid but after he's taken the life of even one human being that doesn't matter to me anymore. At the very least, he needed to be put away.

And George should have been in prison right next to him, since he was acting like Lenny's guardian. I really don't care that Lenny was his best friend since childhood when that childhood friend is breaking people's necks. After the FIRST "rabbit", he should have turned Lenny in. Instead, he helped Lenny to run away until the problems became too much and he had to put him out to pasture. Did George even attempt to teach Lenny empathy or self-control in all the years that they were traveling together? He was a terrible guardian and an even worse friend.

Those of us with small children or pets, when we play with them we understand that they're smaller and weaker than us. We don't want to hurt them so we play and deal with them more gently than we would someone our own size. That's a concept that even animals understand. Lenny has no excuse.

Of Mice and Men was a great story, but I feel nothing but contempt for George and Lenny.

Edith is a really difficult character obviously and many readers despise her and lump her in with character’s like Cathy from EoE. I think she is very clearly much more of a victim than Cathy ever was and while she does very evidently have mental health issues she is not, I believe, a sociopath. I think a novel of her life would honestly be somewhat riveting.

Spoilers for those who have not read:

Her early life is obviously destructive in the same way so many women of the times were, she’s essentially raped on her honeymoon, her husband cheats on her and pretty quickly gives up on showing love to her (she is not innocent here, obviously she does horrible things but you get the point).

Anyway, I just finished the book and loved it and while I’m not saying I want a James version of “Edith” it is very interesting to think about the events of the book from her perspective

I've been thinking recently about how digital life is depicted in contemporary art, particularly books, film and TV. I rarely come across a writer who's really able to land either the psychological feeling or the actual sensory experience of navigating social media, doomscrolling, or even just operating an iPhone, despite how much of modern existence is made up by these moments. Often, I find these descriptions are clunky, overexplained, or rely on ironic distance and clumsily inserted internet slang that doesn't always age well. There always seems to be a slight incongruency to them that I find pulls you from the page, and maybe that’s why they're often omitted entirely.

Similar to how, in film and TV, we haven't seemed to move far past the approach of flashing blue text bubbles up on screen when a character reads a text or clumsily green-screening in a faux-Instagram style interface with massive font size that the camera hovers over awkwardly while the protagonist scrolls. (Pretty egregious example of this recently in The Devil Wears Prada 2)

All that being said, and hoping it makes sense, I'm wondering if anyone has examples of writers who they think have succeeded in describing digital experience well? Especially now as the “iPhone/social media book” is becoming so much more common.  Why/How? Is there a compelling way to describe someone reading a post on twitter or flicking through reels? Is it avoided? Also open to any bad examples too. 

As far as exceptions to the rule, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte stands out – did a nice job imo of both accurately mimicking actual digital text environments and also just conjuring the claustrophobic paranoia of social media discourse through the mindsets of his characters. Almost writing from inside the internet.

I also think Sally Rooney managed well in Intermezzo. One reviewer put it like this:

"Rooney’s descriptions of mobile phones, for example, are not sublimated into dull investigations of postmodern communication, but serve simply as the most realistic, intimate descriptions of what it’s actually like to use an iPhone in all of contemporary literature. The way light seems to gather around a screen on a dark evening; the heat of a freshly charged mobile held up to your ear; wondering whether it’s medically possible to hear your lover’s heartbeat on the other end of a phone call."

Have heard No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and Transcription by Ben Lerner offered up as examples too, though I’ve never read them myself. 

Also, not a book, but Everything Everywhere All At Once obviously nails the freneticism of online life by way of the multiverse metaphor - haven't come across a better attempt since.

Keen to hear any critical thoughts on this topic:)

Hey guys, just finished this book and adored it, felt a a lot reading through the book but I have some questions about the ending. Namely the last few pages where Yedigei is scared off by the rockets and then the book cuts to his two daughters returning home. I can see the parallel between Yedigei and the vixen from the books beginning but I don't understand why the book cuts from him running away to his two daughters (who are barely brought up during the story). Whats going on? Did yedigei get killed by the rockets or something.

I also don't really get how the sci fi story connects with the story of the Sazorek. Earlier on in the book, there's a line talking about how Yedigei's story and the story of the parity cosmonaut will become closely interlinked but this just... never happens? (unless its implied with the rocket launch but idk).

I'm also struggling to figure out who Cholpon-Ata, the person credited with the blurb about the Sary Ozeki desert and the trains that is brought up throughout the book. I googled it and while Google ai told me it's some central asian saint, everywhere else on google just told me its some small city in Kyrgzstan. Does this have some sort of deeper meaning or am I looking into it too much?

Thank you for any help in understanding this book.

There are certain journalistic pieces that rise to the level of literature and never lose their power. This is one of those. It is one of the best written responses to the Holocaust that I have read. Gellhorn was an outstanding writer and she was reporting on the liberation of Dachau immediately after it happened. She is able to capture so many concrete details that would have been lost in the fog of recollection had she waited to publish. The fact that this piece appeared in a popular American magazine, Collier's, in June 1945, only a month after the Nazis surrendered, is incredible to me.

This account also benefits by interviewing several survivors about the horrifying medical experiments they witnessed or were forced to participate in, rather than just rely on a single testimony.

This should be required reading. I took a graduate level seminar on Holocaust literature and theory but never heard of Gellhorn's reportage until years later, on my own. If you're interested in the Holocaust and haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and check it out now. But brace yourself for some very dark revelations.

"If ever again we tolerate such cruelty, we have no right to peace."

I have a question if anyone else feels the same.

I have always loved reading, and I read a lot. But during the last year I have started to notice something that is making reading less enjoyable.

It feels like no matter what book I read, someone thinks I shouldn not be reading it.

If the author is Mormon, someone has a problem with that, if the author is a muslim som other have a problem. If the author is against LGBT people, people criticize the book. If the author supports LGBT people, someone else has a problem with it. If the book is violent, people say it should never have been published. If it has the "wrong" kind of romance, people complain about that too. If the author has certain political opinions, people say you shouldn not support them with reading ther books. Sometimes people even complain that the language is too difficult so it shud not be read before it is made more simple.

I just finished The Snow Society, which is a biography. Even then, a woman on the bus told me I shouldn not read it because one of the survivors was accused during the MeToo movement or somthing. So everything is a problem.

I dont live in the US, I live in Europe, but I still feel like there is always someone who thinks the book I am reading is wrong for one reason or another. People at wook, in class or in other places

Does anyone else experience this? Do you ever feel like no matter what you read, someone will criticize you for it?

I've just finished Saramago's Blindness.

I was very excited to read it. The concept sounded very interesting, and I'm into darker, bleak, philosophical, and psychologically deeper books. For context, I'm a fan of Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, and Peter Watts.

To be honest, the concept was the only thing I really liked about the book.

The things that annoyed me:

SPOILERS!

• The unusual punctuation. I'd read about Saramago's unconventional punctuation beforehand. I got used to it pretty quickly, but personally I don't think it added anything to the experience. I'm a pretty cynical person, so I can only see it as a cheap marketing gimmick.
• The narration and writing style. I didn't find it particularly artistic or sophisticated. Many times it felt like listening to an absent-minded old man telling an anecdote. I think it would have been much more interesting if the doctor's wife—the only person who could still see—had been the narrator.
• The unrelatable characters. The characters don't have distinct personalities or deeper motivations, and the occasional pseudo-philosophical rambling doesn't help. The book also mentions that names are useless for blind people, but that doesn't make any sense to me.

The unrealistic and illogical plot:

• The soldiers guarding the quarantine immediately receive orders to shoot anyone who approaches. This could have been made more believable with a small setup—for example, if some blind people had revolted or soldiers had accidentally become infected.
• What was the point of stealing valuables inside a sealed quarantine?
• Why is there almost no real resistance from either the men or the women when they're told they'll only receive food if the women submit to being raped by the gang members?
• Before all of this, there's a scene where several characters have consensual sex with random people. The doctor, whose wife can still see, and the girl with the dark glasses sleeping with the half-blind old man? Come on. Even if we ignore how unrealistic it is, what is the point? What is the novel trying to say with that scene?

And then, in the end, the blindness magically disappears.

Yes, I understand that the blindness is an allegory. But it's so vague. An allegory for what? Our blindness to our own morality? How fragile civilization and social order are? I know readers are often expected to interpret symbolism for themselves, but to me that feels like a weak excuse. I think the novel could have explored its ideas with much more depth.

I'm probably overly critical, but once I notice plot holes, I can't simply ignore them.

This could have been such an atmospheric, bleak, introspective, and thought-provoking book, but it ended up being a huge disappointment.

cant help but think about how George Orwell worried that a shrinking vocabulary would eventually produce a shrinking range of thought. It is difficult to think a nuanced thought with a blunt language.

You see this literally in 1984 with Newspeak. The goal wasn't just to restrict speech, it was to restrict what was thinkable. No word for a concept makes that concept harder to hold onto.

Orwell made the same point without the fiction in "Politics and the English Language." Vague writing isn't just bad style, it's a sign of vague thinking, and it produces more of it. The two feed each other.

Just finished listening to Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. Really liked it. It was my first long Indian fictional read... or listen 😅. I'm honestly not much of a reader, I mostly consume books as audiobooks.

What I enjoyed the most was how well the characters were written. By the end I was genuinely invested in quite a few of them. Paresh and Anandamayi were probably my favorites.

Funny enough, both the characters whose names start with "H" somehow managed to annoy me throughout the book 😂.

The only thing I wasn't completely satisfied with was the ending. It felt a bit abrupt to me. Maybe it's because I just wanted to spend a little more time with these characters before it ended.

Curious what everyone else thinks. Did you like the ending, or was it just me? Also, if you have any recommendations for Indian fiction with memorable characters, I'd love to hear them. Doesn't have to be from the same time period. I don't read a lot, but I do listen to audiobooks quite regularly.

With the movie coming out imminently, I am reminded of a book I read last year that I really enjoyed: Eyvind Johnson's Return to Ithaca (1946).

I read this book as a part of a quest to read a representative novel by every Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. Eyvind Johnson was a controversial Nobel winner back in the 1970s, but this was one of my favorite books from that quest.

This book takes the original poem (which I love) and retells it in the form of a complex and psychological modernist novel. It depicts a profoundly unhappy Odysseus, a man who holds deep guilt over his actions in the Trojan War and the adventures of his voyage (which he exaggerates in the retelling from more mundane disasters to the myths we know today), and a man who after two decades away doesn't particularly want to go home. It also gives Penelope and Telemachus roughly equal weight in the story. It's certainly not a retelling that focuses on the adventures of Odysseus, rather it's a retelling that focuses on the homecoming itself (which the original poem does as well, I think more than many people who haven't read it realize).

If you get the chance and you like the Odyssey (and you like modernism), I would highly recommend. Unfortunately it's out of print, and I had some trouble getting my hands on it. Had to order it through interlibrary loan. Worth it, though!

I don’t think I’ve seen this in any other culture’s writings. Protagonists in LatAm fiction seem to be poets, novelists, etc.

It’s known that you write what you know, but you’d think that’s all LatAm knows or something, at least prior to 2000 or so.

Any insight into why this is?

I moved to Los Angeles over three years ago, after graduating with my literature degree in the Southeastern US. A year and a half ago, I moved out abruptly and found a cute, charming little studio in Hollywood. I toured it and fell in love: a 1920s early Hollywood hotel with built-in bookshelves and original penny tile in the bathroom, halfway up a steep hill.

A few days later, when I signed the lease and began my move, I met with my new building manager: a kind older gentleman with a motorcycle and so much knowledge about the history of my new neighborhood.

Before he left, on the upper right-hand corner of my copy of the lease, he wrote down two books I had been assigned in college but had never read:

1. Day of the Locust
2. Miss Lonelyhearts

I recognized these as books by Nathanael West, books I'd had to SparkNote in order to prioritize my required reading on Joyce's Ulysses.

I asked why he had written those titles down.

"He lived here," he replied.

"In the building?" I asked.

"No, well yes, but in here."

I kicked myself for not giving that assignment my attention.

During my move, I found the assigned reading from college, and set it atop what once was Mr. West's bookshelf. Over the next few days, I read both stories and felt so much more connected to the 325-square-foot room I now inhabited.

According to neighbors who have lived in the building for many years, there is a spirit of an author, dressed in '30s-style clothing, who visits them occasionally. We’ve taken to calling the visitor Mr. West.

I'm certain it's been Mr. West who has knocked that damn book off the shelf so many times.

In addition to feeling his presence, I have also had great fun because of Mr. West. Occasionally, the historical society leads tours around the neighborhood, and one morning rather recently, I went outside to haul out the trash when a crowd of about 15 people had gathered around the building with their phones up to take photos, cooing.

I greeted them and asked if they were the historical society, and they laughed. They were a writers' retreat. Breathlessly, I blurted out, "I live in Nathanael West's unit!"

All 15 of them stared at me for a moment, and then they all spoke at once: "He's why we're here."

The writers were from all over. We had a lovely conversation while I showed them a peek of my unit (THE UNIT!) with the built-in bookshelf, the original mirrors, the penny tile.

As they left, invited my partner and me to a soirée they were hosting that week... at a castle in town.

What a blast! I met authors I had been reading and authors on my to-be-read list. I traipsed around and explored a castle while handwriting analysis was happening in the dining room.

So, yes, I live in an old author's old apartment, and it is just as exciting as you would think.

(POST originalmente em português)

Vou ser sincero, existem os que são legais e realmente bons, e muitos são divertidos.

Mas, sinceramente, tem muitos casos com finais decepcionantes e informações que não são faladas que surgem apenas quando Holmes faz a descoberta (e são coisas simples na mesma página).

Eu vou ler todos os contos (já li os livros) até o final porque são clássicos e a relação de Holmes e Watson é muito legal e até engraçada (quando ela é boa, porque tem alguns contos que ela "desaparece" um pouco).

(O próprio autor não gostava muito do Holmes. Estou em um dos contos das Memórias de Sherlock Holmes. Ainda não cheguei no problema final. Mas li todos os livros e os contos anteriores) Mas o que vocês acham de Sherlock Holmes? Fale sobre nos comentários

Agradecimentos, Alex :)

There are books that are disturbing because they contain disturbing events, and then there are books that become disturbing because they force you to remain inside the mind of the monster himself. Lolita belongs to the latter.

I had always heard people praising this novel for its extraordinary prose, and indeed, I don't think I have ever read language this flowery and meticulously crafted. Every sentence seems polished to perfection. Yet this is perhaps the first time in my reading life that I deliberately refuse to rate a book's prose separately from its subject. For me, beautiful language alone cannot justify an experience that left me feeling repulsed from beginning to end.

I wonder what compelled Nabokov to devote such astonishing literary talent to a story like this. If his intention was to expose the psychology of predators or make society more aware of such monsters, then perhaps he succeeded. But after reading countless discussions and reviews surrounding this novel, I cannot help feeling that many readers seem more fascinated by Humbert than horrified by him. That, to me, is perhaps the most unsettling legacy of Lolita.

Multiple times while listening to the audiobook I wanted to abandon it altogether. Humbert Humbert is, without exaggeration, one of the most vile fictional characters I have ever encountered. What made the experience unbearable was not merely his crimes but his endless attempts to justify them. Every now and then he admits that somewhere deep inside he knows he is wrong, but such momentary acknowledgements never make up for what he does. Instead, they become another way of manipulating both himself and the reader.

The narrator Jeremy Irons deserves special mention because he made the experience even creepier. His performance perfectly captured Humbert's psychotic, obsessive, theatrical personality. At times it genuinely felt as though Humbert was sitting beside me, narrating his own delusions while trying to convince me to sympathize with him.

One unexpected consequence of reading this novel was my perception of the French language. I had always heard that French was one of the most beautiful languages in the world. Here, however, its constant and often unexplained use had the opposite effect on me. Rather than adding elegance, it felt as though Humbert was deliberately showing off, mocking the reader, or creating a distance between himself and everyone else. Instead of making French sound beautiful, it made it feel pretentious through the personality of the man speaking it.

The character I felt the deepest sympathy for was not Lolita alone, but also her mother. She trusted the very man who ultimately destroyed her daughter's life, and even in her final moments she was trying to protect her child from the monster living under her own roof. Thinking about how one man's obsession ruined multiple lives was far more painful than any individual event in the novel.

Earlier, while I was still reading, I described this novel as "a cesspool built from marble and studded with diamonds." Having now finished it, I would not change that description. The craftsmanship is undeniable. The subject remains revolting. I admire the writer's command of language, but I cannot admire what that language was ultimately employed to beautify.

I am genuinely asking this. Please forgive my ignorance, but saw someone's post on Reddit in which they called self-help books "modern literature" while talking about how all self-help books are the same thing just repackaged into different books. I was taken aback by the fact that no one pointed out that self-help is not literature.

I have never considered self-help books as literature.

So, am I wrong or is self-help considered under the category of literature?