A while ago on a club post I mentioned doing a "chapter" a day in War and Peace and people seemed interested in doing a group buddy read so I thought I would make a post here!

I'm planning on starting on 1/1/26 and if you include the chapters from the 2 epilogues, there are 361 chapters (about 2-5 pages on average each) which gives a couple of buffer days to round out the full year. (The one chapter a day isn't a hard rule by any means, more so a way for my ADHD brain to break down this behemoth into more manageable chunks.)

I'm not 100% sure how things would work on Pagebound, but I don't want to clog up this forum - so I was thinking maybe if whoever wants to start in January can connect on this post first, and then we can do updates/check-ins/discuss thoughts on that chapter via our progress updates once we start reading. We can save bigger thoughts/conversations for this forum following the Pagebound guidelines for creating posts.

If you are interested in joining in and/or have ideas on how to best do this, let me know! I just wanted to start the convo early in case anyone wanted to secure a physical copy (since War & Peace is in the public domain, you can get free digital copies!) before January.

There was a post like this going around tumblr a couple months back and it was really cool and interesting, so I thought the PB-community might enjoy it too - What are your favorite stilistic/rhetorical devices or even executions of literary themes? Do you have any specific examples of them being really well implemented? My favorite specific stylistic device by far is the hyperbaton, specifically in Latin and Ancient Greek, not in the simple sense of "inversion of word order" but rather of the separation of two gramatically connected words, e.g. "word [...] descriptive non-predicative adjective", because it (and any other use of a abnormal sentence structure) can be used to visually represent relations between the concepts behind the words or the characters and their feelings. I have some specific examples, but they would mostly be in Latin, but if someone is interested in knowing what they are, you're welcome to ask me, so then I can nerd out :) Otherwise, as I said, I simply enjoy interesting sentence structures, especially if they are meant to convey or visualise a message. Your turn :)

I have an intermediate understanding of Spanish (but my listening is terrible) and im reading La Última Cuentista to try and pull all the concepts I’ve learned so far together. It’s a little overwhelming tho so I’m only reading a couple pages at a time. 😅 My question for people who’ve learned another language through reading: did you stop and translate every single word you didn’t know as you came across it? Because there’s a lot of words I don’t know (a handful per page) and it’s kinda frustrating having to stop reading to translate stuff. But I’m worried if I don’t, it’ll hurt my learning and I won’t actually learn conjugation or vocab etc. I’ll just fill in the blanks to figure out the story. Do you have any tips for learning another language through reading? I know to some extent I have to just jump in or I’ll just keep worrying about doing it “right” and I’ll never actually learn anything. Any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

I've seen a couple of these posts float around, but none in the past couple of days (or rather, I can't tell exactly when the last one was posted, but I'm assuming a week or more ago?) so: tell me, what are your niche bookish pet peeves? I have two: First: People calling any oldish book a "classic". Second: People basing their opinions of a work on a personal misconception which could easily be resolved with a google search (specifically I saw a pin about the Aeneid and everyone was complaining that Virgil "basically copied the Iliad and the Odyssey" and that "the Aeneid therefore sucks/is worthless", and as a reader and classics students, I felt it was my moral duty to go on a ran- ahem, educate the people in the comments about some of the misunderstandings that they were basing their opinions off of and hereby influencing the other people who read their comments.) Your turn :)