Just finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke! Absolutely loved it.
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I’m on book 6 of Farmer’s 7-book World of Tiers series.
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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Catherine Howe
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Just finished my 40th book of 2025, with Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab. A vampire tale, told across many centuries. 4/5 stars for me - some concerns about pacing, balance of multiple POVs, and difficulties with some settings as depicted. But overall enjoyed it a lot.
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I just started Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. My daughter was horrified to learn I’ve never read it, so now I am.
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Recently finished Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson, a well written and thorough overview of how computers and the internet affected the publishing industry! Many charts and tables of actual sales data! Covers the obvious topics (the rise of ebooks and digital audiobooks, self-publishing), but also things like early experiments with ebooks, how marketing / book discovery is becoming more reliant on personalised algorithms and user data.
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Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano is a novel of many emotional highs and lows. I was taken by this tale about the four sisters Padavano and William Waters, the husband of the eldest sister. Well-developed characters, complex yet believable bonds between them, lots of laughs and even more tearjerking.
I do feel that Napolitano is a bit too nice to her characters. On the surface, the first comparison that came to my mind is John Irving’s The World According to Garp, with the outspoken female lead-character and the somewhat subdued sportsplaying male protagonist. However, whereas Irving displays a sardonic pleasure in the suffering he puts his characters through, lending his writing a dark humour, Napolitana remains sugary compassionate, even though she is the one writing all these hardships for her characters.
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I’ve never understood this as a criticism, lol. I tend to feel like people who go around saying things like “kill your darlings” are just being sadistic assholes. XD
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But that’s nothing at all to do with treating your characters badly! It’s about how sometimes you have a lot of fun writing a scene/plotline/character and become very attached to it, but if it’s not serving the story you should still cut it.
And Rovarsson’s complaint seems to be about a book in which a lot of bad things do happen to the characters, he just doesn’t like the tone with which that’s handled, so “lots of bad things have to happen to characters, that’s the only way a book can be good” is not only not a particularly common argument, but also not one being espoused in this thread.
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In all fairness, there are a lot of people on the internet with less than refined tastes who seem to have a kneejerk reaction that anything happy-go-lucky is automatically garbage and that being dark and edgy, even if its superficially dark and edgy for the sake of being dark and edgy automatically makes something a masterpiece. I believe the Internet slang term for such people is “edge lord”… and I’m sure there are people with that mindset who misinterpret “kill your darlings” as you should torture your characters for the hell of it.
Not that I think anyone in this thread is being that shallow, but I’ve seen stories I love get trashed for being too upbeat and positive often enough that I can believe most people claiming an author is being too nice to their characters just want to read about suffering rather than it being a critique of a tonal mismatch.
I mean, I don’t have access to secret knowledge about Rovarsson’s post that other people in this thread don’t have. The post is explicit that it’s not about what happens to the characters but about how the narrative treats it:
However, whereas Irving displays a sardonic pleasure in the suffering he puts his characters through, lending his writing a dark humour, Napolitana remains sugary compassionate, even though she is the one writing all these hardships for her characters.
It’s a reasonable enough misread of the one line, but not of the post as a whole.
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It’s just a way of saying that writers can’t get so attached to their characters that they can’t bear to see anything bad happen to them. It’s hard to kill your darlings. A lot of writers cop out of necessary tension because they love their darlings too much.
I just finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and it was absolutely delightful, like all Abercrombie books. It’s funny because there are a lot of darlings in the book and I spent the whole 500+ pages wondering which one he would kill.
About to reread the first 2 books in Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy because the 3rd one (The Rose Field) is FINALLY coming out in October. I was scared that Pullman might die before he got the last one out. I’d be bereft if I never saw what happened to Lyra and Pan.
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Speaking of killing one’s darlings (nonspecific early spoilers, I guess), I’m coming out of a reading slump and finally got around to finishing Bunny by Mona Awad, just in time for the pre/sequel to come out next month.
I’m also remedying a notable gap in my Vonnegut at the moment: for all I’ve been reading him since junior high, I’m only now getting around to Player Piano. It felt like, uh, a topical choice.
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Like @EJoyce , I have always understood “kill your darlings” to be nothing to do with this but rather about being willing to edit out beloved characters, scenes or plot threads completely if they’re not serving the work as a whole.
The handful of uses I can find online seem to support this interpretation, although apparently there’s a movie called “Kill Your Darlings” which makes it a lot harder to find anything related to the phrase itself.
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My understanding is that the earliest use we know is from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1914 lecture On Style, and there it’s specifically about not getting overly attached to a clever phrase. That’s the only meaning that I remember hearing as a kid… So I feel like it’s more in the past decade or two that it’s really spread out to mean getting so attached to anything that you can’t see when it’s getting in the way of what you’re actually trying to do?
To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
Of course, like anything, many people who ought to know better over-apply this and turn it into a hard-and-fast rule instead of a “hey, consider whether you might be falling into this trap.”
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