To me, good prose has the same qualities as music: it has rhythm, cadences, and modulations of tone and tempo; it pleases the ear.

Yeah, this one got a laugh out of me. Like some teenager's literary curiosity is killed for life, all because they couldn't read The Atlantic for free.

Redditors love bitching about paywalls because they are the exact people discussed in this article: they don't value quality writing or journalism, so the idea of paying for it is completely absurd to them.

When I was 12 I bought a copy of The Communist Manifesto for fifty cents at a library book sale. I knew that this was a book you were Not Supposed to Read so the allure was irresistible.

What I chiefly remember is the elaborate marginalia, obviously provided by a right-wing critic. It was all in green highlighter: because while he had started off using it to highlight passages he found particularly risible, he eventually took to using it to write his own withering critique along certain passages.

I wish I still owned that book. As I've grown older the political aspect of it interests me less and less, but reading one man's personal and wholly Quixotic crusade against Marx and Engels was actually pretty damn entertaining.

>Any book that makes me feel this way does not deserve my attention.

This really is a "you" thing, and has nothing to do with what novels deserve.

I could have read Wolf Hall forever.

I would leaf through it and give it a prominent place on my bookshelf.

By no means would I read the entire thing.

EDIT: Your edit is cracking me up. People in this thread are telling you (some of them quite rudely) to read an exhaustive entomological dictionary when they themselves lacked the patience to properly read your 100-word Reddit post.

Huh. I always meant to read Claudius the God since I enjoyed I, Claudius so much and find Graves such a fascinating figure.

...might skip it now. Thanks for the heads-up. Was the adaptation of I, Claudius good?

My idea for a Buddenbrooks mobile game was shot down but there is money in it, I know.

They are equally lazy in their attempts to seem authentic.

Yes, agreed on his memoirs.

>Does it perhaps start to make sense as I continue to read the book?

Yes.

It's an invented lingo that Burgess created for the characters and not something that is all that much easier for a British reader to understand. The expectation is that you will eventually come to understand more and more of it as you read.

Burgess was a strange guy, completely obsessed with language, with etymologies, with slang. He was slightly resentful, I think, of what people made of him and his education, and so he made a point (way too big of one, if you ask me) of showing off his erudition when it came to words.

My mother clearly thinks little of him but is not going to say anything negative about any of Diana's children.

>And in fact, these posts are actually the better ones because a lot don't include any thoughts on why the books weren't great, including the #1 post in this sub currently, which doesn't state a single reason they don't like the book they just finished.

There is a rule on this sub about low-effort posts, but it is not enforced stringently if the mods think they will gain traction.

LOTS of interesting shit gets nuked in New. But make a post about how Colleen Hoover is a hack, or how Project Hail Mary just made you love reading again, and it gets to stick around, and often winds up on the front page.

r/books is a lousy sub.

Yeah, I don't give much credence to the idea that astroturfing is at play here. This is simply a very bad book that a lot of people like.