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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1767 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 27, 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?

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?

Still on a bunch of stuff. Adding Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, another open access book, to my list.

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki. Slowly getting out there.

The Divine Economy, by Paul Seabright.

Basically it's a look at religion through the lens of consumer economics. It can be a bit dry at times (although thankfully there's no equations so far) but otherwise it's really interesting. Living in the secular West it's good to be reminded that, for most of the world, religion is a huge part of daily life and is genuinely important.

I finished Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy last week. Good finale, if a bit weaker than the others. The irrationality of Area X is just less compelling than the anti-rationality it displayed in the first and second books. But I suspect that’s inherent to writing a plot where characters are supposed to do anything rather than have it done to them.

I still absolutely recommend trying the first book for anyone into literary sci-fi or the New Weird or surreality.

Now I’m halfway through Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City based on a recommendation from @pbmonster. Five out of five stars so far. It’s such a pure example of what that thread was calling “competency porn,” except it also dodges the excesses which litter the genre. The protagonist is smart and driven and charismatic in a way which makes it clear that he, along with everyone around him, is under tremendous stress. This does wonders for the believability. I’m staying up too late reading it.

It kind of reminds me of a more serious counterpart to the Moist von Lipwig Discworld novel Making Money.

Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir of the author's childhood in Albania as it transitioned out of the USSR out of socialism and into a liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, it presents living in a socialist country in a very negative light. Comparisons with My Brilliant Friend are apt (Albania in the late 80s/early 90s seems about as economically deprived as Naples in the 60s), even though this one is marketed as non-fiction. Very readable, and I'm glad the focus is mainly on the politics and the disruptions the author's parents had to cope with, rather than endless trite anecdotes about the author's interactions with her primary school classmates or whatever.

A quibble but Albania was just communist and was a member of the Warsaw Pact Member, so was aligned with but was never a part of USSR.

Also, it quit Warsaw Pact in 1968 due to its alignment with PRC.

Thank you, amended.

I'm on the fifth book of Card's Tales of Alvin Maker and wow, an amazing Fantasy series. It stuck in my mind as a kid because the storytelling is so good, but going back and reading it now is incredibly rewarding. I'd give it a try if American fantasy appeals to you at all.

Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To Al Jourgensen by Al Jourgensen and Jon Wiederhorn.

The Worm Ourobouros, again and still.

Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. I read a Kindle sample and found its subject matter interesting, but the actual treatment of it seemed convoluted and overly materialist, and on top of that the full book is quite expensive. I'd rather just read Frantz Schmidt's diary directly, if I could get a reasonably readable edition of it. All I find is direct scans of 19th century versions in fonts that are cute in their antiquated way, but to be quite honest I'm habituated to more accessible typography.

Faithful Executioner

That has been on my reading list for several years now, but I’ve never gotten around to picking it up. Would you still recommend it despite your somewhat tepid review?

As said, I've only read a sample, which probably amounts to the first twenty or so pages. The subject matter is very interesting, but the style in which the book is written annoyed me. It kept spiralling around key information without revealing it directly, semingly trying to build up tension. And I just don't need that in an educational book. Too many wasted words and repetitions, and far too much time spent on emphasizing how alien the profession of the executioner must seem to modern readers. Then an aside into how the guilds discriminated against executioners purely because of their members' economical insecurity, and that kind of historical materialism plus armchair psychology really turned me off. I had hoped that the author would simply go over the source material and provide additional context, but instead I got a newspaper-article-level clickbait narrative and a bunch of unqualified comments that were ass-pulls from the land beyond even speculation.

All that said, the author clearly did a lot of research and I would have liked to read about that, but not at the price of 15€ plus all the useless bullshit he packed into his book (or at least the early pages thereof that I read). So I'll personally prefer to just read the source directly, if ever I can find a readable version of it.

If you aren't a picky reader but interested in the subject, then it's probably a perfectly servicable pop-sci book.

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