It’s a book set in Victorian society, aimed at Victorian contemporary readers. There’s a limit to how far you can deviate from the social norm without alienating the readers it was written for.

And there’s a lot of pragmatism as well. If you’re going to perform a new and risky operation like a blood transfusion, it makes sense to start with the big strong male volunteers instead of hassling the staff to pitch in.

Yes, the women thought of being obedient and dutiful wives as was the social expectation of them. So are the men. We start out with Harker dutifully writing to his wife every day. It doesn’t mean the women don’t have agency. Lucy was considering several suitors and had every freedom to turn them away. Mina was putting in serious work managing her husband’s estate and supporting his work as a solicitor.

But at the end of the day, women were dependent on men in Victorian society. And men carried the responsibility for their household on their shoulders. In a good marriage, that meant teamwork like Mina and Jonathan. And like Lucy was hoping for. In a bad marriage… well that’s why women campaigned for equal rights.

While it’s unlikely that Bram Stoker was anything like an organized and self-professed feminist. He clearly thought women could be competent, intelligent, and contribute. But that doesn’t change the time period of his life and his novel.

Timing and good marketing. Harry Potter is written for success. It’s the most generic possible fantasy you can imagine but it’s full of clever little gimmicks that hook people.

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• A special class of people. Everyone thinks muggles are lame because everyone already dislikes people. Every reader loves to imagine that they could… not be a muggle.
• A magical school completely full of little titbits of wonder. The kind of place you wish you could visit because there’s a magical marvel around every corner.
• Lots of ways to pick sides. What house are you? What kind of wizardry would you specialize in? What teachers are your favorite? Who would you like to be friends with?
• Lots of ways to be competitive. Merits and demerits for your house. Quidditch games. Magical challenges. Classes and grades.
• Lots of ways to imagine customizing yourself. What kind of wand, what kind of familiar?

The whole thing is like a video game that encourages people to imagine themselves as a character alongside the protagonists. Like a character creator you could immerse yourself in the book by picturing what kind of Hogwarts student you’d be.

And that’s what most of the exploitation of the novel is based on. From sorting hat quizzes to buying scarves and wands. It’s all pushing the narrative that you could be a student at Hogwart.

Creatively, the novels are derivative and bland. But the way they’re written allows people to attach a lot of their own meaning. Timing wise they were published when video games and the internet was only just on the rise so there was relatively little competition from other media.

All in all, it’s going to be nearly impossible to replicate the effect again in book form. Other media are just far more popular and suited for the whole 'place yourself in the role of…" type thing.

If you want to really push your enjoyment of the book, get a map of Middle Earth. Get some colored pushpins and start tracking the journeys of the characters.

It really helps you visualize the world better when you suddenly realize how close those barrows really are to the Shire. How far off course the crossing of the misty mountains makes the fellowship. How the layout of the land allows the Rohirim to safeguard the Shire and much of the human lands from orcs coming out of Mordor.

Both the hobbit and the lord of the Rings are novels about characters traveling across middle Earth and running into trouble. Tracking their travel is a really fun way to figure out how it all fits together.

I don’t count books at all. Seems pointless.

There’s nothing wrong with Hemingway but his novels haven’t aged well because many readers simply don’t understand the context anymore.

Hemingway wrote a lot in the period after World War 1. WW1 was hugely influential on the world, not just because it was a war like nobody had ever seen. But it irrevocably changed Western culture.

Before World War 1, Western society still revolved around traditional gender roles, notions of honor, and clear ideas about what a person’s role in society was. Men signed up to fight in the war en masse thinking they would do their part for their country, bring honor to their name, and come back a hero.

The industrialized meat grinder destroyed that notion. It didn’t just chew up millions and send even more men home physically maimed. They were mentally destroyed. The great war destroyed everything they thought was true about society. It put the lie to it all, to the silly notion of honor and chivalry, the importance of gender roles. The post-WW1 generation stopped caring about all it to the point where they were named the lost generation.

Hemingway writes a lot about that futility. About coming to terms with the unfairness of the world and how to try and find renewed purpose.

Farewell to Arms is a novel that looks at loss, inevitability, disillusionment, and the absence of meaning in it all. It can feel boring because it doesn’t go anywhere and that’s the point. There’s no hero overcoming adversity and winning. No love story that results in a happy ending. There’s just people struggling to do their best and coming up short.

Hemingway’s characters are often ‘code heroes’. Characters that try to live their lives according to a personal code that dictates how they deal with adversity. And often they are not rewarded for their efforts because that’s not how the real world works.

The problem is that WWI is far enough in the past by now that people have forgotten the lost generation. They know factually that the war was bad but they have no connection to the devastating sense of futility it created. It makes Hemingway’s stories difficult to relate to.

I buy one-time reads digitally. The books I really love and re-read periodically, I buy in very fine editions.

People have such a hard time with the notion that books aren’t there to paint their idealized world.

Before bookplates, there were book curses. Books were so valuable that the owners didn’t just mark them with their name, they put in a curse to deter thieves and people not returning borrowed books.

It goes back all the way to tablets from ancient Assyria and Babylonia where book thieves were held to be equally despicable to murderers and blasphemers.

He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it to be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse that cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.

They got a little more concise during the middle ages.

Steal not this book my honest friend
For fear the gallows should be your end,
And when you die the Lord will say And where’s the book you stole away?

I have my own book plate. Although I still want to rework the illustration sometime from a paper paste-in to something I can have carved as a stamp.