>>6233 I haven't read in a long time but last night I checked out a phone game called Alter Ego which had a reading list in it of some interesting sounding stuff including No Longer Human, which was the last thing I read. Never got around to finishing it even though I was enjoying it. Might pick it back up tonight and then check out some of the other books on the list. The book you posted seems like it might be up my alley too.

I started The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard a while back but I've been too stressed to sit down and finish it. Same with The Castle by Kafka, just left it when I was at like 30% last year my life is too much of a mess to enjoy this kind of stuff

>>6297 Totally get you man. After finishing Hunger i've been reading some Chesterton poems, lighter christian poems is very comfy. Sometimes modern, deep literature is too much,

>>6233 I usually recommend European legends for some comfy reading. Not folklore, mind you; Beowulf, Arthurian accounts, and other Monastic-transcribed works have just the right tone.

>>6297 me again. my life is still a mess but I started reading again, just a bit, sticking to to a light genre fiction type of reading. especially works I've read long ago and have forgotten a lot of in the past week or two I've read Raymond Chandler's The High Window, and atm I'm going through Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Ishiguro is great at writing accessible, relatable stories, and The Unconsoled was my favourite novel for a while, though I'm not sure how to describe it since it's so weird. the story is written as a single lengthy dream, where characters and locations are weirdly malleable and always in a state of change. their identities reflect the narrator's subconcious, constantly overlap with one another and are always oddly reminiscent of people from his past. their relationship to the protagonist and their roles never seem to fully materialize - just always sort of suspended in this weird liminal, transitory state that can't be pinned down precisely. the protagonist's goals are constantly swamped and buried under a barrage of more and more tasks which he becomes responsible for, many of which he can't even remember taking. I've found that effect of being haunted by past failures and constantly overwhelmed with promises/mundane jobs oddly comforting, just because of how relatable it feels /late/ talks about dreams a lot so I thought it was fitting to write about a novel written entirely in dream logic

>>6236 >No Longer Human On my list but damn I didn't read a lot lastly. At least not as I used to read younger. Currently reading some Mishima novels.

I read Karpyshyn's Darth Bane Trilogy a couple months ago. It was a great example of the villain protagonist; not generally doing things FOR TEH EVULS, but acting sensibly from some compelling motive. You might not agree, but you understand. Apparently this guy wrote for a lot of the Bioware games where you get paragon/renegade dialogue options, so I guess it's not hugely surprising that he can write both sides convincingly. It's been mostly light fare this year. I recently dropped "The Raistlin Chronicles", despite it being pretty good relative to what you would expect from Dragonlance, or genre fiction. I just hit my limit for this sort of wankery. Some actual literature: The Hermit and the Wild Woman, by Edith Wharton. A short character study of a kid who goes innawoods after his village gets the JRPG hometown treatment, somewhere in Italy several hundred years ago. Wharton's prose is wonderfully free of the phrase "the big man", which is used liberally to describe both Caramon in Dragonlance, and the protagonist in Karpyshyn's novelization of Baldur's Gate II, which I also read for some damned reason. She makes an interesting, if perhaps tendentious, study of deeply religious people of the middle ages and the different ways their piety can manifest.