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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1910 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 11, 2025

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?

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Hey, The Motte. Recommend us some books that are fun to read and that aren't about the destination, but the journey. Books that delight the reader with clever turns of phrase, witty jokes or badass scenes every few pages.

Ender's Game.

Practical Guide to Evil.

It doesn't exist in book form (yet) but I need a physical copy of it yesterday. Multiple times I thought I knew where it was going only to have the rug pulled out from me repeatedly, and it easily satisfies the requirement for cool characters doing cool things.

Annoying favor request: would you find the location (Book+Chapter number) of what you feel was the first really exciting rug-pull, add a random number of chapters between 0% and 20% of the count up to that point to avoid this being a total spoiler, and tell me?

I started reading A Practical Guide to Evil at one point a couple years ago, but didn't make it very far before getting a little bored of it and moving to something else. I'm no stranger to fiction that takes a little while (Mother of Learning) or a long while (Babylon 5) to introduce itself before it gets really good, but I feel like I need some place at which to say "either I like it by here, or it's just not my cup of tea".

Yes, but:

  1. It's so massive that it's actually inconvenient. It's around 3 times the length of the entire Harry Potter series, which is a lot to jump into. 2.If this matters to you, it felt like there were more gay than straight characters.

I'm going to go against the grain and say rather than the Pratchett novels, where I've read two but felt they were kind of uneven and mostly just imitations, just go straight to the original delight: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the original trilogy. The quotes are literally next-level.

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Historical fiction executed as a combination of agape and western, told episodically, with gorgeous descriptions of the landscape and humanity. I recommend it specifically because the tale of the lives of two French, Catholic priests sent to New Mexico, unfolding over decades, is not something I would predict I would enjoy, but was more than pleasantly surprised I did.

Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.

I would argue that this is the ethos behind most of the great fantasy doorstoppers, even the ones like ASOIAF which stumble into the mainstream. “Journey before destination,” hmm?

Buuuuuut I’m not going to pretend that these satisfy your third sentence. For a superior ratio of wit to word count, allow me to make two suggestions.

Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse is an iconic, delightful bit of English absurdity. Every other page offers some combination of words previously unseen in the language. The comedy works both in the short term, via dialogue and gags and ever so many puns, and in the long term, thanks to incredible brick jokes and a fundamentally silly premise. Great fun. The full text is available here, though I thought it benefited from a print copy.

I’ll also recommend Levels of the Game by John McPhee as a more serious sort of cleverness. It’s a synthesis of two biographies and a play-by-play tennis match. Since both players are near the absolute peak of their sport, the physical competition is recast as a psychological one. I can’t do it justice without explaining how little I expected to care about tennis, and how compelling I found it anyway. You can read some (all?) of it here.

Catch-22 is very good.

Unsong also has many jokes.

I'm just commenting "Discworld" here because I'm only allowed to upvote @PokerPirate once.

To make my comment less redundant, here's the Discworld Reading Order Guide. IMHO although the best starting points depend on your taste, you can't really go wrong with "Guards! Guards!" or "Mort".

The reading order is worthwhile to avoid missing backstory (or to let you know what backstory you can miss - "The Color of Magic" wasn't nearly as good as his later books), but the books get even better as you go on. I could name stories by many authors that set me on edge from the suspense, or teary-eyed from the tragedy, or laughing from the comedy, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything other than Pratchett's "Thud!" that managed to do all three at once, and with a single line that would make no sense whatsoever out of context.

Piranesi - Most books you're on the ride with the Main Character knowing more than you about the setting, characters, etc. This book provides the odd experience of feeling like you know more than the MC while having all the same facts as him. It is beautiful, haunting, all about the process of reading it while still having some exciting bits. Think House of Leaves for people who don't hate themselves.

that aren't about the destination, but the journey

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is great for this. It's a window into a worldview that's very specific to 1960s and 1970s America, dressed in absurdist storytelling.

badass scenes every few pages

The Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. It started out when someone claimed that you needed a good idea to write an engaging story. Butcher disagreed, and the person making the claim bet him that he could offer up an idea so stupid that no one could make it work. The idea in question was "the lost Roman legion meets Pokemon".

Butcher took the bet and played it completely straight.

The whole diskworld series by Terry Pratchett. The plot is roughly "use fantasy tropes to make fun of the real world" and has excellent longterm story arcs along those lines. But it's also full of excellent one-liners like the following:

Give a man fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Les caught Akhan's eye. They exchanged a very brief glance which was nevertheless modulated with a considerable amount of information, beginning with the sheer galactic-sized embarrassment of having parents and working up from there.

Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.

Against all rationality, his hair ached.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

To call Rincewind's understanding of magic atrocious left no word to describe his practical application of it

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

No one ever said elves are nice.

Elves are bad.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!

Which book is this from?

I think it’s been a decade since I last read Pratchett and should probably get back to it.

"Small Gods"

But I had to look that up, so clearly it's been too long for me too...

Small Gods is one of my all time favorites!

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte.

Have you read Rejection?

Yes, and posted a review of it here. Of the 14 books I've finished reading this year it's my second-favourite, after Eliza Clark's Boy Parts.

Elif Batuman, Possessed (beware has a lot of Russian novel references but even without that is pretty fasted paced with stories and asides). Another really gripping memoir read is the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. For fiction the Secret History by Donna Tartt, its longer and maybe not as fast paced but I found I read it quickly. Reading some parts were like eating dessert.

Seconded The Secret History, an incredibly readable book even when almost nothing is happening plot-wise.

Tartt's best book. Bar none.

Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.

Light in August

One of my favorites! The character of the adoptive mother is the one who made the deepest impression on me. I think I would get a lot out of rereading it.

The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the GOATs.

Steven Brust writes fantasy novels in the style of Dumas. They're spinoffs of a noir-style series that's also fun in a very different way.

I have been keeping an eye out for Vlad Taltos books every time I go to a used bookstore for…years now. Still haven’t found the first one of any subseries.

For me personally, good examples would be Snow Crash, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and a Confederacy of Dunces. All three were just a pleasure to read. For something more niche, I really enjoy reading almost anything written by G.K. Chesterton. His prose is very good and I never get tired of his irony.

If you liked Snow Crash, try The Rapture of the Nerds.

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