Note that using generative-AI tools to rewrite your posts is also a violation of the policy against unreferenced AI usage; Grammarly and other spell-check tools are fine, but not tools that substantially rewrite your post.
Multi-level barrage of US book bans is ‘unprecedented’, says PEN America. Censorship at local to federal level recalls past authoritarian regimes ‘but this has never all happened at once’.
@verbose I am indeed; this semester I'm finishing Historical Background to Literature (aka Western Literary Classics), Intro to Poetry, and Academic Writing
I think every surviving copy of Shakespeare's First Folio is unique. When they discovered a typesetting error, they corrected it without throwing away the sheets that had already been printed. So both facsimiles and reprints of that first edition are based on a set of copies without corresponding to any specific one.
@Tsundoku I hate spoiler markup as much as the next guy, but I find the framing of that answer (and its upvotes, let alone the entire discussion) as "ableist" and "discriminating against people with disabilities" everything but constructive.
@User1865345 One imaginary book I would really like to read is the full version of Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he died in the middle of writing. It's the only mystery I know where we know who the murderer is (with maybe 99% probability), but we have no idea who the detective is (he/she's in disguise, but is almost certainly one of the other characters).
@User1865345 Rabindranath Tagore was also the first Nobel Prize laureate about whom we had a topic challenge. By number of questions, it was the most successful topic challenge up to that point.
@PeterShor There's always someone else out there who'd enjoy reading a given book that you are enjoying, surely? I mean, the book must have some sort of wider readership than just you. I think if we ask questions about all kinds of books, then we might attract all kinds of folks who might otherwise believe that LitSE doesn't cater to their tastes. No?
@Randal'Thor One advantage of spacing your questions out, if you have a lot of questions about the same work, is that the answers to earlier questions may shed light on the questions you haven't asked yet.
We have a number of meta questions on tagging that have not made progress for some time, e.g. narrator and point of view, authorship and writing process. It would be nice if people could take a few minutes to have a look and vote (or answer).
to read A Passage to India without being acutely aware that Forster is white and I'm Indian, for example, or to read The Lusiads without the same awareness of Camões's race vs mine. I would be surprised if any person of color would ever find it necessary ask whether race is relevant to the appreciation of literature.
I put in a lot of work into my answers for this site. It's demotivating for me to do all that work if my answers have to fight for space alongside machine generated bullshit.
@Tsundoku My book collection exceeded my shelf capacity long ago. Visitors have to pick their way between stacks of books on the floor - the "librarinth"
“The botanist and the astronomer have for their provinces two worlds of beauty and magnificence not inferior in their way to literature; but no one expects the botanist to throw up his hands and say ‘how beautiful’, nor the astronomer to fall down flat and say ‘how magnificent’: no one would praise their taste if they did perform these ceremonies, and no one calls them unappreciative pedants because they do not.” — A. E. Housman
@verbose I just went back to read the poem with a (hopefully) clear mind, and I didn't get any sense of a clock either. I did get transported back to nursery, where boisterous kids (never me of course!) would be told to turn and face the wall and count slowly to 10, as a way of calming us down
