︎


      






Reading with Tim is an Instagram and TikTok account where I talk about books that I love in hopes of inspiring others to read them too.


All videos: 

https://www.instagram.com/readingwithtim/


Selected Samples:
 

Probably banned a thousand times over throughout the world.

“The Torture Garden” AKA “The Little Green Book” by Octave Mirbeau. 1899. 162 pages.



Next up, The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. First published in 1899. In its day it was known as the little green book, because of it’s green jacket meant to shame any readers who dared to take it out in public. I first read it for a course in college named Decadent Imagination. I didn’t know what the word decadent meant in the morning while signing up for classes, and figured it must be some kind of gay literatue course and signed up immediately. Of course, that’s not what the word decadent means, but the class was amazing. The professor once joked to ignore any wine stains you might find on your papers because he liked to throw a little dinner party and have his guests grade our work. He was a fantastic prick and I enjoyed everyday.
This is a good, maybe great, little book worth reading one time because it is really fucked up. The Torture Garden is a real garden located in a prison in China. At this prison all of the drains and toilets lead off to the soil of a garden, which makes it the most beautiful garden in the world. Rich foreigners come to visit the prison to feed the prisoners rotted meat and watch them be flayed and crucified. Yeah, really fucked up. It is a book showcasing the hypocrisy of Western Civizliation and Colonialism without actually teaching or dealing out a moral lesson for the reader. Which is a staple of the decadent genre, where aesthetic is always valued over morality. 





Is your trauma worth holding onto? Probably not.

“There is a Tide” by Agatha Christie. 224 pages.




First up, there is a tide by Agatha Christie of which the cover has broken off. I read this book over the course of a few months while sitting in my car for alternate-side-parking. I picked it up at a mystery bookstore in TriBeCa about a decade ago. I have no idea if the place still exists, but I actually have about six or seven of them now, because the prick at the counter told me I’d have to do better than a book that costs a dollar if I wanted to use my card.  Anyway, it has all the tropes of mystery you’d expect from the woman everyone rips off to make Netflix movies.


Hercule Poirot is the main star. I want to skip the whole plot and tell you the whole scene in the end that really stood out for me. A woman who is engaged to a boring man meets a dangerous man. She falls in love with him. The boring man finds out.  At the end of the book the boring man tries to strangle her to death, and while his hands are wrapped around her throat, and she’s taking her breath, Hercule comes in, the man stops, and not only does he not go to prison for this, but the woman now seeing this passion tells the boring man that if she had known he wasn’t such a goddman bore this whole time, she would never went after the dangerous man and they live happily ever after.

Fun book. Maybe holding on to our trauma is pointless. Anyway, I give this book three bookmarks and one coaster.