I tried to get through A Discovery of Witches’ first chapter on three separate occasions. I’d never read anything so poorly written.

Page 43 of Anne Rice’s The Feast of All Saints, when Marcel enters the Mercier house. You can basically smell the New Orleans vegetation in that chapter.

It might concievably be a crossover of folk horror and this new “cozy fantasy” trend.

I mean, I feel like Folk Horror already covers many of the attributes of “cottagecore” horror.

If you only read a book for it’s plot, and the events which happen, there’s not much reason to re-read. If you read a book to understand and explore it’s themes, often multiple reads are beneficial or even neccesary to see the intricate details embedded in the story.

Grapes of Wrath is shorter and more topically polemic to social, economic and environmental issues to America during the Depression years. East of Eden is a gorgeous, biblical, Shakesperean tragedy of human nature. I feel that theyre both perfect books, but there’s a reason why one is spoken of more often in terms of Great American literature.

There is nothing wrong with reading just for entertainment or relaxation. However, it’s an important value to me that I read to better myself, whether learning through nonfiction, empathy through personal tales or other cultures, or just abstractly through postmodern or erdogic literature.

As such, my “comfort zone” has shifted over time. I would say that Vonnegut is now well within my comfort zone, and that Pynchon and Faulkner are just outside it. This year I read Lot 49 by the former and Sanctuary by the latter, and both were very managable reads, by their standards.

Last year I read through The Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Inferno, and Paradise Lost, and now feel that almost no archaic prose is beyond me. But next year will push out into Canterbury Tales and Pilgrim’s Progress.

I’m about halfway through Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and what stands out to me is that most characters are introduced in an almost archetypal way - here is the homely farmer, here is the rich do-nothing, here is the Asian servant - and yet each character acts in a way which is entirely contrary to my preconceived notions of what their arc would be, and yet feels more true to their character than anything I could envision.

In my early 20s, when I had disposable income and a high sense of myself, I bought a lot of books which I DNF’d. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra…

Reading older books is kind of like a muscle which needs to be trained. In the last couple of years (now mid-30s), I’ve now read all three of these. I adored Paradise Lost, whose language flowed effortlesly after falling into the rhythm of blank verse. I appreciated Karamazov, though Dimitri is perhaps my least favourite character in all of fiction, and having finished Thus Spake Zarathustra, I now believe Nietzsche is the incel OG.