This is utter BS. For whatever reason you decide to actually count the books you read … it supposedly requires of you to have finished those books. You can’t have it both ways, you either stop counting, or you don’t count the ones you haven’t finished. You’re only cheating yourself.
Oh, and an active decision to never finish a book is a lot worse than putting it on a back burner for a time, while you read something else.
Even English writings are sometimes translated into other languages maintaining certain terms in the original. Actually Mister, Miss etc. It’s a way to not lose sight of the original language - many times it’s not irrelevant that the action occurs in England, for instance.
It’s the same with Japanese: if you want to keep the reader always aware of it being a Japanese story, you use san instead of Mr.
It’s also common enough by now, that if you started using the English translations for -sama or Sensei, people would be confused.
It absolutely is and it’s always used as a reference whenever people are discussing other dystopian writings.
It’s like saying why isn’t the Iliad more well known than modern epic literature?
You don’t need to previously want to relate with a character to end up relating to them.
And it’s perfectly normal to have a reaction of grief, shock, rejection or disbelief to reading about trauma or a character’s traumatic experience and aftermath, even if you never had that kind of lived experience or you don’t end up identifying with them.
It’s a riff off ancient beliefs.
The most important thing about the novel’s background is that Stoker wrote it as a revenge against a theater manager he hated while working in the theater himself. He looked for a relatively obscure figure in history he barely knew anything about and the vampire thing had been the YA dystopia of those days for decades.
The rest is tropes.
Oh, and titillation.
Maybe I would’ve used “dense”, instead of soft, but I suppose “soft” applies too when someone feels the need to unnecessarily put down another person for their potentially traumatic life experiences. I suppose it does make them feel more powerful.
Just because we get to see some positive traits in them doesn’t mean they aren’t villains. A character can be as nuanced as the writers wants, I don’t think anyone would disagree that people who hurt children on purpose are villainous. Sure they can have their good moments and their journey of discovery and what have you. It doesn’t erase their past acts, they just need to atone for them and keep on the straight and narrow. What can I say, the road from absolute villain to nuanced complexity and a very checkered past is hard.
It’s not a problem that he centers his writing on men and their struggles. The problem is he includes some women and writes them badly.
Apart from books where any kind of graphic component is important, all books work as audiobooks. It’s a matter of finding a good narrator who has understood the assignment. If Joyce’s Ulysses is on Audible, not to mention all classics…
I think I was more bugged by the uggs in Greta Gerwig’s version.
I agree on the antisemitism, although in all fairness it comes more from folklore and the implicit traits associated with the mythical/folkloric creatures involved rather than from the author’s ideas or intentions. And the movies … well that’s where I think they did screw up.
As for slavery apology: you are mistaken. For a very long time I bothered to try and understand why some people just can’t realize that. I don’t care that much anymore, especially in the age of having infinite knowledge at our fingertips. Word’s coming out of a character’s mouth aren’t necessarily the author’s convictions and many, many writers use their characters and heroes to voice the opposite of what the authors mean to convey in order to show how ridiculous or harmful those ideas are. It’s very very common in fiction and in the simpler writings the hero ends up visibly learning they were wrong. In the more sophisticated ones maybe you don’t even get that, you just have to acknowledge the hero never learns. But YOU, the reader should.
As for them being sexist… huh? Is it because they show certain very sexist characters? Did that bother you? Then the books attained their objective.
Never trust the fans. They are a fickle and treacherous bunch.
You know how when you’re wearing shades … you can see well enough … but then you take them off and you realize there’s a lot more colors and hues than you could see with the shades on? That’s how knowing more words is: you don’t know how helpful it it and how much it expands your way of thinking (not only of expressing yourself) until you know a lot more words.
Even the most common concepts or emotions… it’s amazing when you realize how one word can make a lot of difference compared to another.
Just think it’s like having a full panoply of tools for your project, and they’ll award you infinitely more precision while you work than just having a standard set of 6 screwdrivers.