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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   4978 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Flowers for Algernon. Haven't been able to make much progress.

Jon Krakeur's Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Lafferty murders and the larger FLDS sect.

Still on Moby Dick.

I also picked up some Mishima, but I'm not making much progress. I think I'm not well-calibrated for manly authors who write manly books for manly men writing about nothing but emotions and introspection from page one.

Also the Kekulé Problem, which is short, but for some reason I stopped halfway through and haven't gone back for a while.

Which Mishima are you reading? I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion a few months ago and thought it was great. I couldn't get into it when I tried reading it a few years ago but this time around I found it enjoyable and relatively light but with an interesting perspective. Cool, stylish imagery and a funny takedown of Buddhism that uncannily mirrors a lot of criticism of academia today.

I started with Spring Snow. Bad pick?

I'm not familiar with that one, but scanning the wikipedia article on it it looks a bit more dense than The Temple. I'd recommend The Temple if you want something that's not too hard to get into.

Working through Red Storm Rising, in which the Russians, foolishly embarking on a military campaign over oil, pick a fight with NATO, and, after a brief period of success, fail to achieve their military and political objectives.

It's quite short, if memory serves. I read it in middle school or high school, but never since.

I picked up SPQR from a community sale event, so I'm starting that. No idea if it's any good, and I haven't much background reading in the Roman empire, just hardcore history and YouTube.

Working on reading Death's End, the last book in the three body trilogy. Been enjoying it!

Edit: finished the book. I, uh, am not sure if I enjoyed it in the end. I think that Cixin Liu had a lot of interesting concepts in the trilogy, but wasn't nearly as good at bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion. Also, in the third book in particular he seems to get up his own ass a bit with the high concept sci-fi ideas. I had a very hard time following some parts of the book because the concepts involved were just so abstract. Overall, decent book but I definitely think that the arc of the quality of this series goes down with each book.

I finished Houellebecq's Serotonin over the weekend, it's easily my favorite of his novels now. It has all of his usual topics, atomization, sexual degeneracy, French cuisine, and an utterly defeated protagonist. This time on antidepressants. It's probably one of his most 'normie' protagonists, but one with concerns about missed opportunities and connections that feel more relatable than some of his others. I'm eagerly awaiting his latest novel to be translated.

After reading through some Plutarch, I'm stepping back for a broader overview of Greek civilization and culture with Kitto's The Greeks. I read through Herodotus earlier this year, and am planning Thucydides after this. Kitto's work seems to be tying a lot of the disparate threads together for me already.

I picked up the books I was missing from Malazan yesterday. Probably won't read them for a bit, because I also grabbed another WWII biopic and some neat...geological historical fiction?

Which books?

I particularly like 2, 4, 3, and 7.

The whole series I'm pleased to have read, once through. I know there are other novels, have you read any of them? The other Erikson books and the Esselmont novels.

4 through 8. I'd only read the first 3, and had copies of 9 and 10 that I got from a garage sale. I haven't seen the others.

Deadhouse Gates was my favorite so far. Its split narrative worked really well, and I found the blending of magic and military to be best executed there. When I recommend the series, I suggest starting with it instead of Gardens of the Moon. Really looking forward to reading the rest.

I particularly like 2, 4, 3, and 7.

This sentence made my head hurt, and yet, it feels oddly appropriate for Malazan.

I just finished I, Claudius and I was...disappointed.

I've often found the use of period-accurate names over modern ones to be obnoxious, but I guess I'm used to it, because the use of modern names here really annoyed me.

I found the whole book to be confusingly boring. It was mostly a recounting of things I already knew, with a few thin fictionalizations thrown in, and no real characters to get me invested.

Any chance you've read Lindsey Davis' Marcus Didius Falco novels? Hardboiled detective fiction in the time of Vespasian. They're certainly less serious, but great fun.

I've heard of them! Maybe I'll try that next!

I liked I, Claudius a lot but I didn't know much about the period so maybe that's why. Have you read the Masters of Rome series? Those are flawed, especially the later ones in the series, but their portrayal of Sulla is one of my favorite fictional characters ever.

Can't get enough of them, the Grass Crown is probably a contender for my favorite book.

Honestly the portrayal of historical characters there was just mwah

Look to the West is an alternate-history series that eschews the small-scale format of such authors as Eric Flint and Harry Turtledove. Instead, like For Want of a Nail and The Shape of Things to Come, it takes the form of a series of excerpts from history textbooks that were written in the alternate timeline. Therefore, each book is capable of spanning multiple decades and multiple continents, rather than progressing at a snail's pace through just a few months as seen through the eyes of a handful of viewpoint characters.

Books 1 through 5 are available for standalone purchase. The author writes on the AlternateHistory.com forum, where Book 9 is in progress.

I just read the first book and it was great, just up my alley. The only problem is that there are a lot of things that really demonstrate it's a product of serial writing on AH.com, such as chapters being ended with ellipsis...

I think I'll hold on a bit with the others since I have a lot of work for the coming week and just plowing through all the current books will get me sidetracked.

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