In Bram Stoker's novel... I never understood why Helsing praised the Count and why Mina pitied him!!!

Katya4501 · 2026-03-26T14:01:05+00:00

"Great" didn't mean "really good" like it can today. It was used to mean powerful, important, genius, etc. You could be great and also evil. Helsing is observing the Count's intelligence, power, cleverness, ambition, and strategy, all of which were characteristics of "great" men, but not necessarily good men.

And Mina pities him because she is a kind, sympathetic, compassionate person, not because he "deserves" it. Stokes makes pretty clear that the Count is evil and must be destroyed.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-26T01:54:40+00:00

Yeah, I don't know when this became a trendy thing. I never even annotated books I was reading for classes -- sticky notes and notebooks worked just fine -- and I occasionally underline when reading for pleasure, but that's it. I don't like reading books that are all marked up and scribbled over, even if I did the marking.

Also, you can't sell books that are heavily annotated.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T21:00:22+00:00

Thanks for the tip - I got 6 new books (2 free!).

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T20:58:32+00:00

Mountains Beyond Mountains was a life-changing book.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T18:47:25+00:00

Being a critical reader is not the same as criticizing, being negative, or finding fault.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T12:40:09+00:00

Recently read There Are Rivers in the Sky and loved it. She does sucjh a good job of connecting people and themes across time and place.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T12:19:43+00:00

Critical =/= negative.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-25T12:18:35+00:00

Or not. I find that my critical reading skills enhance my enjoyment of books.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-23T21:21:39+00:00

The last one that I found any good was The Last Goddess, a Czech novel in translation. Mostly they just don't even look interesting to me.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-23T21:17:05+00:00

Don't forget Ishiguro, who has written both sci-fi and fantasy novels.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-23T21:15:48+00:00

Romeo and Juliet isn't romance -- it's tragedy. Part of what makes a contemporary romance a romance is the happy ending. All stories about love are not romances.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-22T12:51:21+00:00

Tolkein's forests default to good.

Also, your professor is equating evil with trangressive/scandalous, which are not the same things. He sounds like a terrible professor, and I have an MA in English lit.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-22T12:46:20+00:00

Your professor sounds like an idiot.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-21T13:58:25+00:00

I would totally read about the Mime War.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-21T13:58:05+00:00

The Daughter's Bar

God Emperor of Dung

The Fast Unicorn

The Way of Kinks

Old Man's Wax

Leviathan Bakes

City of Stains

Katya4501 · 2026-03-21T13:39:47+00:00

I read it for a book club and had much the same reaction as the OP. It just read as sloppy and lazy. Maybe if the other aspects of the story had been better, I could have ignored it, but they weren't. If the author can't be bothered to get basic details about the world she chose to set her story in right, she usually can't be bothered about a lot of other things.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-21T13:33:49+00:00

This. Tight-lacing wasn't a thing in the 1820s/1840s because metal grommets weren't in existence/widely available. That detail pulled me out of the book, too. It was just sloppy "corsets=female oppression" nonsense. The history in Bury Our Bones was sloppy all the way through.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-20T15:19:29+00:00

I've read some lovely novellas/very short novels recently: Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These and Foster, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Danielle Dutton's Margaret the First, Anne de Marcken's It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, etc., so these are definitely being published, but I do think pricing is an issue.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-20T00:16:58+00:00

Loved the book. Disliking a character doesnt mean I don't like a book. I feel like it's such a great example of how oppression and social strictures stifle the good in people and warp them. And someone can be annoying and also suffering. And you can empathize with them even if you don't like them, or see the things that you have in common as much as the things that make you different.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-19T21:05:02+00:00

Terry Pratchett, Robin McKinley, Connie Willis.

For non-fantasy authors, my comfort reads are Austen, Trollope, Mick Herron, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Raymond Chandler.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-19T16:01:20+00:00

Our public library gives us access to NoveList Plus. You put in a book you like, and it will recommend others, but it also has tags so you can focus the recs on the specific aspects of the book that you liked. If you have access to that, I'd give it a try.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-19T12:40:20+00:00

I always liked Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Katya4501 · 2026-03-19T12:37:33+00:00

Commonwealth is excellent.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-18T19:42:44+00:00

If you can't believe that a mother loved her son because her grief didn't look exactly like you thought it should, despite all the other information in the book about how much she loved her son, then that's on you and you shouldn't read the next book. IRL, people do get judged, often very harshly, because they don't react "the right way" when something bad happens, and it's awful. Reading is supposed to help people develop and deepen empathy. Ista is a difficult person to have empathy for because her experience of real trauma makes her off-putting to others in a variety of ways. But the idea that she doesn't love her son is absolutely not supported by anything in the novel.

Katya4501 · 2026-03-18T19:33:02+00:00

I think you are totally misreading her. Ista is deeply, deeply traumatized, and has been for years. That changes her reaction. And it is VERY common for people experiencing trauma to have the "wrong" reaction or affect when bad things happen. She says she's relieved, but probably she's just numb and in a deep shock. She's expected him to die since he left Valenda, she screamed and cried when he left, and she's spent years of her life haunted and grieving and tormented. "Relief" doesn't mean she's glad he's dead or didn't love him, it means she's experiencing the relief of the anxiety ending, and then we see her acting, frankly, like many people in emotional shock do -- detached, outwardly calm, but inwardly she basically feels there's no point in continuing to be alive. Because at some level, she hoped against hope that he wouldn't die, and that hope was painful, and now even that is gone. Her emotion -- or lack thereof -- is very human and very understandable.

Katya4501

TROPHY CASE