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Smerdyakov - a servant with an upsetting back story. His mother was a simpleton and was raped at night as she was sleeping rough by FYDOR himself. She gives birth to Smer in Fydors outhouse and dies, and Grigory and his wife - Fydor's servants - raise him. But he grows up to be strange, and his adoptive parents start to resent him. Fydor has a soft spot for him. He goes on a monologue about apostasy being based.

Now it's getting crazy. Dmitry messes with Katarina and the result is HER wanting to marry HIM, but he's obsessed with Grushenka and wants poor Aloysha to give her the bad news that the marriage is off. Very 'Sins of the Father' vibes - he's as lustful and vengeful as his Father.

"There are so many mysteries. Man is beset by too many mysteries on this earth. Fathom them as best as you can, and survive unscathed."

Grushenka - the centre of this lusty whirlwind. Dimitri wants her but is married. Ivan wants Dimitri's wife, so wants Dmitri to get Gruskenka. Fydor, shameless father, ALSO wants Gruskenka, and Aloysha's colleague, Ratikin, seems to also want her, but denies it, but nonetheless gives off a jealous vibe? What's so special about Grushenka? She's low-born and described as a loose woman - she even 'wants' Aloysha?

"Can there be such a sin as would exceed God's love?" says Zozima to a woman who killed her violent, abusive husband, and before justifying a theocracy that excommunicates criminals. Huh?

So Aloysha has some relationship to Lise, the disabled girl, and her Mother. They want him to visit.

I'm completely baffled by Ivan's argument in favour of a Church-state. Anyway, we let it slide.

A whirlwind tour of the 'startsy', and what it means to be a pupil of a starets. Ego-death. These guys are revered like saints. Aloysha has a vivid memory of being in this monastery, and the sunlight dappling the wooden floor and illuminating the icons - could this be why he is so drawn to the monastery and the starets? A pure, almost aesthetic experience, that stands alone as the only truly happy moment in his life?

Three brothers: Dmitry, Ivan, and Aloysha. Dmitry comes from a pretty terrible upbringing and seems to be hated by his father and is in general a bit of a wasteman. Ivan shows up out of nowhere and spellbinds his father, having no problem extracting money from him. And Aloysha, neurodivergent perhaps, incapable of confrontation and much happier secluded in a monastery.

Catches a nurse in the orphanage getting down to it when he's 5. Is looked after by 'Alice' - a few years older than him then she disappears. Sets the stage for pathological fear/hatred of women? He's adopted but abused by religious nut - the wife enables it. He gets with a waitress but when he learns he's mixed race it all seems to go terribly wrong. I kind of feel bad for him ... but I can't figure out his psyche

Disgraced Rev. Hightower can't escape rumours - that he's a cuckold and sleeps with a black woman. His sermons revolve around some mythic tale concerning his grandfather in the Civil War?

Christmas ratted out by Brown as being the murderer of Miss Brown - the woman of the house who he slept with. She herself was white and her family moved south to provoke slavery riots against their owners.

Lena in-between it all

Lena is almost autistically naive and good-natured but the dramatic switch in her disposition when she realises 'Joe Brown' is her lover gone AWOL, and Byron's heart slowly breaking when he realises that SHE's realised, is so 'tea', as the girlies say. Excellent writing, of course - it's Faulkner. Mr Christmas is one to watch.

Well set up so far. Sibylline prophecies set the scene for a potentially fatal clash of ideals and values. The violence begins with the murder of progressive brothers at the hands of reactionary factions and mutates into a war between tribes and Rome and finally with Mithridates, a King in the East.

Zama's life is tea, or rather, maté. And it's all very interesting because there's nothing else really going on in pre-civilised Asunción. But like all great narrators, he's unreliable, and even contemptible.

The film had a profound effect on me, so I have to read this now. So far a delightful experience. As strange and emotionally charged as Lanthimos' adaptation. I enjoy Bella's curious stream-of-consciousness way of speaking. And any story with a convoluted love affair is bound to pique my interest.

Prospero is already complex: victim of usurping, but usurps the island from Sycorax's son and is generally a bastard to everyone except his daughter in exacting revenge.

"There they hoist us// To cry to th’ sea that roared to us, to sigh// To th’ winds, whose pity, sighing back again,// Did us but loving wrong."

"Thou dost, and think’st it much to tread the ooze// Of the salt deep"

"It's a burden for us even to be men - men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea."

Always a love-hate relationship with Dostoevsky. He always defers to the spiritual realm to explain and remedy the nastiness that pervades a lot of human behaviour and sociality. A toxic relationship, to him, can be mended by having children. And having children is wonderful (for him), putting aside the ordeal it is for women. Certainly a reactionary in a lot of his thinking, which is where I sigh....

"But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love."

"But why should I die?"

Strange incest-y discussion about a father's jealousy over having to marry her daughter off. Freud would have a field day. Another dark undercurrent of the human psyche here...

Oh no, what an eventful dinner! I love how our narrator is so relatable yet at the same time so repugnant in many ways. It's as though we're being forced to converse with our ugly side. And that's probably why this is so gripping to read.

"I was already then bearing the underground in my soul."

Excellent passage where he debates the existential weight of moving out the way for an oncoming man, or standing resolute and 'bumping' into him. Really nice way of framing the deeper subject at hand here - individualism vs societal expectations.

OG 4channer who resists society, yet is so desperate to be SEEN by it. Incredible double bind. Freud dramatized.

"..But reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life." This is beautifully explained by way of military uniforms throughout history: colourful and splendid, and yet "they fight and fight, they fight now, and fought before, and fought afterwards."

Thus, a fundamental drive towards chaos is what makes us human, contrary to 'utopian science'.

"I would like now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you do or do not wish to hear it, why I never managed to become even an insect."

- 'Headier' than I expected it to be. Precursor to Beckett's 'Trilogy' in some respects? Man's 'nature' is being cynically torn apart chapter by chapter. Revelations thus far? . . .

"Man is so partial to systems ... that he is ready to distort the truth ... so as to justify his logic."

Oed slips into what I think is psychosis, the narrative itself takes a turn for the wild. All sorts of chance encounters, all bound by the 'Trystero' emblem. The prose also starts to melt into stream-of-consciousness, reflecting the escalation of events. Oed's husband addicted to LSD was also very entertaining. Note: Not like 'Gravity's Rainbow', which is a sweaty orgy of cryptic and fringe encyclopaedic references

Now THIS is a wild detective story, and the reader is commanded to pay attention and join in on the hunt. So Trystero - shadowy assasins and rivals to both a European postal service AND American one. Symbols of black, night, secrecy, silence. 'Natives' with black feathers who hunt at night. The disgruntled engineer doodling the symbol. Is Trystero a still surviving underground network? Now I think I get it . .. .

Bruh . . . conspiracies; Jacobean revenge play; and lots of words I had to google the definition of. It's turning into exactly the kind of fever-dream of a novel I expect from Pynchon, but I know I'll need summary notes at some point.

Already strange. The poem is beautiful and sad. What's interesting is the rhyming scheme - it strikes me as somewhat childish - yet the imagery conjured up and the subject matter is equal parts heart-breaking and mind-bending. Note: I don't know how much our commentator can be trusted here; how much of the poem is Shade's?

"Outstare the stars. . . above your head they close like giant wings, and you are dead."

This is a mad little parade of a story so far. Everyone is mentally ill, or traumatized, or damaged in some way, and the result is a strange, hallucinatory narrative. I like how a headache is described as "flowering behind the head." I love that nobody can be trusted, not even the narrative itself. How much of what happens is REALLY happening, and not just the paranoid delusions of Oedipa and the others?

Now this is what I signed up for - batshit weirdness. Corpse tied to the mast of an empty ship, dangling in the wind. Then follows his own log of events leading up to his demise . . . horrific stuff. Mr Swales is brilliant - dramatically describing Judgement Day in relation to a half empty graveyard - because half of the bodies are lost at sea! De Seward's Patient, Renfield, is also unnerving.

Dracula crawling down the side of a castle wall is a very creepy image. His 'nightmare' with those three women and them devouring the child is also quite horrific. The entire headspace of Dracula's castle is quite disorienting and claustrophobic, so credit to Stoker here for doing it so well. Prose wise it's fairly straight forward, which works for the style of the novel. Some nice descriptions but nothing special

hmmmm . . . it's strange, but stranger still is the lack of a cultural anchoring point. Everything is described as though it could be happening in a hum drum city in America. Similarly, each story is narrated in first-person, but we barely know the gender of each narrator unless explicitly mentioned - that's how impassive the style is. I can't decide if this works or not. The stories, for the most part, are good.

Gollum is really well written. Very unnerving. Amphibious freak whom even the Goblins are wary of. His eyes shine green when he's in a heightened state.

It's a good bit of fun, so far. The prose is fine. Nothing spectacular, but not as dry as I thought it'd be. I had a whale of a time reading the Troll's dialogue in a disgustingly heavy cockney accent, and I also appreciate the sense of history Tolkien is imparting. Elrond is old - he was there 'before History', with the 'first men in the North'. We pass ancient ruins built by 'wicked people'. It's all pretty cool.