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I loved it too, up until this part:

"I’m reading Kafka’s Castle right now — which itself may kill me"

Kafka is one of my favorite authors and The Castle is one of my favorite novels :( But a well-written essay nonetheless ;)

For anyone that doesn’t quite ‘get’ Kafka: I recommend his short stories and aphorisms over his novels. Metamorphosis and The Castle never quite did much for me, whereas The Great Wall of China or In the Penal Colony are some of my favorites.

Don't know about this link, but I read a translation of The Castle to my native language, and it was clearly his best book ever, although it was not finished. However, it always confused me why it didn't have more rightfully deserved attention.

Franz Kafka - The Castle is in the public domain and everyone should read it. IMHO it's his best work.
http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/frans_k...

(not sure how good this translation is, was the first pdf when I googled for it)

All corporations are fundamentally feudal systems. At a big enough scale they all become some twisted form of the Franz Kafka novel The Castle.

> A lot of the people who wrote the books you're staring at in a book store have day jobs.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, IMHO. Kafka had a day job at Assicurazioni Generali, but that didn't stop him writing The Castle or Metamorphosis.

In my experience Apache Kafka is indeed a real world incarnation of that Kafkaesque bureaucratic rigmarole that he described in his novel 'The Castle'.

On the other hand if Max Brod had listened to Kafka we wouldn't have The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika along with much of the authors other work.

Ah, The Castle has been a favorite of mine since I was in high school despite it being unfinished. The shorter works are something I only started to enjoy about ten years ago. I have really enjoyed rediscovering the magic of Kafka through his shorter works so I’m really interested in these!

I’m also a big “streaming Kafka” fan, so this post was win-win for me

Kafka only wrote 3 novels, all unfinished, all excellent.

"The Trial" is the conventional starter Kafka novel. It's the only one with an ending.

"The Castle" is my favorite. A good entry if you think you already understand Kafka (you may be surprised).

"Amerika", or "The Man Who Disappeared", is an under-appreciated gem but should be read 3rd because it's the least complete and you'll need the practice appreciating unfinished novels.

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable?

The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aphorisms and short stories are much better than his novels.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

> The villagers hold the officials and the castle in high regard, even though they do not appear to know what the officials do. The actions of the officials are never explained. The villagers provide assumptions and justification for the officials' actions through lengthy monologues. Everyone appears to have an explanation for the officials' actions, but they often contradict themselves and there is no attempt to hide the ambiguity. Instead, villagers praise it as another action or feature of an official.

Replace officials and castle with AI and it is almost the exact same scenario.

1. This is already happening: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)

The Bible (technically working on my 2nd cover-to-cover readthrough, but have read individual books in it many times, especially the Gospel of Matthew).

All of Kafka's novels, but especially "The Castle".

Several of PKD's novels: "The Man in the High Castle", "Through a Scanner Darkly", "Ubiq"

"The Silmarillion" (when I was a young adult)

Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency" (when I was a teenager)

He only did three novels, so you've already finished 1/3 of them.

The Castle: The only difficulty here is some conversations take forever (probably because they were never revised). I'd suggest just plowing through them the first time, your eyes might glaze over and you'll miss stuff in them but it's ok, you can pick more stuff up on later readings. I've read The Castle many times and I still pick up new stuff from it.

The Trial: There's really only one chapter that's difficult, the penultimate chapter set in the cathedral. You could literally just skip it, if you're having trouble with it. You'll miss some self-contained goodies like "Before The Law", but you can always come back later. It has been said that except for the first and last chapters, most chapters in The Trial can be rearranged and read in whatever order you like. I seem to recall someone even created some sort of physical version of the book where you could literally swap chapters around.

Hint: K is the name of the central character in Franz Kafka's The Castle, as well as that of The Trial.

> "The term "Kafkaesque" is used to describe concepts and situations reminiscent of Kafka's work, particularly Der Process (The Trial) and Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Examples include instances in which bureaucracies overpower people, often in a surreal, nightmarish milieu that evokes feelings of senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness. Characters in a Kafkaesque setting often lack a clear course of action to escape a labyrinthine situation. Kafkaesque elements often appear in existential works, but the term has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical."

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#%22Kafkaesque%22

The Castle, I really liked, much more than The Trial, but I couldn't finish that either. I don't exactly recall where was I stuck but I remember literally struggling to read as if studying Algorithms or Machine Learning. I read it both in English and German with similar difficulty.

The Trial was the only thing I read from Kafka that I found kinda meh and boring-ish, again made it a bit more than half way. I tried reading The Trial at least 3 times, maybe more, with same faith every time. (I eventually learned its ending in a literature class, but given other works of Kafka, it was very predictable). I'll give it a shot again and maybe skip chapters where I lose focus and come back later.