welcome to bookbug!

Bookbug is a digital book club that is centered around discussions and reviews. Please check the sidebar for more information!

Announcements

It's that time of the month again - please vote on our next book below! :)

Our December book has been chosen! We will be reading The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy. Thank you everyone for voting! Also, the monthly wrap-up is here!

Thanks everyone for voting in our latest poll. As the major votes decided, we will now have a discord channel to discuss our reads and chat! If you'd like to join, please click here. Participation is not mandatory, but we would love to have you! :)

Would you like to write a wrap up for bookbug? E-mail neobookbug@gmail.com

about the club

This is a book club housed on Neocities. Members read a monthly book & record their thoughts or reviews on their own personal sites. We hope this can foster a sense of community and discussion amongst readers. Most of all, we want this to be a place where people can make friends and have fun! If this is something you'd be interested in, we encourage you to join. We are always taking new members!

how it works

Each month we'll read a new book. Book club members will create a /bookbug page on their site that houses their thoughts about our monthly reads. Your thoughts or reviews can be in any format that you'd like. As long as you read the book & write about it, it's okay with us!

Every month on the 15th a new poll will be added to our homepage, so that members can vote on our next read! And then on the last day of the month, the poll will be closed and the winner announced.

NEW Do you have a book suggestion for the club? Bookbug will now take in your proposals via email only! Please keep in mind that: submitting a book title does not imply that it will be definitely added to future polls; and the club's preference of more 'classical' choices. If you have any in mind, send them over to neobookbug@gmail.com.

We now have a discord server to discuss about books, chat, and have fun! Participation is not mandatory, but we would love if you joined!

member requirements

As long as you have an active site, with a /bookbug page, you are good to go!

We prefer if you have a button in standard size (88x31) to be added to our member list - no problem if you don't! We'll then use a placeholder button instead.

We do prefer if you could participate in every monthly reading, but it's totally okay if you don't make it from time to time (:

Also, please make sure to include the club's linkback button on your page (mandatory)!

NOTE we will do member sweeps every couple of months and remove: links that go nowhere; pages that don't include the club's button; inactive members*; (and/or pages that contain anything offensive/etc!

*members that haven't participated in the club in the last 6 months. we do this to keep the club more active, if you wish to join again in the future, we'd love to have you back! :)

how to join

Once you create a /bookbug page, contact us via e-mail with your button and link.

Please send your request to join to neobookbug@gmail.com

about the founders

This site was founded by Maple & Vashti! As of May 2024, Vashti is no longer running it, but will be forever in bookbug's hearts ♡

a message from Maple

Hi there, I'm Maple! I have always dreamed of participating in a book club, but had never found one that read the same type of books I like, and have never found someone that shared a similar taste, to create one myself - well, until now!

I've always been a big reader, which made me choose to study English Language & Literature at university (which I graduated in 2019!). Even though I always read a lot, I never really write about the books and that is something I want to change. I tend to like more classic and gothic books in general, but also enjoy contemporary books and plays!

Favourite books: The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides), The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov), Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), and some other stuff hehe.

A message from Vashti

Just reading books; trying to read like a child again.

Favourite books: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk), Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto), Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke), & many more!

how it works

Each month we'll read a new book. Book club members will create a /bookbug page on their site that houses their thoughts about our monthly reads. Your thoughts or reviews can be in any format that you'd like. As long as you read the book & write about it, it's okay with us!

Every month on the 15th a new poll will be added to our homepage, so that members can vote on our next read! And then on the last day of the month, the poll will be closed and the winner announced.

NEW Do you have a book suggestion for the club? Bookbug will now take in your proposals via email only! Please keep in mind that: submitting a book title does not imply that it will be definitely added to future polls; and the club's preference of more 'classical' choices. If you have any in mind, send them over to neobookbug@gmail.com.

member requirements

As long as you have an active site, with a /bookbug page, you are good to go!

We prefer if you have a button in standard size (88x31) to be added to our member list - no problem if you don't! We'll then use a placeholder button instead.

We do prefer if you could participate in every monthly reading, but it's totally okay if you don't make it from time to time (:

Also, please make sure to include the club's linkback button on your page (mandatory)!

NOTE we will do member sweeps every couple of months and remove: links that go nowhere; pages that don't include the club's button; and/or pages that contain anything offensive/etc!

how to join

Once you create a /bookbug page, contact us via e-mail with your button and link.

Please send your request to join to neobookbug@gmail.com

member list

link back

hotlink is okay (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

credits

✳ layout base by fiziwhig, edited by maple to work on neocities - please, do NOT use it for your page.

✳ bug doodle and button by maple

✳ background from doqmeat

✳ "new" pixel from sorahana

review spotlight

Some amazing reviews from our member's! Please note that they will probably contain spoilers.

July 2024 read Elilenti's review of the first part of To the Lighthouse!

"People struggle with the tediousness of familial life. This book is about those who formed the nuclear family-or didn't-and question whether they made the right decision for themselves."

June 2024 read Vita's review of Strangers on a Train!

"The writing felt fairly dense yet not difficult to parse. I do feel like even though Guy was one of the main characters of the book, he had drastically less agency than Bruno or even Anne. Everything that happened in the book felt like it was already laid out for him, and all that needed to happen was for the first domino to fall."

May 2024 read Jo's review of The Master and Margarita!

"Many modern authors tend to shy away from over-description, and with good reason. Bulgakov pulls this off by gradually introducing Moscow, his settings and characters through the episodic plot. We slowly learn about Woland and his friends - introduced first from an outsider perspective, then an insider one."

April 2024 read Ondine's review of Notes from Underground!

"These deep, unhealthy mental recesses still hold a good reflection of the erratic, irrational core of human nature. Dostoyevsky understands that humanity is guided on by desires that logic can't always explain, and that we sometimes know things are harmful to us, but we do them anyway to satisfy irrational whims."

Monthly Wrap-ups⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

✶ November ✶

This month went by so quickly! Our November book was a quick read for me personally. Full of very short chapters and witty observations, Machado writes in a way that does not feel dated, even though the book was published in 1881. As Vita points out, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas feels similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude, "except centered around the life of one man rather than an entire family's worth of people". I agree completely with this statement - as I said, I finished the book quite quickly, but it did make me feel like I was going through a long period of time (a whole person's life worth!), the same way it felt when reading our September book.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is written as an autobiography, a telling of a man's life by his own words, without any exageration of grandeur, and as Willa points out, "The author isn't trying to keep me interested, he's trying to paint a realistic portrait of his character, and he succeeds!". Indeed some chapters left me confused as to why they mattered for the story, but looking back, some of them are really the kind of experience only the person experiencing would find important enough (for say, be written in your own memoir).

The book style of very short chapters, some with only punctuation, was very surprising! After hearing about this book in school for so many years, I had the wrong impression that it was a boring and very long book, which could not be more wrong. It felt very modern in a way. With that said, see you again next month!

Participants <3

With love,

Maple

✶ October ✶

Happy November everybody, and a belated Halloween ‧₊˚ ☾. ⋅! I think our book this month felt like an October book. Even though it wasn't scary, there was a "chilling and ominous quality" to the words, as Lina puts it. I was very happy to see that we had seven reviews this month! I had a wonderful time reading them, so let's dive in...

A Pale View of Hills is Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's debut novel. It follows the life of a Japanese woman named Etsuko who, having moved to England, is faced with the suicide of her oldest daughter. The book is a series of recollections and memories from the years after WWII and the other women she knew in Nagasaki.

Honestly, I am the least qualified to write this wrap-up as Maple and Jazonks have already read multiple of Ishiguro's books, and Moondvsted lived in Japan "for a while." This was my first by him and I'm happy to have very much enjoyed it. One of the things I was stunned by was the writing style. Lina really nailed it in her review:

I think Ishiguro has such an interesting writing texture. In a way, the book can feel "flat" in its writing: direct, straightforward and easy to digest, but there's a sense that there's a lot more brimming beneath the surface. -Lina

This style intrigued me so much at the beginning of the book that I looked up to see if the book had been translated from Japanese (it's wasn't). The style is especially evident in the dialog, but not to say that it's awkward. As Vita points out, Ishiguro uses it in a way that hints at deeper meanings and feelings. I agree that there's a lot to be said in this book regarding language, especially considering that immigration from Japan to an english speaking country is a present, but elusive, plot point.

All of the reviews touched on the parallels between Etsuko, Sachiko, Keiko, and Mariko. Are Etsuko and Sachiko the same person, as Elilenti considers? Are they mirrored, younger versions of each other, or did Sachiko and Mariko ever actually exist at all? Personally, I do believe that Sachiko and Mariko lived, but that Etsuko's guilt may have manipulated their memory. We aren't given a clear answer in the end, leaving us to make up our own minds.

This is already fairly long, but I want to end wih a question: who was the woman Mariko spoke of seeing? The topic was dropped after Sachiko's explanation of the mother and baby in the water, but that didn't satisfy me. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Participants <3

Yours,

Willa.

✶ September ✶

Seriously, are you guys okay? Because I'm not. That book messed me up. It feels like we were truly subjected to one hundred years of solitude. I agree wholeheartedly with Vita, this truly was peak fiction.

If you didn't finish or weren't intrigued enough to start, One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the Buendia family over six generations in a relatively unknown town named Macondo. Many, many things happen to Macondo over those one hundred years, but throughout all the wars, celebrations, epidemics, and brief moments of prosperity, a crushing sense of solitude persists. As a reader, you witness super-human feats and inexplicable events so fantastical that, in the book itself, they fade away into myth.

From Vita's review:

"[Macondo] lies just outside the bounds of real life, a sort of "heightened reality" where unnatural things happen without explanation and without much fanfare."

I highly recommend this book to others, if not for the story than for its brilliant (but easy to read) prose. I'll definitely be buying this book in hardcover! ALSO... It looks like Netflix is making a TV show??? No dates yet, but the last one I saw was 2024, so... I'm hyped.

Participants

Vita
Maple
Willa (that's me!)

Quotes

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

"What did you expect?" he murmured. "Time passes."

"That's how it goes," Úrsula said, "but not so much."

✶ August ✶

Happy September! It's me again, Willa, and I'm back with the wrap up for Pnin! I'm leaving out stats for this month to keep things like Pnin: short and sweet.

Written by Nabokov concurrently with his most famous novel Lolita, Pnin is a humorous, charming novel about a Russian professor that teaches at a University in the Northeastern United States. By the end of the 191 pages one can't help but fall in love with his clumsy, endearing, and unexpectedly passionate character. (I know I did.)

Vita of That Odd Haystack nails the book's atmosphere as similar to "sitting in a coffee shop with a friend discussing a third person we were both friends with." The narrative takes the same shape, consisting of numerous tales and hi-jinks Pnin gets himself into.

I liked this book (gave it 4 stars!), and it has made me look forward to reading Lolita in the future. I'm sixty pages into One Hundred Years, where are you?

Participants

Willa Magland

✶ July ✶

Hi! My name's Willa, and welcome to bookbug's July Wrap-Up! This is a new (experimental) way to bring together the different thoughts and opinions about the books we read. July's book was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

We had a total of 4 participants this month. Of those four, three participants enjoyed the book, giving To the Lighthouse a score of 0.75. The reading rate for July was 10% (4/40)*, which makes sense considering the book's difficulty. Let's try and get that number up with Pnin*!

To the Lighthouse follows the Ramsay family (and others) over multiple decades in early-1900s Scotland. Woolf uses her famous stream-of-consciousness technique, jumping character-to-character as they grapple with society and the pulsating cycles of life and death.

This month's review spotlight is Elilenti, who, in their review, specifically focused on the theme of Gender in the book. They point out that, while Mrs. Ramsay and the women must bear the burden of familial life, Mr. Ramsay and the other men can retreat into academics without responsibility. But, "when the rosy ideas the men have about themselves are put on thin ice, they turn to the women for comfort," hoping they will "stroke their egos by listening to them."

Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost (...), requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? -Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, complaining.

For more thoughts on gender, go read their review!

Elilenti also pretty much summed up how I was feeling by the end:

I feel like it was trying to describe a phenomenon I've sensed about life for a long time. It's hard to describe, I felt like the author also had a hard time describing it and was trying to throughout the book.

The book isn't just difficult linguistically, but the very essence of the characters and objects within it seem to melt and fade into each other. Nothing is sure or solid, and the "meaning" we seem to be approaching is always just out of sight. In their review, That Odd Haystack described getting "lost in the metaphors and inner thoughts and was grasping for some kind of concrete anchor to latch onto." I personally found solace in imagining the novel as Lily's painting which constantly changes and shifts. This is supported by Woolf's stunning use of color in the novel.

I really liked this book. If you saw my review, you'll know that it's now my favorite. It felt like Virginia Woolf had accomplished that ultimate goal of art: to transcend its medium and communicate in pure feeling and energy. But for others it's understandably confusing and unstable, and that's okay!

For those who enjoyed it, I recommend the other book by her I've read, Mrs. Dalloway!