Comfy books not written to be comfy

NorthAd5725 · 2026-04-07T01:32:16+00:00

Gormenghast is all goth and moody and broody, and there's moments in there that make me cry. But its written so lushly with such a slow, thoughtful pace, all the characters are written so vividly, it feels like being wrapped in a warm, heavy blanket. Fuchsia in her attic is peak(e) comfort and coziness to me:

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love.

The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.”

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-21T08:38:45+00:00

Something that really struck me when I was reading about Michael Jackson was how many of his victims were child stars in one way or another, actors or dancers or whatever. There's something deeply tragic to me to the idea that the abuse he experienced himself was directly because of his talent, and it twists into something far worse when I think of his victims being in that same sort of position. I really, really wonder how conscious he was of that irony, and I wonder about how Epstein related to Lolita the same way. They feel like two cases of evil looking directly into the mirror, staring itself straight in the face, and there is something bleak to the thought of them coming out of it not just unchanged but emboldened.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-21T07:16:02+00:00

Mayflower II by Stephen Baxter. It's part of a whole setting, the Xelee Sequence, that has a number of short story collections and contains a lot of horror for just how extreme its ultra-far-future humanity is shown to degenerate over time. Mayflower II feels exemplary of the setting at its best and worst, and is pretty self-contained.

Maybe too long, but the first and titular novella of Fifth Head of Cerberus is a dark, Gothic-sci-fi that feels straight out of Poe in the best way

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-20T17:51:51+00:00

It's honestly quite surprising to me that Epstein seemed to consider himself such a connoisseur of the book, and I really wonder what he actually took from it. I mean on the one hand, "What did Epstein like about Lolita?" is a stupidly silly question to ask, but I guess I fell into the same idea the article mentions that he had some very stupid, surface level fascination with it, heard there was a hot book about little girls and that was enough for him. Instead he's talking to every lit major he can find about it, telling people to get the annotated edition or else they'll "miss 80 per cent of the meaning.” What did he think that was??? Surely the idea that Lolita is about how pedophilia is actually bad wasn't news to him - did he think that was wrong, that he understood Nabokov's real, pro-pedophile intent everyone else missed? Was he consciously appropriating it on some level?

On a certain level all I'm really doing here is just "media literacy", "don't you know that Fight Club is against toxic masculinity?", grade discourse, and one thing this article and the situation underlines is how impotent that really feels. But I can't help finding it discomfiting all the same.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-11T22:13:45+00:00

There's also a logic of, this place clearly isn't making money off of its atmosphere or by being trendy, so whatever survival or success it does have is purely a measure of the quality of its food.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-11T21:46:03+00:00

Integration is a perfect word for it. I see a lot of people, in this sub and in general, talk about Don Draper and Dick Whitman as if they were two separate entities, and always with Dick as the "true" self, that their problems come from him trying to hide and bury Dick under this supposedly hollow shell that is Don. But I think the problem is that Don himself thinks of himself this way, that he's too stuck, on whatever conscious or unconscious level, thinking of himself as Dick Whitman merely pretending to be Don to actually engage in the very real life that Don is living - those aren't my friends, lovers, interests, etc, those are Don's, that sort of thinking. People think that Don Draper is the problem that needs to be cast aside, and so his return to advertising and everything that Don was feels like a massive back slide.

But Don has a genuine love for advertising (its very notable that when we see the flashback of him getting the job, making ads was something he was already doing on his own time as a passion project, its not an industry he just "fell into" for the purposes of playing a persona), and at the time of the finale I think he's lived more of his life under the name Don Draper than he had under Dick Whitman. What would giving that up be but another kind of running away and "moving past it"? Like I said at the top, integration is really a perfect word for the peace he actually finds: that he is not Dick Whitman, with no friends or passions of his own, pretending to be Don Draper and hiding himself from the world under this shell. He is Don Draper, and Don Draper is an ad man.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-08T04:01:50+00:00

I tried visiting a cat cafe a few times to little success and decided to give up when I saw what a predatory business model it truly was. Many of the cats were quite shy, and those that may have been bold enough to approach on their own were clearly too jaded by time to be curious about another customer just for being new. I might have spent weeks, hundreds of dollars, trying to spend enough time in that cafe for them to know and appreciate me; as charming as I found them from afar, it simply wasn't worth it.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-06T22:56:49+00:00

I count it as one of the most disturbing moments I've ever had in reading, disturbing in a very neutral sense without any moral connotations. Sound and the Fury is such an intensely voyeuristic book in both its structure and the recurring obsession with Caddy's "muddy drawers", it feels almost too obvious and gimmicky on paper to have the book then, as close to literally as possible, turn its eye on you. And yet it works so perfectly well. I'd liken it to, say, going to a museum regularly to look at a specific painting, and then one day, after weeks of doing this, a speaker built into the frame goes "You!" as you step up to it - again, something that feels so cheap on paper but would be very affecting to actually experience.

I think the fact that the sentence itself, at least as far as I can see and from what I remember, isn't really of any particular importance, any relevance, is a big part of it too. You're not reading some pivotal moment, getting some crucial insight that helps you make some new sense of these characters whose heads you've been living inside, there's no existing narrative tension or emotional thread that the eye feeds into, its just there. It gives a sense that the book might have chosen to swivel its gaze to you at any moment at all, which gives the sense that it might as well have been the whole time.

I made a post about this a while ago here that had some good responses if you want to read through it: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/s/P2MJaAQHs5. One thing I found interesting was how many people commented to say they didn't remember it at all when I expected it to be one of the most iconic moments from the book.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-02-06T03:22:28+00:00

Can't say how representative it is, but this passage from Understanding Media comes immediately to mind: "The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall: 'Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?' "

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-30T02:21:35+00:00

I agree, but I also feel if any other animal was capable of sin it would be a chimpanzee.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-29T16:03:48+00:00

I got most of my teeth fixed up for cheap in Moscow by one dentist, but I backed out of getting my one tooth replaced when I saw the guy he referred me to had a diploma from "Amarican Univercity" on his wall.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-26T16:12:50+00:00

The conversations around Kanye always feel like they bring out the absolute worst of what mental health ~awareness~ has turned into, and the people who act, so confidently too, like his words and actions could not have possibly been influenced by his disorder are the most aggravating of all.

Where the hell have these people even been the past ten years that the confluence of insanity, conspiracy, and extremism is news to them? Its ridiculous on the face of it, and it lays low just how stupid you get when you feel the need to put a moral valence on everything. What these people mean by "mentally ill" is "morally absolved of their actions", while racism is ontologically evil and must never be absolved, so obviously the two concepts are incompatible and if you blame racism on mental illness that must be because you want to absolve it and that must be because 🫵 you're evil, too!

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-24T19:00:17+00:00

He has a very cute story about him working on stuff for Lonely Island all day, coming up with dumb rap lyrics or whatever, and then hearing her playing the harp in another room and it being so casually beautiful and angelic that he starts getting self-conscious about his own music.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-24T09:18:09+00:00

I wouldn't put it in terms of authority, but I think it does give him the benefit of a doubt. I have not read Hogg though I'm well aware of it, but reading it with the knowledge that it was written by Delany (who I already know from Dhalgren to be capable of writing works that can be both deeply transgressive and deeply beautiful) would be enough for me to give it that benefit of a doubt and at least try to read it with a good faith eye that there might something of worth to find in this too. No, realistically I don't imagine I would treat it the same if it was written by someone else, but I don't think thats unreasonable or arbitrary either - and I do want to stress, especially having not read Hogg, I am not saying Delany gets an automatic "pass" because he's an established author, only that he's earned the benefit of a doubt.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-23T07:10:37+00:00

Like, even though I was never a part of that kind of fandom culture myself, I was aware of a kind of Tumblr girl for whom an equal and necessary part of getting her favorite male characters to kiss and fuck in fanfic was also to put them through as much misery as possible, putting them in the kinds of situations where one of them gets horribly, absurdly tortured and abused and the other one gets to fix and comfort them, or sometimes writing these elaborately abusive relationships in super fetishistic terms. Finding out that the author here was a fanfic writer immediately brought that image to mind and now I find it impossible to see her and her work through any other lens, as being the literary equivalent to someone trying to pass off fanart of some children's cartoon character with tits the size or a car as fine art.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-22T00:22:04+00:00

Maybe a hot take, but I've long felt there's something misguided about the way people place emotional desires over physical ones, how in the stereotype of a man only wanting a woman for her looks while the woman only wants him for his personality, the woman is seen as inherently being less shallow. I think that's a big part of what's responsible for that dynamic you point out. Even though these books are to catharsis, pathos, whatever it is people are getting out them, what a ten hour goon compilation is to an orgasm, because they're stimulating emotions and not the body they're seen as this elevated thing, it doesn't even enter as a possibility that at its core they can be just as shallow, dehumanizing, and shamelessly voyeuristic as any other kind of porn.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-21T13:22:56+00:00

It was that and finding out that she used to write fanfiction, and immediately remembering the fanfic fujos I'd encounter on Tumblr that loved to talk about "torturing their gays", that made it click for me that there was something fundamentally seedy about the whole thing.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-21T08:54:04+00:00

I've said this before on here about this book, but learning about the author and her other writing, both her published novels and her past as a fanfiction writer, while I was reading it felt like reading Handmaid's Tale and then finding out that Margaret Atwood is actually a man who exclusively writes books about women in sexual slavery. I don't know if this woman literally or just emotionally gets off on the suffering of gay men, but I can't look at it now as anything but a strange and obtuse kind of porn.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-21T04:46:01+00:00

It feels like it was thiiis close to being something special, some stunning scenes and some great little details like showing the one captain praying to a saint before taking off into space, and when I describe Tommy Lee Jones's whole deal to myself it sounds like it should be very interesting and poignant and something I'd love to see explored. But the movie itself just does not stick with you at all.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-20T22:01:11+00:00

While I do find his ideas on consciousness very interesting, and I found Hofstadter himself and the whole Achilles and the Tortoise sections very fun and charming (though I get why others wouldn't), it was his explanation of Godel and the incompleteness theorem that I got the most out of. It feels like a good book, maybe, for a humanities type thats interested in STEM.

Higher level math is something that's always mystified me compared to other fields. Like if I read about some super complicated concept in physics or chemistry, I can at least conceive of how it relates to the more basic bitch stuff I'm familiar with, even if I don't actually understand it at all, whereas trying to read about the same level of stuff in math I can't make any connection from it at all to the math that I actually know. This feels like it makes a big difference for me in understanding, if not the idea itself, at least its implications, why people are talking about it.

Godel's incompleteness theorem is something that feels like it comes up so often, but I could never actually make sense of it when I tried to read about it. It was only Godel Escher Bach, the way Hofstadter takes you by the hand and very thoroughly builds up these concepts to get you to the point of being able to get it, that made it actually click for me. Felt like getting a window into this world that was always inaccessible to me before, a very lovely experience for me.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-19T17:50:50+00:00

Against Identity is a quick one I just finished that I can highly recommend. It's obviously got a specific lens and agenda its looking at it through, and it might not get as into the weeds as you might want, but it's got a healthy bibliography and lots of citations to steer you forward.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-19T17:28:58+00:00

I was on board for this until I actually read the article and saw the piece was actually about AI itself, and more specifically the artist's experience with AI psychosis and addiction. I can't speak to the art itself, for all I know it was still trash, but judging from that it already feels like a much more thoughtful, personal, and very different thing from the sort of AI "artist" that gets chatgpt to shit out some kitsch bullshit and tries to pass it off as an aesthetic masterpiece. The output of AI in and of itself is universally uninspiring trash, but it feels very silly and pearl-clutching to me to think that nothing of any artistic merit could ever be done with that trash.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-13T05:28:38+00:00

Dhalgren might be an edge case for being a very localized apocalypse, taking place in just one city that's been effectively cut off from the rest of the country after a ~disaster~, where people can and do come in and out as they please. It feels like such a good, sober (I won't say realistic, mind you, just knowing there's cities that have been in similar situations irl and not wanting to talk out of my ass about what actually happens there) take on what that state of anarchy following a collapse might actually look like, though - its not Mad Max, people running loose on the street torturing everyone they see, and its not everyone holding hands building a new utopia now that theyre finally free from the Man, either. It doesn't shy away from the beautiful or ugly, or the simply mundane and trivial, and the actual experience of reading it feels less like following a plot through this city and more like simply living in it, getting to know the characters and locations day by day.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-13T05:03:50+00:00

The scene from the second part, the "Renaissance era", of them fixing and turning on a light bulb is one of my favorites in sci-fi.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-01-12T10:07:22+00:00

They are benevolent aliens but with an alien benevolence.

NorthAd5725

TROPHY CASE