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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1750 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

Still on the Iliad and Lovecraft. Picking up Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Still trying to separate the chaff from the wheat in LitRPG and adjacent, I finished Mother of Learning and started The Wandering Inn. Mother of Learning was great, not quite high literature but among the best, most consistent world-building I have ever seen in fantasy so far. I was mildly annoyed by some parts of the story and it's kind of obvious that the author struggles to write anything but aspergers with different preferences, but that's something I just accept as a given at this point for good fantasy/SF.

The Wandering Inn, on the other hand, is trash, at least to my preferences. It's defenders are correct that there is nothing quite like it, so if you like that kind of thing it is probably unreplaceable. But it is best described as "juvenile progressive Soap Opera in Medieval Fantasy", which doesn't really appeal to me much. The world and the characters don't really seem to follow consistent rules except for whatever random thing the author wants to contrive to happen next for the purpose of drama or to make some point.

And one specific thing was especially grating and repeated itself over and over: First, I notice that the MC behaves stupidly. This is fine, if lampshaded properly. Even other characters in-story explicitly mention that yes, this is stupid. Then I go look up online discussions of the event in question and even the defenders of the MC basically just say yeah, this is stupid, what did you expect of a teenage girl teleported into medieval fantasy? So I read further, and ... the MC turns out basically right. And again, and again. It's frustrating.

I finished Mother of Learning

I'd like to recommend nobody103's next serial, Zenith of Sorcery but I just can't do that in good faith. We're now two years into writing with 23 published chapters and it barely feels like the plot is maybe about get started within the next half dozen chapters. If we're lucky.

So what I'll instead do is recommend you take a look at Void Herald's writings, particularly The Perfect Run. There's a reason it's #2 on Royal Road right below Mother of Learning. If you want more fantasy bent with comedy, the same author's Vainqueur The Dragon is a hoot but you'll have to do some googling to find the full story as pdf.

If you aren’t yet burned out on time loop, although it’s unfinished and the first loop takes like 20 chapters to happen, The Years of Apocalypse is also very good and in some ways better! Might be up your alley given those criticisms.

Sorry, I should have mentioned: Currently I'm only listening to audiobooks, since it allows me to do household chores, cycle, etc. simultaneously. With small kids + full time work I don't really have time to properly read. The limited spare time I have I unfortunately already waste on substack/theMotte. But it sounds interesting enough that it will go on the list of things to read later.

unfinished

*ongoing

"Unfinished" has a connotation of "abandoned" that is not warranted here.

This is the kind of minor pedantry I actually appreciate!

Well, it's important in context. Many people aren't interested in reading stories that are expected to remain unfinished, but are fine with following ongoing stories as they approach completion.

I read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last week. Very entertaining and remarkably well-structured, even when you know the twist. Having read lots of Lovecraft, I can now properly contextualise him within the Gothic horror lineage (although my understanding is that he wrote his stories in a self-consciously retro style, almost like a genre throwback).

Currently halfway through Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality by Theodore Dalrymple, a writer I first encountered via Scott's controversial post "Radicalizing the Romanceless". As the title might suggest, he's a grumpy old man without apology, and his polemical ranting about how much modern Britain (and the Western world more generally) sucks is tremendous fun.

I needed something to read, and this might be it. Only a few pages in, and he's thrashing phonics, so he's on to something.

I just finished Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine, and am about to break into The Ancient City by de Coulanges.

I also finished Blood Meridian last week. I had taken kind of a long break before the final few chapters, so I wound up reading the whole thing again and finishing it.

Ancient Law was very interesting, taking it both as a piece of its time, and considering that the publisher I bought it from is openly reactionary. It was very much a book that I could see being easily read as a leftist piece, given that the author is quite happy to laud the perceived moral development of his then-Victorian society, and appears to be under the impression that the Kingdom of God on Earth will just keep getting closer and closer.

Maybe I’ll do a review of it at some point.

I'm reading Man And Woman He Created Them (aka the theology of the body) by John Paul II. The intro on the version I have was a doozy, like 180 pages. But I'm finally into the work proper, and that is easier going (mainly because it's smaller chunks so easier to digest).

I'm also reading Modernist Cuisine, after my wife unexpectedly bought it for me for my birthday. Ironically, I rather despise "modern" movements (in art but also in cuisine), because I find they get up their own asses seeking novelty without ever considering whether they have made something as good as the tradition they seek to distance themselves from (and more often than not, they haven't). So in theory I should hate the book. But I appreciate the sheer level of autism that goes into making something like this, and I think the photography is beautiful. I also appreciate that they have recipes that aren't trying to be creative and shocking, but are using modern techniques to make traditional dishes even better than before. So I'm enjoying the book well enough.

Their classic recipes are quite good. I think it is more than 2/3rds of all of them. And sous vide is a game changer for select proteins.

We have Modernist Cuisine at Home, which is an abridged adaptation for the home kitchen, and I also like the illustrations and the autism, but the thing that bugs my wife is how completely it discards existing culinary practices. "Out with pots and pans, in with pressure cookers, sous vide and blowtorches!"

The Food Lab ended up a much better purchase, since it tries to optimize existing culinary practices, not replace them with the new ones Bolshevik-style.

Yeah... my wife also got me Modernist Cuisine At Home for my birthday, because she's a crazy person lol. That was the one I actually wanted because I felt like it would be more useful to me, but I can't say I'm displeased to have the full set as well. The publisher claims that the at home volume has new content not taken from the larger set, so we'll see i guess.

The Food Lab is definitely on my list of books to get someday. I really respect Kenji's food writing (it's consistently very high quality), so I definitely want to read his book.

I’m about halfway through Anna Karenina. After that I’m finally gonna crack open Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.

I just finished Anna Karenina myself. There's a lot to chew on there, but some of the more interesting points for me were:

  • Despite the main dramatis personae all being high class, there's a big difference wealth differential between Vronsky, who has a really lavish lifestyle, and Dolly, who is basically just scraping by (and not, apparently, due to profligacy).
  • Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

Tolstoy really seems to think that "subsistence" farming where the landowner is barely breaking even (or worse) is a totally reasonable state of affairs and the Russian way of farmwork is just not amenable even in principle to mechanization.

He really did think that. There's a short story by him that is quite explicit about his view. It's literally named How much land does a man need?. The classroom interpretation is of course that it's a story about the sin of greed, but it's not.

Why is this not about greed?

To be clear, I did not get the sense from Anna Karenina that Tolstoy was against large holdings per se. It's just that he didn't think that there's any point in trying to save labor or increase profits - you can do that on a large plot or on a small one. Levin certainly seems to have vast tracts of land - forests, fields, etc etc.

Just finished The Universe Within (Amaranthe book 22) by G.S. Jennsen and have moved on to Girlfriend in a Coma: The Novel by Douglas Coupland.

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