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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   802 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on the Iliad, Dialectic of Enlightenment and McLuhan's The Classical Trivium. Picking up Nudge: The Final Edition.

Wrapped up the last of Journey to the End of Night, which I ultimately got almost nothing interesting out of, and finally finished Seeing Like a State, which I got a lot out of but I expect everyone here has already either read the book or read better folks than me summarize its findings better than I could.

Started Storm of Steel which is a fascinating contrast to American Sniper. Both authors, at least at the start, enjoy the war. It's the difference between the 2000s Patriots or the 90s Bulls, and a role player on a .500 team. Kyle goes in expecting to win every time, and is shocked and takes it personally when he loses. Junger is immediately just hoping to survive. Kyle experiences enemy soldiers and civilians as "savages," as mooks that are just part of his story. Junger experiences them as formidable dangerous foes.

As an aside, I saw a local performance of Penelope, a one-woman musical of Odysseus' famous wife. It was fantastic. That woman really carried the show for an hour and a half straight, just her and a band, and of course that is the core commentary of the play: Penelope did it all alone, with nothing but a backing band, for twenty years until Odysseus returned. The show definitely plays the situation for light feminist snark at times, but never lapses into wokeness: at core it maintains a belief in Homer, Homer's heroes stay heroes and his villains stay villains, it doesn't try to flip the script like so many recent musicals based on old stories. It's very reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in that it looks at how great events feel to someone who isn't privileged to speak constantly with the gods; where Athena speaks to Odysseus pretty regularly, Penelope here gets only a single, cryptic and non-actionable message from Athena. My only critique of the play is that, compare to Madeleine Miller's Circe, the play cuts off before the really interesting and difficult stuff to get Penelope's commentary on: the slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the maids. How does she feel about her Telemachus going all school shooter on the place?

I've decided in celebration of the show being cancelled to re-read the Wheel of Time. It is just as aggravating, annoying, lengthy, and wonderful as I remember.

Didn't care for the first couple chapters, and given how much everyone complains about the series I've never really heard anything good enough about it to bother committing to all that.

It's not for everyone. But if you can handle wanting to reach through the pages to strangle several POV characters, it really is a cornerstone of fantasy for a reason. There are deaths that will make you cry, marriages that will make you want to dance, what is in my opinion the best-written "formless horror" ever (which is admittedly a fairly minor plot device but still, it stands out for how good it is), and moments of such incredible power they will take your breath away.

But those Wetlanders have a strange sense of humor.

I got to the middle of Use of Weapons and I am kinda doubting if I'm going to finish it. I've pretty much guessed the main reveal already (it became so painfully obvious at some point that I broke down and checked it and yes, it was exactly what I thought) and the story is somehow not that engaging for me, and in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases. I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely? I read Player of Games before, and it was kinda obvious how it's going to end (I mean you don't set up the whole thing to lose at the end, right?) and there also were a reveal which I thought was kinda meh but overall it was ok, not super-excellent but also I didn't feel like I need to force myself to go on. With this one, I am kinda struggling.

I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely?

If you're not feeling the overall vibe of Banks' work then I'd encourage you to go ahead and drop him from your list. Life's too short to read stuff that's only kinda appealing and all that. While Banks' novels, be they Culture novels or not, build different worlds and, to an extent, explore different ideas, they all tend to have the same sorts of edges to them, and if that's not engaging you, then you're really not missing anything by letting them go. FWIW, I've read quite a few of his books, and they're not bad by any objective stretch, but at the same time I have several more that I may not ever read because I've lost the desire to engage in his work myself. I'll probably read one in the not-too-distant future, perhaps just because of this comment, but still, there never seems to be a heart to any of his books that I've read.

I found that one a bit mid and kept skipping the flashback chapters.

My favorite one so far is Surface Detail. Player of Games was decent, I thought. I also enjoyed Consider Phlebas as a good introduction.

Definitely don't read the short story book.

People here say they liked Matter but I thought it was snoozeville and gave up after 3 chapters.

I'm reading Look to Windward right now that's going okay.

I've been reading the murderbot series after watching a few episodes of the show and deciding I liked it and didn't want to wait.

After watching the series and reading all the books I can definitely tell the books are better. Some cliches are there for a reason, I guess.

That is interesting, I'm not surprised I like the books better, but I wouldn't have thought many other people were the same.

The books can be sparse on details in a way that I like. The show fills in those visual details, mostly because it is forced to do so by the medium of film.

Alongside a re-read of Reverend Insanity, at o3's suggestion, I'm halfway through The Outside by Ada Hoffman.

The core conceit of the novel should be like crack to me. AI Gods? Said Gods fighting against eldritch abominations? Sign me the fuck up, I had independently considered writing my own novel along those lines before finding this one.

Unfortunately, the real deal is incredibly mid. The protagonist is a capital-A Autistic genius woman, written by an autistic female author, who hasn't heard of "show, don't tell".

If I have to read another line about her sensory issues and inability to function in normal or posthuman society, I'll lose it.

Beyond that, the pace is achingly slow, and the prose not very tight for the most part.

I'd call it a 6/10 novel, barely worth reading. I'm just out of the kind of hard scifi I normally enjoy, they just don't write those fast enough.

who hasn't heard of "show, don't tell".

Fang Yuan let out a breath of turbid air. He was an old fox, the aspect of how [a particular aspect of cultivation that isn't even relevant much to the current narration], it was extremely clear to him. As for so-called conciseness and elegance, he did not give a damn. Beauty, ugly, did that really matter to Fang Yuan? He he he... The only thing that mattered was eternal life!

(I will not let this go)

Curious if you were reading this take on 'system war' SF with a title I am too embarrassed to type out? It's coming to a close now, I found it to be a pleasant weekly read, at times disappointing, but overall a decent quality novel.

Huh. I had already begun reading that one, made it a few chapters in before I forgot the name and lost the tab in the millions I have open. I do remember thinking it was of above average quality in the usual sea of Royal Road slop!

I recommend you try it again then, quality is consistent until the very end.

usual Royal Road slop

Different realm!

Still on The Perfect Heresy, which I'm determined to finish tonight or tomorrow so I can move on to something more interesting. Medieval history just doesn't seem to do it for me.

I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.

The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.

CSB reports are pretty fun, if morbid reads, especially since they're a lot more willing to point fingers (contrast NTSB).

I will caution that they tend to put a pretty heavy thumb on the scales to favor as wide-ranging a possible conclusion as available from the evidence: even their own videos make it sound more like BP (or Amaco's) process engineering played a much bigger role than the page count would. The report notes that there were previous incidents involving the blowdown system, but most of these were from before the 2004 budget cuts, and some were from before the merger. Counterfactuals are hard, but with that bad a process design, and that level of normalization of deviance, I'm not sure better trained or less tired staff would have done much more than changed the body count for whatever inevitable incident happened.

I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.

I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.

Ah, you've read deeper into the incident than I have, then. Apologies.

Daring (Pax Arcana Book 2), by Elliott James.

@Titanium Butterfly, City was quite thought-provoking! Not at all surprising coming from Simak, and I'm really glad that someone has dedicated themselves to getting his stuff published. I've probably read at least one book that was directly influenced by it--don't remember the exact name of it, maybe Manta's Gift, but it was by Timothy Zahn.

Glad you liked it. Simak was so far ahead of his time. Particularly the part where everyone goes off to try another mode of existence and nobody comes back stays with me. But the whole book has such a vibe to it and I think it ages well. Definitely one I'll be getting my kids to read.

A few years ago I was up in Seattle on business and found a first edition in fantastic shape at Twice Sold Tales. Very happy with it.

Meanwhile I'm on book 2 of 12 Miles Below. So far it feels not quite as good as the first but definitely willing to give it time. Thanks again for the rec.

12 Miles Below has been steadily getting worse over time, but it started at such a high point that it's still okay. I won't spoil the later books, but it gets increasingly self-aware and the humor becomes obnoxious.

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