I’m not totally sure what kinds of books you’re reading, but if you’re interested in more canonical literature, then I highly recommend buying a Norton Critical of whatever book you’re interested in: https://wwnorton.co.uk/norton-critical-editions They have critical essays, annotations, and biographies of the authors. They’re also not expensive. If you live near a university, you’ll definitely find some in a used bookstore. They’re also all over thriftbooks.

I've found the The Great Courses to be a very good resource for a general understanding of a variety of different topics (not just books, but also books). I don't know what sort of access you might have, but I get free access to them through my library's Hoopla account.

Seconding the library search, and also you can try to filter out the algorithm garbage on youtube by specifically searching <book + "lecture">. Sometimes you still have to scroll through some "UNDERSTANDING HAMLET IN 2 MINUTES" slop to get to the old guy with a blackboard lectures, but they are usually out there.

Jstor is very good but I think if you have the free version you only get a certain amount of articles per day (month idk?). I still have my uni account active with unlimited downloads, so feel free to DM if you want me to grab one to send to you (same goes for anyone else, too).

democritusjrjr

1 month ago

A free Jstor account will give anyone 100 article views/month. Just for reference.

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yesiamapersonplease

1 month ago

That's somehow both more generous and less useful than I assumed it would be lol.

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A good source for well known works might be reviews of books, or articles which cite those books, in academic publications. Any academic library (and many public libraries) will have a "article search" function which can bring up reviews. Also worthwhile to look at the metadata of books you liked; the subject classifications can give you an idea of what else to search for. As an example, I'm reading Praiseworthy right now. I can pull up reviews here: https://search.library.wisc.edu/search/articles?f0=anywhere&q=Praiseworthy+alexis+wright Obviously this only works for books that are "academia worthy" past the threshold of having a published review. Also academic goobers miss a lot also.

apple

1 month ago

thank you, this is exactly what i was looking for. i knew this had to exist, just wasn't sure how to find an entry point into it.

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yesiamapersonplease

1 month ago

I highly recommend reaching out to a reference librarian at whatever library is closest/most easily accessible to you. There are a lot of electronic resources which are free to access from library computers. Any librarian worth their salt should be able to help you find stuff, or at least point you in the right direction. It's literally their job!

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