{ "user": { "id": 120657, "username": "the0" }, "currently_reading": [ { "book": { "id": 749284, "title": "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: with Hume's Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature and A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh", "subtitle": "with Hume's Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature and A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh", "description": "A landmark of enlightenment though, HUme's An Enquiry Concerning Human understanding is accompanied here by two shorter works that shed light on it: A Letter from a Gentlemen to His Friend in Edinburgh, hume's response to those accusing him of atheism, of advocating extreme scepticism, and of undermining the foundations of morality; and his Abstract of A Treatise of HUman Nature, which anticipates discussions developed in the Enquiry. In his concise Introduction, Eric Steinberg explores the conditions that led to write the Enquiry and the work's important relationship to Book 1 of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature.", "pages": 170, "release_date": "1748-01-01", "release_year": 1748, "rating": 4, "ratings_count": 1, "slug": "an-enquiry-concerning-human-understanding-with-humes-abstract-of-a-treatise-of-human-nature-and-a-letter-from-a-gentleman-to-his-friend-in-edinburgh-1748", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/30747618/063853cd018e81086df225e53462158fca4509f1.jpeg", "authors": [ "David Hume", "Eric Steinberg" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "currently_reading", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-07-21", "started_reading": "2026-09-06", "read_count": 0, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null }, "progress": { "pages_read": 40, "total_pages": 170, "percentage": 24 }, "last_read_event": { "event": "progress_updated", "action_at": "2026-09-14T10:54:53.356878+00:00", "entry": null } }, { "book": { "id": 765590, "title": "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective", "subtitle": "A Programmer's Perspective", "description": "\"Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, Second Edition, introduces the important and enduring concepts that underlie computer systems by showing how these ideas affect the correctness, performance, and utility of application programs. Other systems books, written from a builder's perspective, describe how to implement the hardware or some portion of the system software, such as the operating system, compiler, or network interface. This book is written from a programmer's perspective, describing how application programmers can use their knowledge of the entire system to write better programs. Changes in hardware technology and compilers over the past decade have informed this major revision of the 2003 edition.\"--BOOK JACKET.", "pages": 1120, "release_date": "2002-02-01", "release_year": 2002, "rating": 4.4, "ratings_count": 5, "slug": "computer-systems", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/45879307/05401b51d4b707e7f119fd144301619187daa06b.jpeg", "authors": [ "Randal E. Bryant", "David Richard O'Hallaron" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "currently_reading", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-08-14", "started_reading": "2026-08-14", "read_count": 0, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null }, "progress": { "pages_read": 213, "total_pages": 1120, "percentage": 19 }, "last_read_event": { "event": "progress_updated", "action_at": "2026-08-28T17:34:46.240947+00:00", "entry": null } } ], "previously_read": [ { "book": { "id": 1577895, "title": "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", "subtitle": null, "description": "One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.", "pages": 104, "release_date": "1936-01-01", "release_year": 1936, "rating": 3.8833333333333333, "ratings_count": 30, "slug": "the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/32349454/4814af578263aee037ad6434a5418b0878dc5ff6.jpeg", "authors": [ "Walter Benjamin" ], "series": [ "Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe" ] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-09-02", "first_read_date": "2026-09-14", "last_read_date": "2026-09-14", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 431146, "title": "Death Comes for the Archbishop", "subtitle": null, "description": "\"What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. \n\nIn the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. \n\nOut of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.\" --Provided by Amazon", "pages": 176, "release_date": "1926-01-01", "release_year": 1926, "rating": 4.056603773584905, "ratings_count": 53, "slug": "death-comes-for-the-archbishop", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/24067376/faae865607c2363bdf3db81fb8f88d433606162a.jpeg", "authors": [ "Willa Cather", "A.S. Byatt" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4, "date_added": "2026-08-20", "first_read_date": "2026-08-31", "last_read_date": "2026-08-31", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 312500, "title": "Candide", "subtitle": "or, Optimism", "description": "Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. \r\n\r\nAnd so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism.", "pages": 148, "release_date": "1759-01-01", "release_year": 1759, "rating": 3.796521739130435, "ratings_count": 575, "slug": "candide", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/10919001/7cf4b0fc5135b8dfd367c692a4936f9b66758a8d.jpeg", "authors": [ "John Everett Butt", "Voltaire" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 5, "date_added": "2026-07-17", "first_read_date": "2026-08-20", "last_read_date": "2026-08-20", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 385284, "title": "A Confederacy of Dunces", "subtitle": "A Novel", "description": "A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, \"huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures.\"", "pages": 338, "release_date": "1980-01-01", "release_year": 1980, "rating": 3.8480565371024733, "ratings_count": 566, "slug": "a-confederacy-of-dunces", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/12157419/267b596a0c2d11a49e029f36ee194569311035ff.jpeg", "authors": [ "John Kennedy Toole" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 5, "date_added": "2026-07-11", "first_read_date": "2026-08-17", "last_read_date": "2026-08-17", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 656831, "title": "Fear and Trembling", "subtitle": null, "description": "In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.", "pages": 103, "release_date": "1985-08-29", "release_year": 1985, "rating": 4, "ratings_count": 1, "slug": "fear-and-trembling-1985", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/59708475/ce00743f94204ec96b3098113e527fe0c2b4825c.jpeg", "authors": [ "Soren Kierkegaard" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4, "date_added": "2026-07-26", "first_read_date": "2026-07-30", "last_read_date": "2026-08-08", "read_count": 2, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 1467344, "title": "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers", "subtitle": "The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers", "description": "This brilliant and concise account of the lives and ideas of the world's great philosophers —Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Croce, Russell, Santayana, James, and Dewey—is \"a delight\" ( The New York Times ) and remains one of the most important books of our time.\n\nWill Durant chronicles the ideas of the great thinkers, the economic and intellectual environments which influenced them, and the personal traits and adventures out of which each philosophy grew. Durant’s insight and wit never cease to dazzle; The Story of Philosophy is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history and development of philosophical ideas in the Western world.", "pages": 528, "release_date": "1926-01-01", "release_year": 1926, "rating": 4.212121212121212, "ratings_count": 33, "slug": "the-story-of-philosophy", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/31512684/d5999c4855c2a0a0f0ee9222e4e76460fc58f197.jpeg", "authors": [ "Will Durant" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-07-04", "first_read_date": "2026-07-23", "last_read_date": "2026-07-23", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 447843, "title": "Spring Snow", "subtitle": null, "description": "The first book of Mishima's landmark The Sea of Fertility sequence, this novel is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders.", "pages": 400, "release_date": "1967-01-01", "release_year": 1967, "rating": 4.074074074074074, "ratings_count": 81, "slug": "spring-snow", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/14070148/adc4ac5988c05f2228aec21a799409f0ef16a024.jpeg", "authors": [ "Yukio Mishima", "Michael Gallagher" ], "series": [ "The Sea of Fertility" ] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4.5, "date_added": "2026-07-15", "first_read_date": "2026-07-21", "last_read_date": "2026-07-21", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 44503, "title": "The Woman in the Dunes", "subtitle": null, "description": "The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel. After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.", "pages": 260, "release_date": "1962-01-01", "release_year": 1962, "rating": 3.67578125, "ratings_count": 128, "slug": "the-woman-in-the-dunes-1962", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/28442722/0d43e5085e5dd6a904fb80b3c27b906290937798.jpeg", "authors": [ "Kōbō Abe", "E. Dale Saunders", "Machi Abe" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 3, "date_added": "2026-07-14", "first_read_date": "2026-07-16", "last_read_date": "2026-07-16", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 31677, "title": "Heart of Darkness", "subtitle": "New York Public Library Collector's Edition", "description": "Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity.", "pages": 228, "release_date": "1899-01-01", "release_year": 1899, "rating": 3.343661971830986, "ratings_count": 1065, "slug": "heart-of-darkness", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/3431377/48a9c088af3c98971dc1e6c5663590b04c7da65a.jpeg", "authors": [ "Robert Hampson", "Joseph Conrad" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 2.5, "date_added": "2026-07-11", "first_read_date": "2026-07-13", "last_read_date": "2026-07-13", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 119359, "title": "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea", "subtitle": null, "description": "THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'ojectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part and react violently.", "pages": 194, "release_date": "1963-01-01", "release_year": 1963, "rating": 3.8011049723756907, "ratings_count": 181, "slug": "the-sailor-who-fell-from-grace-with-the-sea", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/7684026/545b20c113fdc8cad4e2f079f229d1b48d89ebe0.jpeg", "authors": [ "Yukio Mishima", "John Nathan" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4.5, "date_added": "2026-07-10", "first_read_date": "2026-07-13", "last_read_date": "2026-07-13", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 765772, "title": "Fires on the Plain", "subtitle": null, "description": null, "pages": 246, "release_date": "1951-01-01", "release_year": 1951, "rating": 4.142857142857143, "ratings_count": 7, "slug": "fires-on-the-plain", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/59902686/f9d5a6258df7effe091184f899acb23aef18bb9b.jpeg", "authors": [ "Ivan Morris", "Shōhei Ōoka" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4, "date_added": "2026-07-08", "first_read_date": "2026-07-10", "last_read_date": "2026-07-10", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 825329, "title": "An Armenian Sketchbook", "subtitle": null, "description": "An NYRB Classics Original Few writers had to confront as many of the last century’s mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman, who wrote with terrifying clarity about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman, notable for his tenderness, warmth, and sense of fun. After the Soviet government confiscated—or, as Grossman always put it, “arrested”—Life and Fate, he took on the task of revising a literal Russian translation of a long Armenian novel. The novel was of little interest to him, but he needed money and was evidently glad of an excuse to travel to Armenia. An Armenian Sketchbook is his account of the two months he spent there. This is by far the most personal and intimate of Grossman’s works, endowed with an air of absolute spontaneity, as though he is simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia—its mountains, its ancient churches, its people—while also examining his own thoughts and moods. A wonderfully human account of travel to a faraway place, An Armenian Sketchbook also has the vivid appeal of a self-portrait.", "pages": 160, "release_date": "2013-02-19", "release_year": 2013, "rating": 4.5, "ratings_count": 3, "slug": "an-armenian-sketchbook", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/59976307/2b80cb2e0f61d8ec6d953baf7b679a5577c61b22.jpeg", "authors": [ "Vasily Grossman" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4.5, "date_added": "2026-07-05", "first_read_date": "2026-07-07", "last_read_date": "2026-07-07", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 737761, "title": "The Death of Napoleon", "subtitle": null, "description": "\"\"Ladies and gentlemen, alas! The Emperor is dead.\" The news from St. Helena goes out across Europe, but in fact Napoleon has not died. By means of an ingenious escape, he has returned to the Continent, leaving an impersonator on St. Helena, and it is this double who has unexpectedly and very problematically passed away. Traveling incognito, the emperor experiences a series of bizarre adventures that bring him face-to-face with the myth of Napoleon as it is disconcertingly played out in everyday life. After a visit to Waterloo and a near arrest at the French border, he eventually arrives in Paris, where he falls in with some veteran Bonapartists and visits an asylum where most of the inmates are laboring under the mistaken impression that they are he. Will Napoleon ever recapture his true identity? Who, in the end, is he, now that \"the Emperor is dead\"? Simon Leys's truculent, delightful fable poses these and other questions in a rare work of fiction that is continually surprising and effervescent\"--", "pages": 145, "release_date": "1986-01-01", "release_year": 1986, "rating": 3.375, "ratings_count": 4, "slug": "the-death-of-napoleon", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/30734217/4847ffcb12586165bb0c42e01cf46175dfa7e7d8.jpeg", "authors": [ "Patricia Clancy", "Simon Leys" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4.5, "date_added": "2026-07-05", "first_read_date": "2026-07-05", "last_read_date": "2026-07-05", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 702276, "title": "The Flowers of Buffoonery", "subtitle": null, "description": "The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba — the narrator of No Longer Human — is convalescing after a failed suicide attempt. Friends and family visit him, and nurses and police drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, Yozo and his visitors try to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh. Dazai is known for delving into the darkest corners of human consciousness, but in The Flowers of Buffoonery he pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a fresh and darkly humorous addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.", "pages": 64, "release_date": "1935-01-01", "release_year": 1935, "rating": 3.8676470588235294, "ratings_count": 34, "slug": "the-flowers-of-buffoonery", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/60825841/ae2a1fa8e1007a8ed3a25b224eeddb8c4015b733.jpeg", "authors": [ "Sam Bett", "Osamu Dazai" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-07-04", "first_read_date": "2026-07-04", "last_read_date": "2026-07-04", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 372082, "title": "Hunger", "subtitle": null, "description": "First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes into the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Like the works of Dostoyevsky, it marks an extraordinary break with Western literary and humanistic traditions.\r\n\r\n\r\n----------\r\nAlso contained in:\r\n\r\n - [Ernest Hemingway / Knut Hamsun / Hermann Hesse ](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17970062W)", "pages": 150, "release_date": "0019-01-01", "release_year": 19, "rating": 3.9, "ratings_count": 95, "slug": "hunger-19", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/60168839/d847d2a46a6f0ec97cd98a31bcdd5a7137405389.jpeg", "authors": [ "Knut Hamsun" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4, "date_added": "2026-07-02", "first_read_date": "2026-07-04", "last_read_date": "2026-07-04", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 478691, "title": "Existentialism is a Humanism", "subtitle": null, "description": "This book presents a new English translation of two seminal works by Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominant European intellectual of the post-World War II decades. The volume includes Sartre's 1945 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” and his analysis of Camus's The Stranger, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre's introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. In her foreword, intended for an American audience, acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal offers an assessment of both works. It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Sartre accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre's doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.", "pages": 123, "release_date": "1945-01-01", "release_year": 1945, "rating": 4.012987012987013, "ratings_count": 77, "slug": "existentialism-is-a-humanism", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/2611659/eb94694aa22aa3aee4925f797b8346c53993f1bd.jpeg", "authors": [ "Annie Cohen-Solal", "Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre", "Carol Macomber", "Jean-Paul Sartre" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-07-03", "first_read_date": "2026-07-03", "last_read_date": "2026-07-03", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 375422, "title": "Stoner", "subtitle": "Roman", "description": "William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.\n\nJohn Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.", "pages": 288, "release_date": "1965-01-01", "release_year": 1965, "rating": 4.3926261319534285, "ratings_count": 773, "slug": "stoner", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/3478337/724f3530e9716fc03ded4f7d635c65f64c4e93c6.jpeg", "authors": [ "John Williams", "John McGahern" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": 4, "date_added": "2026-06-29", "first_read_date": "2026-07-02", "last_read_date": "2026-07-02", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 961948, "title": "On the Genealogy of Morals", "subtitle": "'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings Student Edition", "description": "Explores issues at the very core of human nature in three powerful essays. Here Nietzsche dissects the basic concepts of 'good', 'bad' and 'evil', going on to examine humankind's transformation from barbarous creatures into civilized beings who can feel remorse, regret, pity and compassion but, in the process, destroying instinct and freedom. Nietzsche asks why the virtues of poverty, humility and chastity have become so central to religion, even when they deny vitality and life itself. Daring to expose uncomfortable truths, this brilliant and provocative polemic provides startling insights into our complex psychology.\n\nModern Western Philosophy, C 1600 To The Present.\n\nEthics & Moral Philosophy.", "pages": 208, "release_date": "1887-01-01", "release_year": 1887, "rating": 3.9871794871794872, "ratings_count": 78, "slug": "on-the-genealogy-of-morals-1887", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/external_data/3089025/b7eb0313b99e3cb55af3501b0a0302826c5d222d.jpeg", "authors": [ "Robert C. Holub", "Michael A. Scarpitti", "Friedrich Nietzsche" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-06-28", "first_read_date": "2026-07-02", "last_read_date": "2026-07-02", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 216850, "title": "The Fall", "subtitle": null, "description": "Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth.\n\nThe Fall (French: La Chute) is a philosophical novel by Albert Camus. First published in 1956, it is his last complete work of fiction. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence, and truth. In a eulogy to Albert Camus, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as \"perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood\" of Camus' books.", "pages": 147, "release_date": "1956-05-16", "release_year": 1956, "rating": 3.8958333333333335, "ratings_count": 240, "slug": "the-fall-1956", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/editions/5035607/0aabe67f-11f5-4610-a62c-4494dcde3dce.jpg", "authors": [ "Justin O'Brien", "Albert Camus" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-06-28", "first_read_date": "2026-06-27", "last_read_date": "2026-06-27", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 499357, "title": "On Liberty", "subtitle": null, "description": "Two cornerstones of liberalism from the great social radical of English philosophy John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty, one of the sacred texts of liberalism, he argues that any democracy risks becoming a \"tyranny of opinion\" in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. The Subjection of Women, written shortly after the death of Mill's wife, Harriet, stresses the importance of sexual equality. Together they provide eloquent testimony to the hopes and anxieties of Victorian England, and offer a trenchant consideration of what it really means to be free. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.", "pages": 248, "release_date": "1859-04-01", "release_year": 1859, "rating": 4.1, "ratings_count": 10, "slug": "on-liberty-84d3870e-e89a-41d0-97f4-a0d2ec73a907", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/30448846/c963b05429950f1480645824b6108adb544e082d.jpeg", "authors": [ "John Stuart Mill" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-06-28", "first_read_date": "2026-06-26", "last_read_date": "2026-06-26", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } }, { "book": { "id": 431713, "title": "The Metamorphosis", "subtitle": "A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky", "description": "Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins with one of the most shocking openings in literature: traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover he has turned into a giant insect. But this is not just a story of absurd metamorphosis—it is a deeply human tale of alienation, family obligation, and what happens when someone is no longer “useful” to society.\n\nAs Gregor’s family struggles to cope with his bizarre condition, Kafka explores powerful themes of dependence, dignity, and the quiet cruelty of social expectations. Both absurd and painfully realistic, this modern classic strikes a unique balance of dark humor and existential insight.\n\nFor fans of George Orwell, Albert Camus, and modernist fiction that blurs the line between the strange and the familiar.\n\nWhether you're reading it for the first time or rediscovering it with fresh eyes, The Metamorphosis is a novella that stays with you—long after you’ve turned the final page.", "pages": 45, "release_date": "1915-01-01", "release_year": 1915, "rating": 3.8466796875, "ratings_count": 2560, "slug": "the-metamorphosis", "cover_url": "https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/6343685/704cd849182f0351406e03434d2968ade757fde0.jpeg", "authors": [ "Franz Kafka", "Michael Hofmann" ], "series": [] }, "user_book": { "status": "previously_read", "rating": null, "date_added": "2026-06-28", "first_read_date": "2026-06-25", "last_read_date": "2026-06-25", "read_count": 1, "owned": false, "starred": false, "review": null } } ] }