skylar

lover of off-kilter, sentimental stories 💕

349 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

skylar earned a badge

Classics Starter Pack Vol I

Champion: Finished 5 Side Quest books.

skylar wants to read...

Excellent Women

Barbara Pym

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

skylar joined a quest

Classics Starter Pack Vol I 🕯️📖🎻

💎 // 154 joined

Not Joined

An introduction to the Classics, these books are part of the cultural zeitgeist or the 'canon' that many would recognize. Look for more niche titles in later Starter Pack volumes.

skylar wants to read...

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

skylar started reading...

Minor Detail

Adania Shibli

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

skylar finished reading and wrote a review...

skylar

Aug 20, 2025

4.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

🌊

🏛️

📓

Super fun read - I thought the pacing was especially good. There was just enough to get you intrigued, but not enough to give it all away. Halfway through the book I still had no idea what was going on, but I couldn't stop, which I think is a sign of great storytelling. I also just loved Piranesi's character. Other media that this reminded me of (darkness, labyrinths, memory, time): Memento (2000 Nolan film), The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Post from the Piranesi forum

skylar

Thoughts from 81% (page 199)

I have other urgent stuff to do but I can't stop reading 🫠 save me

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

skylar

Under-recommended books?

Are there any books you love but that you haven't seen anyone else here or on other platforms recommend? Which books do you think are generally underhyped? I can start: How to be both by Ali Smith is one of my favorite books ever, but I haven't yet come across anyone recommending it! Maybe because it's been out for a while already?

Post from the Pagebound Club forum

skylar

Under-recommended books?

skylar finished reading and left a rating...

skylar

Aug 18, 2025

4.5

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

anistolary

Cozy Japanese novels recommendations

I read Kamogawa Food Detectives and Before The Coffee Gets Cold recently and loved the vibes of a slice-of-life novel, packed with emotions and coziness. Any recs for more Japanese novels like these?

skylar earned a badge

Level 3

250 points

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

nezuu

book unhauls

for the people who have very large physical book collections, do you unhaul frequently? do you get unhaul books you didn't really enjoy, or do you keep them? do you unhaul books that you haven't read yet and have been sitting on your shelves for a while? i've been seeing a lot on unhaul videos on my tiktok feed, and i am curious! i am a book hoarder (lol) and have only "unhauled" (donated/recycled) books if they started to fall apart and could no longer be read easily because of their condition, or if i really hated them deeply enough to not want them anymore.

skylar commented on skylar's update

skylar started reading...

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

skylar started reading...

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

skylar finished reading and wrote a review...

skylar

Aug 15, 2025

4.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

🪴

💻

☕

I found this book pretty terrifying. It describes the "millennial aesthetic" so well, perfectly illustrating the type of lifestyle most people would be jealous of - a beautiful apartment filled with plants and curated furniture, remote work, doing work you're passionate about, a close community, traveling throughout Europe - and shows the emptiness underneath it all. Is this really what we're all striving towards? Will this actually bring us satisfaction or happiness? Withholding some points because I thought the entire narrative was framed too much as a thought experiment, so it read more like a narrative essay than a novel. But otherwise, this is definitely a read I'll be thinking about for a while.

skylar commented on milddaydreams's update

milddaydreams started reading...

The Employees

Olga Ravn

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth. The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn's crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

Post from the Perfection forum

skylar

Thoughts from 12% (page 15)

The amount of millennial dread I experienced in just the first 15 pages 🫠

skylar commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

heystef

Edited

Where do you buy your secondhand books? 📚

Hi all! Do you buy secondhand books? If you do, what are your favorite websites or bookstores to purchase? I find myself in several Amazon-bought websites that sell secondhand copies of titles I want to add to my TBR/home library. It got me wondering if there are better places to get my copies where I can support a fellow reader emptying out their shelves and give these books a new home on my shelves. Thanks in advance for your recs! 🙂 --- UPDATE 💡 For anyone who's just checking this thread, these are what everyone's recommended: - Thryft.asia (those based in Southeast Asia) - Goodwill (https://shopgoodwill.com/categories/books?p=1) - ThriftBooks (https://www.thriftbooks.com/) - Vinted (https://www.vinted.co.uk/catalog/2312-books) - Pango Books (https://pangobooks.com/) - Half Price Books (sadly I got blocked by their website) - Facebook Marketplace - Book Outlet (https://bookoutlet.com/) If you prefer visiting in person, visiting your local library, local used bookstores, charities that may have used books or bargain book bins.

skylar started reading...

Perfection

Vincenzo Latronico

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s twenty-four-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.

Founder Announcements Help keep the servers running 🤑

Support

FAQ Contact Us Report a bug

team@pagebound.co

Company

About Us Terms of Use Privacy Policy Content Policy

Founder Announcements Help keep the servers running 🤑