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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 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 The Eternal Dissident. Reattempting Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.

12 Miles Below VI: The Icon of Stars by Mark Arrows.

What did you think? I'm worried about the possibility of things going off the rails a bit.

Doh, I'm actually only a few chapters in, but it's certainly an odd beginning. I'll reply here in detail later this week when I've finished it!

Don't worry I'm still loving it! This book just went in a very different (literal) direction.

Still a cheap date over here so no worries on my end even though the whole opening with the ravens thing definitely gave me the feeling that this book would be different!

ETA: I'll be interested to see if expies of either Huginn or myself exist in the book...

Personally I thought what you are talking about works fine, my concern is just pacing issues. The ideas are explored with the usual higher degree of competence than I would expect from random web author.

I just finished Beyond Cynical and I'm not sure why this isn't a bigger book. It's a great explanation of why we have negativity bias, and seeing it around us, and working against it to be happier. I also just finished Witch King (I love Murderbot and this is her other major series) and I liked it but it lacked the humor of Murderbot.

In lazy comfort food rereading I read Thief of Time (Terry Pratchett) for the first time in years, and it was great, and I'm rereading Scruples and Scruples 2. (70s/80s wealth porn, think Crazy Rich Asians but more episodic and fantasy fulfillment. The book equivalent of a bubble bath in a sunlit bathroom.)

Still "Die Staufer", on the house of Hohenstaufen. Now at Friedrich II's side-gig as a patron of science and a scientific researcher and writer himself. The book makes much of how arabicized he must have been - I wonder a little about how much of that is actually substantiated by evidence, and how much is wilful conjecture by the author, because he cites unusually few sources when it comes to the topic of Friedrich II's acculturation, but overall it's interesting enough either way.

My understanding is that while Sicilian culture was highly Arabicized compared to the rest of Christendom, Frederick II was not much more notably Arabicized (or Byzantinized) than his predecessors on the Sicilian throne. Roger II, for instance, Frederick's grandfather, spoke Arabic, employed Arab scholars, and even wore a coronation robe using Arabic writing and the Muslim calendar - but he also spoke Greek, employed Byzantine scholars, and adopted Byzantine customs he liked. By the time of Frederick's life, Sicily had been a melting pot for over a hundred years, and many Arabs had melted in there, but that doesn't mean they were the dominant element, just an unusual one (the Crusader States, of course, had many Arabs, but their leaders were generally far less cultured and intellectual than Sicily's). What Frederick really brought to Sicily that was new was his Latinizing, Classicizing impulse, the desire to restore the Roman law of the Roman Empire that he inherited from his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and while the intellectual life of his administration owed much to the Arabo-Byzantine influences on Sicily, his political program and specific policies would be much more in a Classicizing, proto-Renaissance mode. Essentially, he added the missing element to the melting pot to turn Sicily from a prosperous and uniquely cultured regional power to a base for truly imperial ambitions.

I enjoyed the Berlin book as very readable, maybe because it's largely (maybe wholly) transcription of talks he gave. You can find some of the actual talks online.

Restarting my read of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. For the age it's a surprisingly pleasant and easy read.

Finished the travel writer book. It was unable to resolve the contradictions of backpackers who want to find the "real" "untouched" locations and the reliance on guidebooks that serve only to funnel people down a well worn tourist trail. To his credit the author did demonstrate ample self-awareness and acknowledge the problem, and it was never the central thesis of the book. If anything it underlined that the guidebooks themselves are of questionable authority, relying on freelance writers like the author who, due to a tight deadline, demanding editors and a low budget resorted to taking advantage of quid pro quo while canvassing hotel and restaurant owners for their opinions on where to stay and where to eat.

Now reading What Not. From the blurb: "Rose Macaulay’s speculative novel of post-First World War eugenics and newspaper manipulation that anticipated Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by 14 years."

Some time ago I read an article talking about how literary publishing is experiencing something of an extreme Pareto distribution: every year, one book becomes the literary book that everyone is reading, to the point that its sales completely dwarf the sales of every other literary book published that year. In 2022, that book was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which a family member (I think my sister) gave to me some years ago and which I started reading earlier this week.

I'm as surprised as anyone to find that the hype is entirely warranted.

Seriously — of the 27 books I've read from start to finish this year, this is the best I've read so far and it's not even close. (I was only about a third of the way through it when I started to think it might achieve this accolade.) The last time I remember being so affected by a book was when I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in February of 2023. When I woke up this morning I was on page 236, and when I picked it up this afternoon, I found that I simply couldn't put it down, tearing through the remaining 242 pages in three sittings and finishing it all of ten minutes ago.

It concerns two childhood friends who reconnect as Harvard undergrads in the mid-nineties and, with the help of one of their dorm-mates, decide to design a video game together. As a gamer it was of particular interest to me, but even my family members who don't game enjoyed it, so don't let that put you off.

Tender, moving, perceptive, topical, gorgeous. The three main characters are so vividly drawn, I feel like I know them personally. I don't think I'd change a thing. I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.

Funnily enough, about a decade ago I attended a talk by Brenda Romero, an American game designer. (You might have heard of a certain project her husband John designed.) She was talking about a board game she'd designed as an art installation called Train. One of the characters in Tomorrow... designs a video game with a broadly similar premise, to the point that Romero publicly accused Zevin of plagiarism. I can certainly see the parallels, but it seems possible that it was a coincidence: even when Romero was describing the premise of Train I thought it sounded a bit trite. Creative works using the "actually it was the Holocaust all along" twist often come off as cheap and manipulative, and that's coming from someone who used exactly that twist in a short story he wrote (come to think of it, I was about the same age when I wrote it as the character is when she designs her video game).

Holy shit. You're not the first person to lavish this amount of praise on it, but it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

I literally threw it away 3/4 of the way through. Shut it, walked outside to a dumpster, and dropped it in.

The main protagonist is a Mary Sue who's a barely veiled stand-in for the author. Even she's a cardboard cutout: only the combination of her and her two sidekicks begin to make a whole human being. Every gaming reference is inaccurate in some critical way or topical enough to have come from asking an LLM. The sheer hamfistedness of the central conflict (a right-winger strolling in to shoot up a game studio because he's mad about gay marriage being allowed in this Super Perfect MMO That Everyone Loves) couldn't have possibly been more idiotic.

Anyway, sorry to be a wet blanket about it, but I'm continually baffled by the praise.

Agree with your overarching point though (re: Pareto distribution of modern literature). It's all becoming a lot more monolithic, for many reasons, and it's not a development I appreciate.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn't change a thing, and yet I did bristle a little at the culture war aspects. Marx just had to get murdered by a homophobic white American, didn't he? We couldn't dream of having him get killed by an Islamic extremist. This and the book I read immediately beforehand, Doxology, were published within five years of each other and mention 9/11 and the ensuing atmosphere prominently, but one of the ways you can tell they were written by Blue Tribers is that the authors express no curiosity about the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks at all: 9/11 is essentially just treated as a natural disaster, an act of God, something that just happened. But after Marx's death, the rest of the book is just about how Sadie and Sam process and come to terms with it, and the culture war implications of his murder are barely even touched upon.

But for all that, it didn't sully the emotional impact of the book for me one iota.

it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

Try reading the aforementioned Doxology and come back to me.

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