Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: Big update!!! Please welcome u/Soup_65 and u/RoyalOwl-13 as our new moderators! Both have been amazing, active members of the community for a long time now, so we are excited and happy to have them on board.

The Winner (and other results):

The winner of the seventeenth vote for the r/TrueLit read-along is Can Xue's Frontier. For those curious about the statistics, here is the spreadsheet of the RANKED CHOICE VOTES (122 votes total) and here is the pie chart of the TOP 5 VOTES (121 votes).

(Pagination is based on the Open Letter Books edition).

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* This is not to discuss any introduction to the book, but to discuss what you may know about it or about the author prior to reading.

Before next week's Introduction, buy your books so they have time to ship if necessary, and then once the introduction is posted you are free to start reading!

Thanks again everyone!

Friends,

Engagement has been lower than usual as of late despite our sub reaching record numbers. To kick-start us back to the glory days of yesteryear, we are once again rebooting the Themed Threads - in both its greatness and shame. Each time we've doubled in size, we've done one of these, so now is as good a time as any. With that, we are once again rebooting our most popular thread:

Please post your most controversial, unpopular, unpleasant and most garbage opinions which apply to literature or its field of study. Same rules as previously: please be civil (no personal insults or harassment/bigotry), but otherwise, have at it -- dish it out and don't be too sensitive if called out.

Again, sorting by controversial. Most controversial wins? loses? Who knows.

Please, no weak opinions and generally held opinions (e.g., "I didn't like the Alchemist", "I dislike Ayn Rand [insert novel]", etc.).

Last year's hottest takes:

1. Shakespeare's plays suck. I've seen multiples of them in hopes that I will finally happen upon a good one and it's all just the most shallow shit. I've seen Macbeth recently and it finally put me over the edge - I thought it was me, but at some point, I just have to admit that no, it's him. I guess it might have been good at the time it was written, but now it is the part of the canon and it just feels (again, because it is taught everywhere for last 400 years) like the most commonplace tropes stiched together in the most unimaginative ways. There is just no reason to study or even try to enjoy it in current times, when everything Shakespeare gave us is just part of society's subconscious.
2. Piracy is the best way to consume literature (and any art), especially due to the profit motive. Authors complaining about their books being "stolen" are more concerned about their financial stability rather than the art itself. Get a real job!
3. Philosophy texts are not literature. Lord of the Rings is not literature. Music is not literature. That being said, I am completely okay with Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
4. Electronic formats are objectively superior. An e-book is more convenient in absolutely every respect, more environmentally friendly and most importantly cheaper than the paper equivalent. This is a controversial opinion because no matter how you word it, a lot of people will argue against it with passion as if you are a techno-fetishists trying to outlaw paper books and force everyone to read from a screen, or alternatively a paid Amazon gigacorp shill looking to destroy their precious local bookstores.

The above are certainly interesting...let's see if we can top them!

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

The link to the form is at the bottom, please read everything before voting.

Welcome to Part 2 of the vote for the seventeenth r/TrueLit Read Along!

With the ranked choice done, we now have a Top 5 plus a random selection. The random selection is something that was suggested by the community to hopefully get more unique choices in the second round. How it worked was I took the average of the total score for all the books not in the Top 5 and then did a random number generator to select a book that was below the average. I will not reveal which book was the random one until after the voting is over.

These 6 books have been compiled into a new form and we will vote on them to determine the actual winner (no ranked-choice here, just standard voting). I won't be revealing the order of the winners from the ranked choice until next week either, just so it doesn't influence anyone.

As usual, please enter your username for verification at the end of the form.

Voting will close on Wednesday afternoon/evening (in the US). No specified time so just get your vote in before Wednesday to be sure. No complaining if it is closed when you check.

If you want to use the comments here to advocate for one of the choices, feel free to do so.

The winner will be announced on Saturday (April 20) along with the reading schedule.

Thanks again!

LINK TO VOTING FORM

I started reading The Books of Jacob in late February. With new characters cropping up every other page it soon became too difficult to remember who's who, so after 240 pages I decided to go back to the beginning and start taking notes.

I've never struggled so much with distinguishing characters in any book I've read so far. Maybe the issue is with my bad memory, especially with names, and not with the character names themselves, but there are a lot of them, and so many of them with the same name. Also typos or slight variations in names weren't helping me either.

Reading the book I noted down every new character that appeared and also previous characters that I received new information on that I felt was important. In parallel to keeping a list of characters I also built a sort of a family tree of connections between the more important characters. Should I ever reread the book I might add everyone to the family tree, but probably not.

Even after taking all the notes I was still very confused at times about who's who, but I really can't imagine how lost I would've been had I not taken any notes at all. At times, when lost, I consulted u/ANAS_T 's list of characters (and his notes on Polish orthography).

Overall a very good book, great fun to read and to try and put together who's who. The prose is fairly simple which makes it an easy read in that regard atleast. Before I started reading the book I was a little worried that it'd be very religious and possibly preachy (everything does revolve around different religions, but it's done well), but I was pleasantly surprised.

If anyone should find any typos or serious errors feel free to let me know. The link to the spreadsheet is here.

Tabs marked with:

🟢 should be spoiler free

🟡 should be spoiler free unless you skip ahead

🔴 spoilers of character connections, deaths, etc.

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Notes on other books I've read:

The Garden of Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

TrueLit Friends,

Hope you've all had a wonderful week and Spring. As many of you know, we're on track for a healthy 50,000 subscribers (our goal for year-end)! We'd never envisioned this happening so quickly, and we're pleased to see many new users alongside familiar faces.

With that, we only currently have four active moderators, as a few of us are currently going through very busy periods in life (alongside the fact that a few prior Mods have since deleted their Reddit account, and we're wishing them all the best as well!).

With that, we're seeking your help to handle the day-to-day (e.g., sifting of threads, ensuring civility in comments, creating new ways to engage the community...which is a reminder about perhaps returning to Themed threads again). Despite some lower than usual engagement as late, there's many requests for threads, and any help sifting through these would be hugely appreciated.

If you are interested in helping to continue grow our community, please apply HERE. If you are not interested, but you have any ideas you'd like throw to encourage engagement, please feel free to comment in this thread. All ideas are welcome!

As always, we do not collect any personal information. Responses will only be viewed by u/pregnantchihuahua3 and I. Responses will not be made public at any point.

Thanks all for making this place so special!

Cheers.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

An infinite library, filled with a practically infinite number of unique books. An endlessly repeating pattern of hexagonal rooms, stacked on top of one another, whose walls are lined with full bookshelves. This is the world that’s described in Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. But Borges doesn’t stop there. He also fills this world with people and different factions, all with their own beliefs about the Library and its books. In this post, I’ll analyze the different ways of coping with the absurdity of the situation these people find themselves in and what this can teach us about the absurdity of our own existence. But first, what exactly is “the absurd” and how does it apply to this story?

In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus Camus defined the absurd as stemming from “this confrontation between the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world”. This means that the absurd isn’t an inherent property of either the world or of human life. Rather, it’s something that appears when the two meet. It’s the product of a (seemingly) unresolvable struggle. In order for the absurd to pop into a story, the world of the story needs to be as confusing and unanswering as ours, and the people of the story need to have the strong desire to understand it despite all that. So, do this world and its people meet these criteria?

First, let’s look at the word the story takes place in. In order for the absurd to enter into the story, the Library needs to confound those living in it and defy any clear meaning and sense. While there is some logic to be found in the Library, as there is a repetitive geometrical pattern in its construction and a set limit to the amount of pages of its books, overall it still manages to mystify and confuse. All the books are filled with random characters, so most of them are completely incomprehensible. This also means, however, that some books will be filled with the purest wisdom. However, a few problems quickly arise.

First of all, it’s incredibly hard to find a meaningful book in the Library, because it’s simply far more likely for the random characters to form an incoherent mass than for them all to be in the right order. As the narrator remarks: “This much is known: for every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense and incoherency.”

Also, even when you finally find a book that seems to be sensible and to shed some light on the mystery of the Library, there is guaranteed to be another book whose contents completely disagree with the first book. As Borges writes, the Library contains “thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog” and so on. There is no way for the inhabitants to know which book is right and which is wrong. Because of this, the Library and its books elude all simple interpretation.

The other necessity for the absurd to arrive is that the people in the story strongly desire to understand this strange world. Proof of this can already be found in the opening paragraph, where it is described that “In this vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite - if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication?”. This is the earliest example of characters attempting to make sense of their world and it is far from the last. Borges writes about all sorts of interpretations of the Library, ranging from the Idealists, who “argue that the hexagonal room is the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space”, to Mystics, who claim there is an unending, circular book. “That cyclical book is God.” Even the text itself, supposedly written by someone wandering through the Library, is proof that the people of this world, like ourselves, strive to interpret it and try to see meaning where there is none (at least as far as we can deduce with reason).

So how do these people respond to the absurdity of this situation? Before diving into that, it’s necessary to understand the history of their understanding of the Library. When they first started reading the books, they didn’t make any sense to them.They imagined they might be written in ancient languages or forgotten dialects. But some of the books they found were simply too nonsensical to be written in any human language. For example, the narrator remarks that “four hundred ten pages of unvarying M C V’s cannot belong to any language, however dialectical or primitive it may be”.

In the end, a book was found containing “the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations”. From this, a philosopher deduced the random process that filled all the pages and concluded that the Library contained all possible books: “the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus”. The inhabitants now finally had a scientific understanding of the Library. At first, they rejoiced: “the first reaction was unbounded joy.” - “the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope”.

I think an interesting contrast exists between this event and Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead”. After Nietzsche, we were suddenly the masters of our own world and realised that it was up to us to decide what to do with it and how to live our lives. The people of the Library, however, were suddenly more constrained by the books than ever. They now knew that there must be books explaining everything, “Vindications - books of apologiae and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures”. Instead of becoming free to discover their own meaning, they became obsessed with the books and looked to them for the answers to all of their questions.

Camus would probably disapprove of this reaction and label it as a form of “philosophical suicide”. Philosophical suicide constitutes a response to the absurd that tries to prevent the absurd from occuring in the first place, by removing one of the two opposing forces which resulted in the absurd. This first reaction achieves this by claiming to be able to explain the world: there are books, so called “Vindications”, that will explain everything and make the nonsensical sensible again. And if the world can easily be understood by reading a single book, the conflict that birthed the absurd disappears.

The problem, however, is that I have already given the rebuttal for this position earlier in this post: for every explanation that exists in the Library, there exists a rebuttal and for every rebuttal another rebuttal and so on ad infinitum. The Library cannot be trusted as a source of truth, so this initial response is not a satisfactory one. I’d argue that most, if not all, of the solutions offered by inhabitants of the Library rely on some form of philosophical suicide and fail to adequately answer the absurd.

After a while, they realized the hopelessness of their situation and, while some inquisitors still wandered the hexagons and leafed through books every once in a while, they’d mostly given up. “Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.” A period of depression followed.

“The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.”

A sect appeared that tried to mimic the random process which filled the Library's books by shuffling through letters and symbols, until by chance the long sought-after books would appear. At first sight, this might seem like a clever solution, but in practice it’s just a slower way of combing through the books that are already in the Library. None of the books they produced didn’t already exist somewhere on its shelves and it would probably have been faster to continue searching for them in the regular way. It didn’t help that this sect was seen as blasphemous: “The authorities were forced to issue strict orders. The sect disappeared”. As for the problem of the absurd, the sect still relied on the assumption that their “precious books” would be of any use in understanding the Library. While they approached the search for those canonical works differently, they still made the same philosophical mistake and didn’t make any real progress.

The last approach to finding these holy texts was found by the Purifiers: “Others, going about in the opposite way, thought the first thing to do was eliminate all worthless books”. They simply threw all volumes they considered useless into the ventilation shafts in the middle of each hexagon. This, like the sect discussed above, is simply another way of putting the same assumption to practice. Like all of the others, the Purifiers didn’t achieve their goal. Some were afraid they’d destroyed possible ‘treasures’, but the Library prevents this quite elegantly: “each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, or a comma”.Their destruction was profoundly useless. I think that this destruction could actually be an interesting Sisyphean task, if the Purifiers had approached it correctly.

Camus thought that the only “correct” way to answer the absurd was by rebelling against it. He illustrated this with his description of Sisyphus, who was punished by the Gods for betraying Zeus. Camus thought of him as an “absurd hero”, because before he was punished he lived his life to the fullest and when the Gods tried to take him to hell, he took Hades captive with his own chains. He basically refused to die. When the Gods finally managed to capture him and took him to hell, they punished him by making him roll a boulder up a hill, which would immediately roll all the way down again when he got it up. This would repeat itself to infinity.

The reason why Sisyphus remains an absurd hero even in death, is that he is conscious of the absurd situation he finds himself in and even manages to accept and enjoy his punishment. Camus writes: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The destruction caused by the Purifiers has some similarities with the story about Sisyphus. Both are trying to accomplish a useless and impossible task. Even if Sisyphus could get his boulder to remain on the top of the hill, he still hasn’t accomplished anything useful. SImilarly, even if the Purifiers were able to destroy all worthless books and their copies, they still wouldn’t have understood the Library, as that is impossible. The difference is that Sisyphus (at least in Camus’ version) is aware of the absurdity and because of that, is able to live without hope and fully embrace his task. If the Purifiers also had this consciousness, perhaps they could have become absurd heroes too.

The final faction I’ll discuss are the “Infidels”, who “claim that the rule in the Library is not ‘sense’, but ‘non-sense’ and that ‘rationality’ (even humble, pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception”. Of the Library’s volumes they say that “they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity”. This is not too far from how I myself have characterized the Library earlier in this post. The narrator strongly disagrees with this view, however, and says of their views: “Those words, which not only proclaim disorder, but exemplify it as well, prove, as all can see, the infidels’ deplorable taste and desperate ignorance”. He goes on to argue that everything in the Library, even the most ridiculous volume imaginable, is necessarily explained by another book, meaning that no true nonsense exists: “There is no combination of characters one can make - dhcmrlchtdj, for example - that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god”.

In my opinion, the narrator is wrong here. While he is technically right that there must exist an explanation for every bit of seeming nonsense, the fact that the Library can both explain and deny everything, strips all explanations of meaning. If everything is meaningful, if everything is both full of tenderness and terror simultaneously, nothing has meaning and nothing stands out. In my view, the Infidels were right that the Library is irrational and the only way to truly answer this absurdity, is with rebellion.

In the final paragraphs of the story, the narrator shares his ideas about the Library’s infinity. Due to the restricted page count, the number of books isn’t endless, but according to him, the Library itself is. These are the concluding lines: “The Library is unlimited, but periodic. If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.”

In the end, the narrator, who has seen and read so much, who knows how others have tried and failed to deal with the Library’s absurdity, turns to this godlike Order for hope. While this is undeniably a beautiful idea, it does not meet Camus’ standards for a solution to the absurd. Even the narrator commits a philosophical suicide by assuming the Library’s endlessness and divinizing the order that he discovered. This is his way of finding some meaning or sense in his universe and by doing this he has prevented the absurd, instead of answering it. He refused to live without hope. This failure, along with that of the other factions, proves just how hard it is to deal with the absurd.

In the face of something so unsettling, we understandably tend to comforting explanations, like the idea of a higher Order or a “Vindication”. This is also true in our own world; you need look no further than the chapter “Philosphical suicide” in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyhpus for proof of that. In this way, “The Library of Babel” not only confronts those living in its fictional universe with its absurdity, but it also challenges its readers to think about how they would have answered its many questions and how they respond to absurdity in their own lives.

For me, it served as a gateway into Borges’ other works and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. I have enjoyed both of these authors a lot and especially Camus’ absurdism has been really inspiring to me. I will forever adore this story for its endlessly puzzling universe and the questions it made me ask. “The Library of Babel” deserves to be in every library’s collection and stands as a testament to Borges’ incredible skill as a writer and the fascinating pull of the absurd.

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Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this post, I really appreciate it. I look forward to reading your thoughts about my analysis and to hearing about your own interpretations. This post analyzes the text through one specific lense and I know you all will have your own interesting viewpoints about the story. Thanks again for taking the time to engage with this post!

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

The link to the form is at the bottom, please read everything before voting.

Welcome to the seventeenth vote for the r/TrueLit Read Along!

Remember: Week 1 of voting will consist of ranked choice to determine the Top 5 choices. Next week we will be doing Week 2 of voting where we will do a vote between the Top 5 choices with one vote per person.

READ THE INSTRUCTIONS (Week 1):

1. This is a ranked-choice vote. You get three choices. The book you choose in Column 1 will be given three points, Column 2 will be given two points, and Column 3 will be given one point. You must vote on all three columns. NOTE: You can technically select more than one choice per column, but it will not let you submit it if you do that. So if you can't press "Next", make sure to uncheck the one you don't want.
2. The second question asks you to enter your Reddit username. This is for validation purposes so people are less inclined to vote more than once. Don't abuse the system. Also, if you don't include your username, I will throw out the vote.

Vote closes on Thursday whenever I feel like it, so vote before then.

If you want to use the comments here to advocate for your book (or another book that you see suggested) feel free to do so.

Next Saturday I will be posting the Week 2 voting form to choose the official winner.

LINK TO VOTING FORM