anwyn

31, history and literature lover

3291 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

46%

16%

82%

anwyn TBR'd a book

The Things We Never Say

Elizabeth Strout

Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us? And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence. Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.

anwyn commented on anwyn's update

anwyn made progress on...

Middlemarch

George Eliot

15%

anwyn commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

19h

GiantAnteaterMoll

classics!

Okay i’ve never really been big into classics, i find them to be hard to get through at times but i really want to grow as a reader! So any recommendations for someone just starting out? Nothing too heavy if ykwim

Also im new here so hi! 👀

anwyn commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

19h

valsbooks

Studying literature

Just a post to share my excitement with you guys!! Last year I decided I wanted a change and went back to school, today I attended my first class in the degree of Modern Languages and Literature! I’m going to be learning Russian and Greek on my first year. And then Russian and English. And I’m just soo happy if I’m being honest!!! But also so scared to go back to learning after a couple of years of working lol.

Have any of you guys studied literature, languages, or something of the sort too? How did you like it? Any tips? I hope you guys had the best Monday!🫶🏽

anwyn commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

19h

spacedox

Favorite books written before the 2020s?

So I just updated my reading spreadsheet to track some new stats and found out that about 60% of all the books that I read this year were published in the 2020s. And while I like reading contemporary fiction, I know there are a lot of good books that weren't published in the last few years. I've added some books to my Interested and TBR list, but I'd love to have more.

So, I'd like to ask the community: What are your favorite books that were written pre-2020? Bonus points if they were written in the 20th century.

anwyn TBR'd a book

19h

The Lifted Veil

George Eliot

Horror was my familiar. Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural. The tale of a man who is incapacitated by visions of the future and the cacophony of overheard thoughts, and yet who can’t help trying to subvert his vividly glimpsed destiny, it is easy to read The Lifted Veil as being autobiographically revealing—of Eliot’s sensitivity to public opinion and her awareness that her days concealed behind a pseudonym were doomed to a tragic unveiling (as indeed came to pass soon after this novella’s publication). But it is easier still to read the story as the exciting and genuine precursor of a moody new form, as well as an absorbing early masterpiece of suspense.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

anwyn commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

19h

gingerailet

In need of recommendations!!

I need some classical literature recommendations that don't feel too dull while reading. I enjoy gothic literature too and have been enjoying the picture of dorian gray and frankenstein but I really wanna get more into other classic literature books without feeling like its too much of a chore. I've read some russian ones and i just cant stand them anymore + i'd like some books written by women but im not a big romance fan tho. Help!!

anwyn made progress on...

19h

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

82%

anwyn made progress on...

20h

Middlemarch

George Eliot

16%

anwyn made progress on...

20h

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans

46%

anwyn TBR'd a book

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future. The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.

anwyn TBR'd a book

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war — and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.

anwyn commented on anwyn's update

anwyn made progress on...

Middlemarch

George Eliot

15%

anwyn commented on a post

notyetread

Thoughts from 5% (page 14)

spoilers

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anwyn commented on a post

Daisycat

Thoughts from 4% (page 12)

spoilers

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anwyn commented on a post

yara.pdf

Thoughts from 4% (page 11)

spoilers

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anwyn commented on a post

annouk

Edited

Thoughts from 2% (page 6)

So interesting that Ann Patchett, who Sybil writes a letter to, blurbed the book! I wonder if the author ever thought it would reach her, considering this was a debut that took the internet by storm but had little press (to my knowledge).

Post from the The Correspondent forum

anwyn

Thoughts from 13%

This reminds me of 84 Charring Cross Road, one of my absolute favorites!!

anwyn made progress on...

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans

29%

anwyn started reading...

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans

Throughout her life Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings around half past ten Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. A mother, grandmother, wife, divorcée, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.