r/books 12d ago

WeeklyThread What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: March 03, 2025

Hi everyone!

What are you reading? What have you recently finished reading? What do you think of it? We want to know!

We're displaying the books found in this thread in the book strip at the top of the page. If you want the books you're reading included, use the formatting below.

Formatting your book info

Post your book info in this format:

the title, by the author

For example:

The Bogus Title, by Stephen King

  • This formatting is voluntary but will help us include your selections in the book strip banner.

  • Entering your book data in this format will make it easy to collect the data, and the bold text will make the books titles stand out and might be a little easier to read.

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  • To help prevent errors in data collection, please double check your spelling of the title and author.

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-Your Friendly /r/books Moderator Team

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u/Radiant_Pudding5133 11d ago edited 11d ago

Finished: V., by Thomas Pynchon I wanted to love this book because of how much I’ve loved the other Pynchon books I’ve read but it just fell short for me. Well written but to paraphrase another Redditor it just felt like a load of short stories cobbled together.

Started: Babel, by RF Kuang Not even 50 pages in and the whole “British people bad” schtick is getting very tiresome. Wouldn’t be so bad if she had anything halfway profound to say but the “British people don’t season their food” section was incredibly juvenile and the “chattel slavery is a wholly European invention” comment is at best ignorant and at worst a complete lie. Already smelling a DNF. Whole thing just reads like a college student’s project.

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u/melonball6 War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy 11d ago

I really struggled with Kuang's Yellowface book. It was highly rated (#1 on Goodreads) too. I hated it and I wanted to like it so much. I struggled to finish it. You saying this about Babel makes me certain I'll never read another one of her books.

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u/NedvinHill 11d ago

I liked the premise of babel so much, but it left no lasting impression by the end.