My first book by Nabokov. My main thoughts: super pretty and flowery writing style - sometimes hard to read for me as a non native English speaker (then again neither was Nabokov).

My main problem with the book wasn’t even the obviously problematic/disturbing relationship between the two main characters but mostly that I just didn’t really care for the story at some point. I actually took a break of several months before finally finishing this book. There are definitely some quite fucked up scenes & situations in the book; I also didn’t think that this book is in any way romanticizing the relationship of the two characters. Humbert knows what he’s doing and that what he is doing isn’t right, it’s just the fact that he’s an unreliable narrator that might make this a bit less clear I guess.

Overall, I found it okay. Very pretty writing style, didn’t love the story & probably won’t reread it.

The first part of the book describes the experiences of the author during his imprisonment in several concentration camps and talks about dealing with the situation there and finding a reason to accept & continue enduring his suffering there. Obviously some very disturbing & tragic description of events there.

The second part was about his general philosophy called Logotherapy. This was definitely more dry, but I liked that for every statement or idea he usually gave several examples of actual cases that prove and explain that idea in a more practical sense.

Overall I found it super interesting & it definitely changes one’s outlook on life’s meaning to a certain extent. Great book!

This is my first introduction to stoicism and actually the first book on philosophy in general that I read. I read the Gregory Hayes translation which helped a lot - I first tried an older translation that was unecessarily difficult to understand when you’re used to modern English.

I found many of the ideas in the book quite interesting and insightful even though I don’t agree with all of them. At times the book was quite dry & repetitive but I guess that is to be expected when talking about this topic. Overall I liked it and it was neat to actually read the private notes of a Roman emperor that lived almost 2000 years ago. You don’t get to do that every day.

First chess book I read! Interesting lessons, some fun chess trivia and lots of examples and games to go through.

Funny concept but overall it wasn’t really my type of humor. I get that the character is supposed to be naive and stupid but it was just a bit too much for me.