The title is a bit dramatic, but it reflects my current frustration perfectly. Long story short: I need books that can help me improve my interactions with others. I feel like I'm failing to read people and to be not-weird in my academic social circle (and isn't that a strange sentence?) and I need to fix that.

I think something that is spectrum-friendly might be of help, but I appreciate any recommendations! 🩷

Do you guys have experience where you were reading an ARC that strongly feel like it was written by AI? I'm not witch-hunting with baseless accusation here, I had marked words that we recognize as AI-writing characteristics (Russell et al., 2025):

• "not x, not y, but z" parallelism Example from the book:

No facilities, no lighting, just space beside the road where trucks sometimes rested between hauls. (Page 5) No traffic sounds. No distant hum of highway civilization. Only the wind through the leaves. (Page 7) The wolves howled again. Not closer, not farther—present. (Page 6) No road. No tire marks. No reflective posts marking the shoulder. Nothing but earth and sage that looked like it had been undisturbed for decades. (Page 5)

• rule of three "phrase, phrase, phrase" or "adjective, adjective, adjective" Example from the book:

Better to observe, to listen, to piece it together. (Page 9) The future stretched ahead like the basin below—vast, inevitable, predetermined. Nothing. No vehicle. Not even tire tracks in the dirt. (Page 5) searching for the Honda. For asphalt. For anything familiar. (Page 5) Organized. Established. The camp of someone who'd been here long enough to make it functional. (Page 8) No warehouse job. No college fund. No family dinners. (Page 8)

• repetitive sentence structure Example:

Same formations. Same distances. Same empty basin spreading toward the Wind River Range. (Page 17) No lights. No road. No paired yellow lines cutting east-west across the landscape. He probed his scalp—no blood, no tender spots. (Page 17) She touched her scalp—no blood, no tender spots. (Page 5) Fair. Harsh, but fair. (Page 14) Real. Impossible, but real. (Page 16)

(THESE ARE ONLY FROM FIRST CHAPTERS!!1!1) I HAD SPENT TIME GASLIGHTING MYSELF about this since I first read it, which was WEEKS ago 🫩. One day I woke up and decided "okay, it's definitely AI." While in other day, "maybe, the writing is just humanely bad." I KEEP GOING BACK AND FORTH WITH THIS!!! Convincing and doubting myself simultaneously because I WANT TO BE SURE to not slandering anyone. How should I give review for this?? Should I DNF it?? But this book is an ARC so I'm afraid to do so1! PLEASE FREE ME FROM MY MISERY (⁠┛⁠◉⁠Д⁠◉⁠)⁠┛⁠彡⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

Reference Russell, Jenna; Karpinska, Marzena; Iyyer, Mohit (2025). People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Vienna, Austria: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 5342–5373. doi:10.18653/v1/2025.

Spent the weekend playing Stardew Valley and tending to my irl garden, what are your other hobbies outside of reading?

My husband and I are the classic "gamer boy, reader girl" pairing, but he's started reading a chapter or two with me before bed. Mr. Birch about to finish his current read and doesn't know what to pick up next. (I read mysteries and romances, so I'm no help whatsoever... as you'll see from the lists below.) What would you recommend? He plays action and massive multiplay online RPGs too. Thank you so much!

Books he's read and enjoyed (last three suggested by me, yay!): Dune by Frank Herbert Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey Harry Potter series by You Know Who Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Books he disliked and/or DNFed (all three suggested by me, ouch!): The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

P.S. It's late here in Europe, so I won't be able to respond to comments until tomorrow morning.

I saw a post in Instagram the other day talking about how difficult it is to go back to reading straight books, like the romance is straight and not queer. I felt it! I don't have the motivation to read any fantasy books with a romance subplot that is straight... Does anybody feel the same?? How can I get over it, because I really want to keep reading all fantasy books that I had interest in??

Hi, so I've been trying to get into actually analysing books and picking up on underlying themes, symbolism, and deeper meanings instead of just reading for the plot.

Sometimes the themes are pretty obvious, but a lot of the times I struggle to collect my thoughts and put them into words in a way that feels accurate to the book, or even insightful enough. Usually, I just read a book, enjoy the vibes, know what happened, and know what I loved about it. That kind of thing. But I want to actually understand a book on a deeper level, if that makes sense.

I tried annotating, but I genuinely had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I mostly ended up writing wattpad-level comments in the margins lmao.

Does anyone have any tips or methods or resources that helped them learn how to analyse books more deeply and like intentionally?

I read 8! it might not seem like a lot but i'm quite proud because 2 of them are over the 700 hundred pages witch is something that i didn't managed to do since i was about 14 probably, and the book i'm currently reading is also like 700 pages why do i do that to myself?.

The good thing is that i liked almost every book i read so far, for the second half of the year i would like to read more of my physical tbr and finish some of the books i have paused.

So far my favs have been the two bricks, Royal Assasin and Assasin's Quest by Robin hobb (and i'm loving East of eden witch im reading right now ) and my least favourite would be Lapvona (i'm sorry guys)

You're free to tell me about your half year wrap up if you want to! i would love to hear it from you!!

Basically the question on the title. When and what do you like to modify (during or after accomplishing it)? 👀

I recently completed my 50 book Reading Challenge and I notice that around 30 books are graphic novels/mangas.

Therefore, I'm sorta expanding my Reading Challenge to complete at least 50 Prose novels. Sounds easy in theory, but reading through graphic novels and mangas is easier for me ans I can down one volume in one day - so very tempting whenever I have stress or close to a burnout.