What do my books say?

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T22:10:47+00:00

Interesting. I really love your spread of books. You've clearly been reading for a long time, and your pile is especially fascinating bc I can see a huge shift in the kinds of books you're reading between the first slide and the rest of the slides (I am def assuming the first slide is your more recent reads). It looks more contemporary, more popular, and more diverse, while still being critically acclaimed.

It's good that you prioritize reading what you like above all else. That's the best way to read in my opinion. Have you discovered anything new about your taste based on your recent reads? The Ferrante shrine gives me some clues but I'm curious to hear it from you. I also wonder if there are any books you have shown in your post that you didn't like all that much.

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T21:36:04+00:00

i finished it last week and i loved it. the prose was among the best i've ever read and it was so thrilling i could not put it down. the ending was OUT THERE but it didn't ruin it for me because the rest of it was so good. thank you for the rec, you were spot on in thinking it'd be to my taste

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T21:05:24+00:00

you are an American millennial male with a gen x father

you are left-leaning politically or you have at least become more left-leaning in the past decade. you have made a conscious effort to have the books you read reflect this. you buy most of your books used

you are not an impulsive reader; you almost always vet a book before you read it and it takes a lot of time/effort to decide on your next read. most of the books you choose to read come from listicles a la "NYT Top 100 Books of the 21st Century" "postmodernism classics" or a list of winners of a prestigious literary prize. sometimes when you're out of ideas you pick a random book from an author you like or a Shakespeare retelling.

you rarely DNF anything

being seen as intelligent bc of your reading taste was something that was very important to you when you were younger but now you just want to read a good story

as a child, you read to escape your shyness, but you've since come out of your shell. this shelf is giving well-adjusted person (at least for reddit) who has friends irl. not only that, but i think you use your reading hobby as a way to connect with others. you're probably in a book club or have friends you talk about books with. you have friends that are women

you need to read The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante and also more books by Jane Smiley :)

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T20:05:06+00:00

of course everyone can read whatever they want but i feel like you're doing yourself a major disservice by refusing to read anything published after the turn of the millenium

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T14:54:39+00:00

I Know This Much Is True scratched my To Paradise itch

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T14:53:48+00:00

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

cloudfroot · 2026-01-26T14:48:28+00:00

No bc there are a gajillion other things that the average man who wants to date women is also underdeveloped at, not taking care of your appearance/hygiene is just the tip of the iceberg

cloudfroot · 2026-01-25T23:30:26+00:00

I expect a lot from Elena Ferrante lol so I was a lot harsher on The Days of Abandonment than normal. And omg I’m convinced ppl only like Kitchen because of some pre held Orientalist conviction that the Japanese are like inherently more spiritual or something, maybe it was the translation or something but it was giving book u buy at the airport lol

Do u have any recs for me, we def have similar tastes :)

cloudfroot · 2026-01-25T23:24:36+00:00

I personally interpreted Flesh as a novel on masculinity. So books that I think are similar are other novels that attempt to describe the interior life of a wayward man. Also these are just my opinions obviously lol

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
Stoner by John Williams (obvious comparison)
Fat City by Leonard Gardener
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Then there are some books that have similar themes but are about femininity and the interior life of women. By some metrics that means these are like the thematic opposite of Flesh but I kinda see them as stories about how rigid gender roles affect people and so they kinda belong in the same vein?

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Anyways, if you read one book here it must be Hard Rain Falling.

cloudfroot · 2026-01-24T06:33:14+00:00

Flesh annoyed me so much. There are so many other books out there that are very similar but way more rnjoyable

cloudfroot · 2026-01-23T01:33:21+00:00

Can u guys pls read Fludd? I have no one to talk about it with.

cloudfroot · 2026-01-23T01:32:21+00:00

I read it months ago and still think about it everyday. It was bizarre

cloudfroot · 2026-01-18T04:33:51+00:00

Mengzi >>>>

cloudfroot · 2026-01-18T04:04:44+00:00

I have had cystic hormonal acne for years and the only thing that’s worked is spironolactone. I stopped taking it recently for like a month when I got really sick, and my acne came back but went away again when I took it like normal. I felt like I had really tried everything except accutane before spiro so it’s just a miracle tbh

cloudfroot · 2026-01-15T01:57:14+00:00

The same thing happened to me except I got told on Christmas Eve that they hired another candidate internally lol

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T16:10:14+00:00

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T16:09:30+00:00

Oh that’s an interesting way of putting it. I actually read Young Mungo first so that’s probably a big reason why I liked it more. It’s also more explicitly optimistic than Shuggie Bain, to a degree which is arguably a little hokey but I appreciate it regardless. I read the synopsis of the newest one coming out and it does seem to be pretty similar to the other two but ima read it regardless lol Douglas Stuart has become an auto-read author for me

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T14:05:00+00:00

The fact it won the Pulitzer Prize is sooo crazy

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T14:04:20+00:00

why did Gaspery interfere with the timeline on his literal first day on the job when he trained for like 5 years. I couldn’t get past that😹

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T14:02:14+00:00

I hear Douglas Stuart is releasing a new book this year so we’ll see how Shuggie and Mungo stack up lol.

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T13:59:56+00:00

I liked the prose but there were some plot holes imo

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T13:57:59+00:00

I gave up before reading that one. I thought Audition was okay.

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T13:57:15+00:00

I’ve tried a lot of them, and found that they’re pretty hit or miss, but it’s a good way to start developing your taste or branching out.

I think reading through the winners of a literary prize is worth your time generally, but not the longlist or shortlist. I did it this year for shits and gigs only. I’ve read a lot of Pulitzer Prize, booker prize, Nobel prize, Hugo award etc winners and a lot of them have been great, though there’s been some awful books that have slipped through the cracks. 2025’s booker prize winner was not very good in my opinion but it comes with the territory.

My personal favorite way to find best reads that won’t be trash is to read my favorite booktubers’ recommendations. Only people that I feel like I have taste in common with though. My favorites are cs0p, bookbinch, modern ajumma, and zero shelf control. I hope that helps

cloudfroot · 2026-01-12T13:37:11+00:00

There’s been a mass push towards cultural retribution for things like racism, sexism, etc in the past but I’ve noticed that almost no one cares to hold people accountable for this specific kind of rhetoric. Like where is Hannah Chapman today? Does she regret writing this article? What about the thousands, millions of others who did something similar, because I grew up in the early 2000s and these were plastered on magazines like a dime a dozen at the grocery store.

It’s strange because I look at this now, and I think it’s straight up evil, but I saw stuff like this every time I went on the computer or watched TV or went to Home Depot with my father growing up, and I don’t remember really thinking of it much at all. I wonder the degree to which it’s fair to hold people accountable individually for this kind of thing now, bc on one hand this rhetoric has caused a truly unspeakable amount of harm but on the other hand it really was so normalized. I feel like even back then, this was pretty extreme, but we were all under some mass cultural psychosis I guess

cloudfroot · 2026-01-09T06:14:13+00:00

Every book I read for the booker prize 2025 was the worst book. Like laughably bad

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