The second half of the first volume ("Swann in Love") is a masterpiece. I got bogged down after that and got stuck in the middle of the third volume.

I wouldn't defend most isekai (and I actively avoid most of them, other than villainess isekai), but I find them interesting as a phenomenon. One cultural aspect that I think is interesting is that Western readers spend a lot of time trying to decode the secret meaning of the stuff they read, while in East Asia they mostly don't really give a shit. If dudes want to read 30 identical light novels about a dude who is immediately overpowered and has four waifus, they will produce 30 of these novels and then give them 30 anime adaptations until the money runs out. Chinese fantasy novels sound the most extreme -- you'll see plots where a dude kills literally millions while having a harem of twenty. (Killing every member of a clan because one of them wronged them is a common reason for mass murder.) Thinking that your leisure consumption needs to be virtuous seems like a Western virtue.

FWIW, the female-led isekai have the same age gap dynamic with the genders reversed. You don't usually get actual harems (because that would be slutty, I guess) but you do get five guys who pine after the female lead because she's just so wonderful. This the level of self-indulgence that gets Western audiences to complain "she's a Mary Sue". But the core audience doesn't give a shit. Of course she's a Mary Sue -- that's what they're paying for.

This leads to a lot of garbage (most isekai, for example), but it leads to a big pulp fiction market that doesn't really exist in the West anymore. The closest is YA, but even the discussion around YA has a lot of anxiety about whether it's virtuous. You also have many other fringe genres like Western litrpg, but that is a pretty small publishing market. Re:Zero or Reincarnated as a Slime are closer to Harry Potter in their cultural prominence in Japan than they are to Western litrpg.

Mushoku Tensei has a weird vibe around it that makes it seem extra-sleazy (the author feels like he's indulging in something), but in a way if you are going to tell a reincarnation story you're stuck with it. What's the alternative? The lead who is in a 17-year-old body dates a 40-year-old? That usually ends up worse -- that's you end up with the "it's okay that she looks 12 because she's a 1000 year old demon" characters.

The only light novel I've read directly is Tearmoon Empire, which is basically "the French Revolution, but a comedy". The main character is basically Marie Antoinette, and after getting beheaded she gets a chance to go back and redo it to avert her fate. It avoid all of the tropes. Otherwise I only know them from their anime adaptations. The Executioner and Her Way of Life is about someone who's job it is to murder isekai protagonists, so it's less trope-y. The light novel for Oregairu, which isn't a fantasy at all but instead about high school, is supposed to be very good.

She had got to be the most recommended author in the world right now, so a lot of those recommendations have to be going to people who aren't the kind of person who would like her books. So it leads to a backlash.

I agree that the book doesn't quite feel finished, though the publisher says otherwise.

If I were going to analyze "The Part about the Crimes", I would compare it to a season of The Wire, rather than any literary tropes.

I'm might be the wrong person to answer, since I think 2666 is a masterpiece, but:

The second part is the least memorable. For the third and fourth parts, you can't really say "nothing ever happens".

I wouldn't say it's about "a mysterious serial killer". While the murders are central to the story, it's not a murder mystery. It's more about the relationship between the murders and the broader society.

There is a more obvious explanation: Reddit changed its algorithm for ranking posts, perhaps to increase engagement.

I don't think there's a Bay movie that even reaches Titanic or True Lies.

I liked it, though I read it a long time ago. The movie isn't wildly inaccurate, but the tone is different, and Tom Cruise isn't how I pictured Lestat.

Someone that I want to mention, mainly because it might interest someone who read the book or saw the movie: there is a recent anime The Cast Study of Vanitas, that is strongly influenced by the book. There's an obvious Lestat character, and an obvious Louis character.

The second half of Swann's Way, sometimes published separately as Swann in Love, is a genuine masterpiece.

Honestly, ChatGPT is great with words. It's not as good as a professional author. I would say it's not even as good as me now, but it's better than me in high school and maybe even college. And this is without OpenAI really even trying (it's not like they went out of their way to only train on good writing and avoid bad writing). "Words" is an entirely solved problem.

There are some minor problems with it. It has no sense of style or voice, so things all tend to take the same tone. It's bad at jokes. It's also really lazy, in that when you tell it to do something it does it in the most lackadaisical fashion. Its answers tend to read like a college student who is doing homework in a class they don't really care about, but they're trying to bullshit their way through. But it could just be all of these could be fixed if you just give it the right instructions when you use it.

Where the current AIs break down is that they have no mental model of the world, and they don't do any long-term planning. They would never get how an event in chapter 3 foreshadows an event in chapter 23. It's these subtle elements of writing, rather than just words, that they're bad at. At least for now.

Part of Nietzsche's appeal is his aphoristic style. It makes him very quotable, like the famous "And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" or "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger." He wrote with a verve that makes him interesting to read, even if you don't agree with his conclusions.

>who am I to stand in the way?

You're the only one who can.

It is kinda weird. Why be secretive about it?

You could ask what TV is the best kind for having sex on top of, but flat screens ruined that. Technology sucks.

The Holocene extinction is a bad thing, and steps should be taken to prevent it. Global warming is a bad thing, and we should take steps to prevent it or fix it.

But you're not depressed about those things. A bunch of animal species you've never heard of or seen are going extinct. You can intellectually understand that it is bad, but nobody (except maybe a literal biologist) is depressed about that to the extent that they literally lose all hope. You are depressed about something else, and this is making you fixate on the bad news.

They feel that the world is newly terrible.

I am going to pay you the courtesy of being honest. What you say here is a load of bullshit. You're just depressed, and you are externalizing that depression onto the world. Some things are worse than before. Some things are better than before. People were selfish before. People were materialistic before. Humanity lived for thousands of years in oppressive monarchies, with slavery and serfdom, and now we have imperfect democracies. People who grew up in subsistence economies where the expected lifespan at birth was 45, and they didn't wallow in despair. Why should you?

The show's one true waifu.

I've seen other posts about it before now.

I find it hard to believe that Vertigo will be number one again, but that's because I found it hard to believe it was number one last time.

2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

The Hobbit is much more of a kid's book, and is more comic. It's like "What if your boring stuffy neighbor accidentally got sucked into an epic quest to fight a dragon." Lord of the Rings starts out like a kids book (a birthday party with fireworks) but quickly transitions into epic fantasy.

Thank you for the response. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

So you did switch? I wasn't 100% clear.

Did you have an agent from before? If so, did you keep the same agent, or did you have to switch when you switched markets?

Yossarian is fixated on a certain event, so the story circles around that event until finally it gets revealed. It's a psychic wound that he keeps poking at, until finally he comes to grip with it. Then we see things that seem like throwaway jokes (like "Nately's Whore" or "Mais où sont les neigdens d’anten?") are core to the theme of the book.

The chapter where we get the full details of the event, "The Eternal City", is probably one of the most powerful chapters I've ever read in any book.