Ah, I was wondering if there was a recent Iranian immigrant in your family, when recommending Parsepolis (it's set in late '70s Iran)! But then figured maybe there's some pocket of India left where Farsi is still spoken as a first language.

Yes, pre-British colonial rule, Farsi was the lingua franca between all the various Indian kingdoms (probably thanks to the Mughal influence). It remained extremely popular as a second language for the Bengali elite (& the Awadhi elite, probably others too) throughout colonial rule - and my family still has some Farsi books from my grandfather's collection. But in the past 40/50 years the popularity has fallen off a cliff (right alongside the rise of English as the lingua franca I guess). There are still colleges in Bengal that have Farsi departments, but they're dying out for lack of funding and interest.

It's a shame, Farsi sounds beautiful to my ears. Hopefully you and your cousins can pass down Farsi to the next generation!

Yes, I am!

Though I have actually never read Premchand - my Hindi reading skills are abysmal (I'm Bengali). I keep meaning to find a good translation - will get around to it one of these days.

If you don't mind answering, where exactly in India are you from? Not too many people speak/read Farsi these days in my experience - though almost every well-educated man in my grandparents' generation did.

From the two examples you gave, Dostoevsky and Premchand, you're trying to go from reading nothing longer than newspaper articles to reading classics.

The thing with classics is - they are like a slow roasted meat dish. You start with many, many routine, mundane steps and then after a whole day of cooking you finally have the pay-off of extremely delicious food. To people who naturally enjoy the mindless chores of cooking or people who love the dish, all that mundanity is worth it, and there's something joyous about doing little things that give such brilliant results.

But if your cooking is usually limited to 20-min Hello Fresh meals - it's gonna be a chore to make such a dish. You're gonna be bored out of your mind stirring the damn pot throughout the day, and you're gonna wonder why anybody even bothers. Then you're gonna walk out of the kitchen while the damn thing simmers - and suddenly realize the whole thing has burnt.

You gotta build up to things.

Read contemporary fiction. And don't worry if it's "not a serious book". People like me, who love reading, we started out with small, un-serious books - we just did it as kids, and got sucked into the hobby. Just because you're starting out as an adult doesn't mean you get to skip steps!

I would also recommend trying various genres, and sticking to books published in the 21st century and ones that are not marketed as "classics of the genre".

• Read a memoir - Trevor Noah's Born A Crime is amazing (& I read it without knowing who the guy was)

• Read a thriller - I really liked David Baldacci's "The Innocent" when I was new to the genre

• Read a narrative non-fiction - Ben McIntyre's "A Spy Among Friends" is brilliant, but I may be biased by my fascination with the Philby Story

• Read a pop science book - Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Science of Sex might be of interest - which college student doesn't wanna read about sex!? (And I say this as an asexual person myself - it was very entertaining and curious)

• Read a short story collection - I recently read one about an elderly serial killer that was great fun, An Elderly Lady is up to No Good

• Read a popular science fiction novel - Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary was great fun, but I wouldn't have gotten through it without the audio book. On this note, also try different mediums!

• Read a graphic novel - Joe Sacco's Palestine is what got me into it. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi was also really good

Read a romance, read a book about sports, read a fantasy, heck google a list of genres and just read the first book that comes up when you google the genre! As with anything else, the trick to enjoying an activity is trying various things till you discover your tastes!

I think character names weren't redacted because it was (& is) pretty difficult to identify somebody with just their name. You need a location to go along with it, at the very least, unless we are speaking of the royalty I suppose

I haven't read Frankenstein in a long time, so I don't know if it's the same there, but in Austen's novels I feel place names are "redacted" when they're associated with negative things and left in place when they're associated with positive things. Kinda like how our newspapers would go "Florida Man threw an alligator at his girlfriend" vs "Steve Irwin, the famous Australian wildlife educator, and his wife Terri spent their honeymoon trapping crocodiles in the wild".

So in Pride and Prejudice, we know Mr. Darcy is from Pemberly, Derbyshire and Pemberly is near the town of Lambton. That's basically pin pointing his identity - but that's okay because he has nothing to be ashamed of/to hide so his identity need not be protected. On the other hand, Wickham's regiment is always _Shire - because he is is a scoundrel and thus his identity needs to be protected/censored.

I came here to say the same ... OP, what's preventing you from picking up the next book?!

I'm intrigued, I'm gonna put this on my to read for 2023.

I have wild* bananas growing in my parents' backyard - I really can't imagine a world without bananas. It's one of the most normal plant I can think of - a house with a banana plant sticking out from behind it is one of those "standard drawings" you produce in grade school. I need to see why it's such a difficult crop to grow, and why/how it might go extinct.

*Well, I guess they aren't literally wild - it's the suburbia after all. But nobody farmed them or anything as far as we know - they just sorta do their own thing. The bananas they produce have crunchy seeds (of skittles size) inside. I promise I'm not taking the piss.

Not OP, and a non-native English speaker, even though English has been my first/primary language for a while now.

I also referred to Murderbot as "he" in my first review (before I realized what its preferred pronoun is). I did not assign a gender to Murderbot though - I thought of it as a genderless entity, if I thought about its gender at all. I just tend to use "he" as the default pronoun without thinking. My mother tongue doesn't have gendered pronouns, and I have never really gotten used to thinking of gender identity before using a pronoun. In my mother tongue masculine words also generally double as neutral gender words (similar to old English where man = human of any gender, and wif-men = wife-men/women/men of the female gender). So I just tend to default to male words in English too, unless I'm consciously making an effort.

Murderbot is the most relatable character I've read in a long time! Especially the way it feels about feelings!

Reading comprehension and listening comprehension are two totally different things, and have to be built up independently.

When I first tried audiobooks, I couldn't follow them either (I'm not a native English speaker either). I had to work my way up from conversational podcasts --> history podcasts where I already know the broad strokes --> audiobooks of stuff like Pride & Prejudice, things I basically have memorized by heart at this point --> other podcasts where I don't know the material --> simpler audiobooks or books on topics I already know about (light sci-fi, greek mythology) --> more complex audiobooks. This whole process took about 3 years for me. Then there was another 18 months or so of listening to audiobooks at 1x speed (which is so much slower than my reading speed, but eh, I listened to audiobooks only in situations I couldn't read anyway - so something is better than nothing) before I increased my default listening speed to 1.5x (still slow it back to 1x or 1.2x for some narrators, and increase to 2x for others). But even after nearly half a dozen years, audiobooks still take me longer than reading the same book, and I am still much better at processing complexity in text than on audio (so I would always choose to read some books on text). Which is to be expected, I have been reading for much longer!

It feels like people just expect to pick up a complex book on audio and immediately listen at 2x speed. That's like a 13 year old picking up Tolstoy and expecting to get through it in a week. It's unrealistic for the average human being - you gotta start smaller!