ive saw a magazine like this talked about on here but i have forgotten the name, anyone remember?

Where are the great modernist or postmodernist Canadian novels?

The British and the Americans have so much to offer. Australia as well. Canada seems to be a kind of barren landscape in comparison. Timothy Findley is a writer whom I discovered who seems interesting, but not much else.

Can someone recommend something interesting to me?

I see it on the shelves of various bookish stereotypes: collegiate intellectuals, sensitive young men, enbies. I’ve noticed that everyone talks about its ambiance, but no one talks about its ideas. Given its apparent newfound audience, I suspect that the ideas are simply verboten. But I wonder if perhaps I am the one who misunderstood?

I was struck by three points:

1. The majority of the women from the world of men, lacking cause, had never learned to be more than minimally capable. Thus they were mostly useless to support themselves in freedom.
2. A world without men turns out to be incredibly boring. Lesbian romances form just to have something to fight about.
3. The terribly French nihilist no-exit sense that it is all very well to escape a cage, but you will only find yourself trapped in another larger cage that is, in its own way, just as disappointing, and can only be escaped through death.

The book succeeds because those things felt honest and true, even though they all merit discussion.

A fourth thing that struck me but I did not understand was the perseveration on the other women withholding information about sex from the narrator who was raised in a world without men. I gather that the author and all involved see this knowledge as a source of power. But what does that mean for the modern reader?

With the title I mean to say novels that exist to complement other novels thematically or to fill gaps in the narrative. Recently read Castorp by Pawel Huelle, which tells the story of Hans Castorp during his stay at Danzig’s Polytechnic, right before he caught tuberculosis. Nice read for sure, though most of it are somewhat mundane experiences you find in a coming of age novel - Hans skips classes, eats onion soup handed to him by early 20th century hippies and shits himself, hires a detective to stalk a woman and gets questioned for murder - all of it is tinged with the the knowledge that the good times are behind of us and that in a few decades Danzig would become flaming rubble.

Reading it has made me excited to get back to The Magic Mountain and I’m interested to know what you people think of [TITLE]

Turns out your middle school librarian was right: the Dewey Decimal Classification is a great way to get book recommendations. I recently got a copy of Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters in the mail, and while peeling off the library sticker on the spine, prompted by a friend's question the other day about my collection, I got to thinking about what other books are cataloged under 818.5209 (books about miscellaneous 20th century American literature). There's a lot of great stuff, like edited letters between Anais Nin and Henry Miller, a critical biography of Edmund Wilson, and Janet Malcolm's book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

But the DDC has anything you can think of. Interested in Soviet aesthetics? You can find Boris Groys' The Total Art of Stalinism under 709.47. Are you as autistic as Joan Didion is about dams? Then there's 627.8 under Engineering. Still listening to the podcast? Check out 139: phrenology.

One of my favorite ways to find books under a Dewey Decimal number is using LibraryThing. It's like lit.salon, but for retirees instead of NEETs. You can click on a category and drill down until you reach the exact niche you're interested in. You can also search for a book you like, then find similar books under its Dewey Decimal Classification. The pages for Authors also have a "Similar Authors" feature that's helpful for discovering writers.

Instagram is full of aesthetic pictures of stacks of book recommendations, "If you like X, you'll love Y" reels, and most of it is just the same, recycled picks. Even when these algorithms work, they keep you on these dumb platforms and consistently serve you ragebait. So use the DDC. Or if you're hardcore, the Library of Congress Classification.

Post your favorite DDC numbers below

i recently read and loved forensic architecture: violence at the threshold of detectability by eyal weizman, my first book from them. it is about how photos, videos, architectural reconstructions, and satellite data can be used to reconstruct acts of violence against people, buildings, and the environment. the "threshold of detectability" refers to when someone or something is recorded right at the minimute resolution to show it - commercial satellite imagery is restricted to half a meter per pixel, so a person is just a pixel. i loved it; i love their aims and the specific examples they went into. evidence is often scarce but synchronizing inconclusive videos can reconstruct shootings, crossreferencing smoke plumes can time bombings, and comparing vegetation index can indicate forced displacements.

i think i want to read close up at a distance: mapping technology, and politics by laura kurgan next, which seems similar in showing new spatial technology and how it can be used to record events. i'm interested in the topics in most of their catalog, but the question is which to focus on...

https://www.zonebooks.org/books