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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2734 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 14, 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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I am going to be in Madrid for a week or so next summer. Mostly work, but probably also some free time. I have been studying Spanish for a while now, and I got to the level when I am mostly understanding written text, at least up to the newspaper level (though some rarer words are missing, but mostly I get through), but when I listen to the radio it's about 50/50 chance I can understand. I know most people these - especially in tourist places and hotels and so on - would speak English likely, but I think it'd be cool if I could speak Spanish to them - and especially understand them speaking Spanish to me. Any suggestions about how could I increase the likelihood of this happening?

Relevant map.

I had the same experience as @charlesf whenever I was in Spain or talking to Latin Americans. Most people seemed happy to hear me attempt to have a basic conversation in Spanish and were very patient and helpful with vocabulary, except for Catalonians who however lit up with joy when I said a few words in Catalan and then promptly overestimated my ability to understand their language.

That's my problem too - I can squeeze out some basic Spanish phrases (donde esta la biblioteca?) but my capability of understanding the answers goes down quickly. Especially if the environment is noisy, as my hearing is also not what it used to be (it's mostly ok but I could miss some details and when trying to parse a language I am not well versed with, it starts showing).

My experience has been that people in Spain react pretty well to being addressed in (competent) Spanish by visitors. In fact this has been my experience in every Spanish speaking country. Especially since English isn't anywhere near as common in Spain (and Italy) as Germany or the Nordics (I suspect France as well, but they'll never admit it). Depending on how you learned Spanish, you might want to brush up on some of the word useage and phrases common to European Spanish. I've found the MadrileƱos fairly easy to understand once you get used to the seseo. You can watch Spanish news broadcasts to get an idea. Other parts of Spain I've not done as well understanding them, mostly Andalucia, despite it being my favorite part. Most educated Andalucians can switch to Castillian without issue though.

I've only been to France a couple of times for work, and of course IT professionals all spoke very decent English, but from the people in service (waiters, ticket clerks, etc.) it was very much hit or miss. Some spoke absolutely zero English and basically refused any attempt to bridging the language gap. Once I had to use ticket machine instead of the ticket booth because the clerk refused to understand anything (which is kinda weird in a railway station - they must have significant tourist traffic there) and once I had to go to another restaurant because they didn't have any non-French menu and refused any attempt to discuss the order in English (it was before Google Translate time of course). It wasn't too bad in general, I found my way around to food and transport fine eventually, but I got the impression that some people in France definitely don't want anything to do with English. In Germany I had an opposite experience - we once got lost on a train station and asked some German ladies (in English) about it and they gave us super-detailed explanations and refused to part with us until making sure we made to our train, and their English wasn't that great (better than my German for sure!) but they were extremely enthusiastic about using it. We felt a bit uncomfortable that we took much more of their time than we planned to.

Most people in Spain do not speak good English. The spread of English in Europe has been exaggerated (with a few exceptions). Yes you'll be partly understood in tourism heavy locales but you won't be having particularly satisfying conversations in English with the average Spanish person. A lot of subtleties will be lost.

Learning the local language is usually a better bet. Regular exposure is the key. I would try to find one or several practice partners for voice chatting. Watching Spanish movies with and without subtitles every week might help. Maybe voice AI could be of help too. I'd try to branch out from learning the written language. Actually speaking it yourself is important to get used to.

Wow, I'm hoping it's the jet lag, but my Spanish speaking ability hasn't been doing great on this trip so far. V depressing. Hanging out with some people more one on one in the next few days, so hoping it's just jet lag+ anxiety + not knowing the customary short greetings.

Edit: Update it's the jet lag. Much better today and yesterday.

An Epstein files dump earlier this week revealed a picture of Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon together chumming it up. Chomsky had his arm wrapped around Bannon and they seemed pretty jovial.

I'm struck by this. On one hand it's great that these guys can put aside their differences and shoot the shit. Listening to the other side is an important tool for converging on the actual truth. +1 open mindedness.

On the other hand what liars. Is politics actually just Kabuki theater to the elites?

Is politics actually just Kabuki theater to the elites?

Yes

But I don't think the shock at this case is based in a good model of who Bannon and Chomsky are. Bannon has always been, or had pretensions of being, a real serious intellectual, who reads widely within academic texts, which means reading a lot of leftists any time since, what, Aquinas? Steve Bannon has definitely read and admires Noam Chomsky's work. Bannon has expressed his admiration and desire to imitate Lenin, you think he'd draw the line at Chomsky?

Chomsky and Bannon share a lot of analytical agreements about the nature of the political establishment, and about American foreign policy over the past hundred years. Their disagreements are actually a lot more minor than the disagreements between either and other Epstein buddies like Larry Summers or Bill Gates. If the guest list at that party was Bannon, Chomsky, Summers, Gates, Clinton, and Epstein; it's pretty obvious that Chomsky and Bannon would get along better together than with anyone else at the party.

Rather I think twitter turbolibs who are surprised about Chomsky and Bannon getting along are shocked because they haven't read Chomsky and just think of him as a harmless mascot of the generic academic left, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is; and they haven't read Bannon and assume he's just a MTG or Boebert style airhead, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is.

I've found often that two people can sometimes agree strongly on, to use a turn of phrase, the diagnosis while differing quite a bit on the course of treatment, as it were. It can be refreshing to be around someone that sees the world the same way you do, even if their idea of what should be done about it is questionable.

I'm shocked because I think of Bannon as a Christian nationalist and Chomsky as an anti-fascist and that they should kill each other like ants from rival colonies put in a glass jar.

I recognize they would have populism in common but that's not the only dimension that matters.

Anyway, I'm showing my low pedigree by thinking such things.

they should kill each other like ants from rival colonies put in a glass jar.

Why? Why would it matter to them?

In my mind what Bannon and Chomsky have in common ideologically is that they are both, by the old Matrix-derived definition, Red Pilled. Both are prone to smugly asking the reader if they think that is air they are breathing.

Their enemies are more in the Blob than in each other, at least until the Blob is defeated.

A couple years back, my patriot news type conspiracy theorist trailer park carpenter helped me take a delivery of a large load of drywall. The delivery driver was a black guy from Chester, who was a black Muslim type conspiracy theorist. They got along famously. Each was telling the other about conspiracy theories they had NEVER HEARD BEFORE. They were loving it. Did you know that they opened the oldest vault and all the saints were black? Did YOU know that Joe Biden is only a fake president, and that really the military took full presidential powers before Trump left office? No shit! Did you know that they're importing immigrants to drive black people, who are the real jews, out of the cities? No way I didn't know that man!

That sounds like the most amazing conversation I've ever heard. There should be a show that just puts BHI and Q-types in the same room with some snacks and drinks and films the conversation.

I hope you got a picture of them hugging it out.

Well, what would you expect - a cage match to first blood? Most people, if they find themselves in a common social situation with somebody whose views you may not respect, would politely smile and behave, that's the norm of the society. You could avoid going to places where you could encounter people like Chomsky (or Bannon) but if you are politically and socially active, you may end up in the same room with them and maybe even discover you have friends in common. What then?

I get that but the picture implies more than polite respect. Putting your arm around the guy and sharing a laugh is pretty wild.

ā€œWouldnā€™t it be funny if we got a picture of you guys hugging?ā€ ā€œYeah, Iā€™m seven glasses of wine down, why notā€.

Hard to say without context what it actually means. Out-of-context random images can be very misleading. No idea what's happening here.

A recent photo of Steve Bannon mucking it up with Adam Schiff would be much more noteworthy.

Noam Chomsky has always been an armchair revolutionary. In terms of concrete political activity, Bannon doesn't take him seriously and Chomsky probably doesn't take himself seriously.

On the other hand what liars. Is politics actually just Kabuki theater to the elites?

I think there's a lot of this. I wonder if political views are to be worn and discarded for politicians like the latest season's fashion. I've seen all sorts of political opponents sitting down together in private moments. I think your average politician is just a shameless opportunist and doesn't believe most of the things they say.

It's almost as if having a political disagreement didn't mean you have to be mortal enemies. Clearly that cannot be...

Meanwhile Chomsky readers are unfriending people for posting memes to the left of Bannon.

I guess going to war over politics is for the commoners.

What's your plan ... E? Maybe F. Yeah, F is better.

Whats your Plan F?

By Plan F, I mean the Plan you have for your life if everything goes to shit, but not by some horrible tragedy outside of your control. A house-fire, a weird accident -- these things you recover from with some combination of insurance, help from friends and family, and outright charity.

Plan F is closer to; "My ice cream business was going great! But then my business partner - who I knew used to deal a little coke - decided to commit insurance fraud and I'm broke."

For me, I think I'm on the periphery of a semi-hostile / hazardous area that has some sort of amazing natural resource. There's always work for a western / American "fixer" here. Logisics middle man. Plausible deniability bro. Even just a scout for hyper-aggressive capital deployment.

So, what's your Plan F?

Barring a large upheaval due to AI that I'm not seeing happening right now (though I'll admit it's not impossible), my profession is going to be in demand even if I lose my job. Even if I were to be unable to find a company to hire me directly, I'm confident I could sell my services as a consultant, there's a lot of companies that are too small to have a full time sysadmin on staff but would like to have one consulting. If I suddenly became unemployable in polite society, some of the skills I've developped around cyber-security would probably still make me employable in less polite society.

I'm currently in an apartment, but I'm looking into moving in a house soon, on a minimal mortgage (or no mortgage if I can swing it). That's going to go a long way towards securing my life from shocks. I'm also eyeing (small scale) homesteading; planting, canning, preserving, having chickens. Maybe hydroponics. In the meantime, I try to keep myself in a position where I could reasonably live in and work from my car if for some reason that became necessary. (As to why someone who's almost at the point of buying a house mortgage free is also preparing for the eventuality he might have to live in his car, it's a mix of timing and my pathological need to prepare and have backup plans, even if I have friends and family that would definitely take me in as Plan B to E).

I recently had an epiphany with regards to what I really want to do as a hobby, I want to go canoe camping and fishing. Equipment for these, to a high amateur level, has a relatively low price ceiling (ie, these are not really money pit hobbies after the initial investment). Once I have a paid off / almost paid off house, my paid off car, my hobby equipment, my food expenses reduced through homesteading, I think I'll be quite secure. My planning puts me at that point within the next year or two, without accounting for my wife starting to work within a year or so.

I have family abroad in a country with iffy relations with the United States, so I've always joked that if I had to do a runner I'd show up at my uncle's doorstep, and hopefully have squirreled enough money away from whatever white collar crime has caused me to flee the country that I'll be able to open an American theme hamburger restaurant.

Being broke wouldn't be such a big setback tbh, I'd need to like develop some beyond the pale predilections and then have them exposed or something to get ostracized from my friends and family. In which case I think I'd move far away and start over, maybe the west coast.

It strongly depends on what actually caused me to end up in such dire straits. Was it insufficient care taken when anonymizing patient details land me in front of a patient tribunal and strip me off my license? Did the UK succumb to the rage virus? Did the NHS finally crumble?

Usually, my backstop is coming back to India. Working with my dad and taking the reins. Looking for a job elsewhere. If I'm done with training by then, I could probably make a decent life for myself as a shrink, if not, well I suppose it's hitting the books and preparing for some other exam. I'm pretty good at that, even if it's hardly my preferred way of passing the time.

Either go to a monastery or work some crappy part time job in a rural area and live on welfare, spend time writing etc.

Shawarma/pizza stand. Both are extremely easy to make, the general quality is shit - so you will be hard pressed to achieve being worse than average, always in demand.

Buy a van. Be the guy with a van to help people move items. Friendly service. Will do value adds like moving shit into your house, or taking junk away to the dump. I can definitely help ensure all of the stuff is maximally recycled.

Bonus: can sleep in van when money is too tight for an Extended Stay., with Planet Fitness membership for showering.

Alternatively: mobile car detailing.

Work as an HVAC tech is literally always available, even with a DUI I could just work internally at a datacenter or hospital(so no company vehicle), albeit with much worse hours. If I get maimed and don't get a payout from it I'd have to get my contractor's license and work for a sketchy company holding insurance at a slight pay cut. The process takes about six to eight weeks of study and costs $1500 in books and seminars, but just having the license isn't a big enough economic advantage to justify it unless you're crippled or trying to start a business. I won't defend it, but it's hardly the worst example of regulatory distortion that exists(it's one moderately highly paid manager per company branch location- most white collar firms are way worse).

Non-driving related legal trouble would just mean working for a crappier company once done with the actual legal penalties. A collapsed business just means you declare bankruptcy and go to work for someone else again('I'm a good tech but I didn't know how to run a business' is a common enough story that everyone will accept it). There might be work life balance compromises, or much smaller pay compromises, but if worst comes to worst(unfixable drug addiction or something) there will still be a job there- even if it's a hotside restaurant equipment focused job(all those guys are alcoholic drug users behind on their child support anyways, and most of them got into it by being HVAC techs).

hotside restaurant equipment focused job

I'm guessing this means doing HVAC work for / in restaurants and - "hotside" - venting out the, well, hot air from ovens, stoves, hoods etc?

Hotside means you also do installation & maintenance of stuff like grills, fryers etcetera

I've never built a plan F in high fidelity. I can find a job anywhere - one sufficient enough to live on and stabilize. I really only need a cardboard box as a house if my family abandons me.

After that, I'd pick a career where you're trading loneliness for currency. Working on an Oil Rig (if they hire people over 30 for that?) is a great example.

Working on an Oil Rig (if they hire people over 30 for that?) is a great example.

Kinda tricky with the current state of outsourcing. My dad was an early Oil Rig participant as a UK citizen with military electrician training 50-odd years ago, and he essentially got grandfathered along with the industry to the point he later ended up a very senior Controls Engineer without a university degree by the time he retired. Circa 2020s the vast majority of rig workers are Filipinos, Indians or Bangladeshis since it's just not really commercially sound to pay a Westerner the multiplier on their base salary to make it worth it. You might be able to swing something in certain countries with stronger legal protections, but still likely requires a lot of time and connections.

Was he working in the North Sea? Half of Scotland seems to be involved in Oil and Gas, but my impression is that the overwhelming majority are locals/white.

Originally English/North Sea but ended up in Australia and working broadly across Asiapacific for essentially an Oil Rig Consulting Firm where developing world's pretty normalized.

Thought so. That didn't strike me as modern picture of the situation in either Britain or the US, which are the Defaultā„¢ expectations, or at least what I assumed without this context.

I would've assumed Canada without the clarification.

Yeah fair. He didn't have a ton of experience in the US industry since it was essentially the only one that actually cared about him not having an undergraduate qualification whilst grandfathered UK credentials got him in everywhere else.

Some old school friends invited me to a poker table around christmas. It's a bit too much for me to just happily play the money away as I usually did, but not so much to say no just for that reason (losing it wouldn't make a noticeable dent in my finances at all, I'd just feel bad). Does anyone here happen to know a decent, short basic poker intro guide/video series or anything that I can watch over a few days?

How is it structured, is it set buy in and then play cash and buy in again if you bust, or single buy in then tournament and pay out by rank, or variable buy in?

For the most part if your concern isn't making money (which depends more on the people you are playing with than on any skill you might build in a couple days) but just in not losing it: then your goal is to play tight, fold most of your hands pre-flop, and don't worry too much about bluffing or calling bluffs just play when you have a high percentage hand. This is where you start pre-flop:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PW7OB7crkxGKJMq9DKEBSCWDJHNcmrbmA05yEAJ3qrw/edit?gid=1033090205#gid=1033090205

Try to memorize the basic shape of the odds for the good hands, and give yourself basic rules of thumb for which to play through. Don't get obsessive with position or anything like that, if everyone else is playing at that level you're probably screwed anyway. If you're playing with ignorant normies, just playing tight and knowing which are the good hands will make you pretty solid. If you're playing against obsessives, it's going to take more than a week to get good enough at strategy for it to matter.

Personally, I'll add that as you play you can learn more about your own issues with certain hands, and either focus on learning to play them properly, or just learning to avoid them. For a long time I consistently lost money playing pockets, I'd take it to the flop because the odds were worth it, then fold immediately under pressure because I wasn't confident that the other guy didn't have a higher pair. So I started just deciding pre-flop that if I felt good I'd go all-in pre-flop and if I didn't I'd fold pre-flop for anything under JJ or QQ.

One extra variable buy-in, and then tournament with 3 winners.

Thanks for the help, that sounds reasonable. I don't need to go pro, just not like to feel like I threw the money away.

Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.

They will think you're a poker GOD.

Most "bro basement" casual games devolve into wild risk taking within 30 minutes. Playing tight will be a contrast and you'll look amazing.

you'll look amazing.

Not really? It'll be apparent that you're holding out for the best cards, not 'paying in' and taking part in the fun, and when you bet, it'll be obvious that everyone else should fold unless they hold an amazing hand.

It'll be apparent that you're holding out for the best cards

Casual poker players are perhaps the best example of Dunning-Kruger. There will be nothing obvious or apparent about the cards he is holding.

It'll be obvious that everyone else should fold unless they hold an amazing hand.

This is ~95% of winning in poker. Position play with the nuts. Actual gambling is a very bad idea.

I'd assume it would be fairly noticable that "wow every time Fred bets any money he eventually wins with two high cards, given he just made a bet after folding 5 times, I can probably assume he has high cards again like the last two hands he played and won"

As we've already established, I play very little poker, but that's how I usually try and think when I play

Yeah you can't always play tight

I've played a vanishingly small amount of poker in my life but I usually like to set a first impression in the opening few hands by making a somewhat aggro stupid bluff so the people who are trying to track your strategy think of you as more volatile.

I've played a vanishingly small amount of poker in my life

It shows!

the people who are trying to track your strategy think of you as more volatile.

If they're actually "tracking your strategy" this will have the opposite of the intended effect. They will simply not play when you are in a hand because the variance is too high. Happens all the time with newer players playing at a casino. They come in, sit down all fast and loose, every veteran at the table can see it a mile a while. What happens on every hand? If the new guy leads a bet ... fold,fold,fold,fold,fold. You just wait them out. Eventually, they get bored (quite quickly, actually) because there is "no action at this table!"

Then the adults can get back to grown folks style poker.

Edit:

The scene in Rounders where all of them gang up on the tourists is fairly accurate. It's not that they actually conspire with gestures or what have you, it is just that they are signalling really obviously what they have, letting the tourists chase them, and using the other (pro) players as enablers. They take turns with who gets the pot - again, informally and spontaneously - so that everyone walks away with cash.

Poker is an information game. You not only have to but want to give away some information in order to effect the betting and play of other players. This gets fucked up when a drumb / new / and or drunk player stops rationally reacting to information.

The most exciting hands are when both players have strong hands, try their best to signal it just right, both do but then both have a fundamental inability to accurately model the board and it comes down to the 4th and 5th cards being turned over. This is so fun because its actually where the limits to information theory are touched.

Happens all the time with newer players playing at a casino. They come in, sit down all fast and loose, every veteran at the table can see it a mile a while. What happens on every hand? If the new guy leads a bet ... fold,fold,fold,fold,fold. You just wait them out. Eventually, they get bored (quite quickly, actually) because there is "no action at this table!"

If you're at a table that looks like this, and you want to make money, you're at the wrong table. Honestly "they (plural!) get bored" should have already told you that there was more than one skilled player at the table, and therefore that it was a bad table.

It shows!

LMAO shots fired, luckily for me my opponents also didn't play much poker, so my amateur reverse psychology was mildly effective

They will simply not play when you are in a hand because the variance is too high

This is really interesting, so "good" players try to avoid chaotic situations and play when they have a better gut sense of what they think the other people are actually doing?

Isn't that the point of bluffing though? I'd imagine every good player does a mixture of going in on legitimately good odds hands, and some amount of bluffing? What makes an opposing player low or high variance?

Then the adults can get back to grown folks style poker.

What does this mean?

This is really interesting, so "good" players try to avoid chaotic situations and play when they have a better gut sense of what they think the other people are actually doing?

More or less, yes. Good players try to exploit situations where they have a biased informational advantage. After learning the basics of poker, Poker 102 is learning about what's called "position play" (you can google it). A lot of professional level players pretty much follow the same first line strategy; be patient and wait for strong hands when you're in position, and then bet in a way that signal some but not crazy strength. This is sometimes referred to as "slow playing."

In poker, every action you take reveals some level of information. You can try to be coy and attempt to signal false information (i.e. bluffing) but that's hard to do well over the long term. People have tells and, moreover, eventually someone will call your bluff. Instead, you try to signal with some ambiguity, some noise, and then try to get the other player(s) in the hand to reveal too much true information. A good fold before having to bet a lot of money is just as smart a decision as calling when someone has preemptively revealed too much.

The difficult emerges when we consider scale. Professional poker players are just that - professionals. They will play poker 40+ hours per week, often exceeding 12, 14 hours in a single day. Nate Silver writes his annual guide to the world series of poker and remarks how, if you make it to the third (?) day, you should be prepared for up 20+ hours of being awake. This is where people crack. Sleep deprivation and cognitive impairment is real. Add on top of that that you need to start tracking betting habits and patterns in multiple other players and often the difference between winning and losing is just who can keep their shit together longer.

I'm oversimplifying - though not by much - to make the point. If you're interested, you should look up what changed in professional poker after Chris Moneymaker. Before, poker was still somewhat a cowboyish, colorful character world. Guys (and ladies) would play tight, but also gamble, and would have fun. Learning the game, at a deep level, was almost an apprenticeship situation. There wasn't a bunch of Game Theoretic Optimal betting guides online. After the explosion of online poker (of which Chris Monkeymaker was the poster boy), it's (de)volved to a bunch of turbo autists who crunch probability in realm time for 20+ hours. Board and people reading is still a thing, but the default, now, is to play so close to the numbers that mostly it's just a grind. The saving grace is that it's still a random deck of cards and bad beats happen. The joy of poker is that you can make all of the best possible decisions all of the time - and still lose.

This is really interesting, so "good" players try to avoid chaotic situations and play when they have a better gut sense of what they think the other people are actually doing?

Good players also want to essentially milk the low-skill money at the table without getting into low/neutral-EV armwrestles with eachother.

@RenOS seems to A) Want to go to this game and hang out for social reasons, B) Prioritize not losing money over making money C) in front of people. Playing tight will maximize the odds that you stick around for most of the night, getting the social benefits of playing poker, and minimize the odds that you'll bust early and need to rebuy and/or look like an idiot.

We can't know the level of the table, so we can't reliably increase the odds of winning by advocating for aggressive play. We can reliably increase the odds of hanging around all night by advocating tight play.

It's pretty similar to what I'd tell someone prepping for a boxing match in two weeks: practice movement, keeping your hands up, throwing straight punches quickly, backing away. That might not be the best strategy for winning a boxing match, but it's got decent odds against an untrained opponent, and it's got very good odds of avoiding getting knocked out quickly and looking like a fool against a similarly skilled opponent.

Best YouTube resource for the basics of boxing "movement." ?? I have zero boxing experience and whenever I stumble onto a bout on late night ESPN, it looks to me like they're just kind of lazily circling each other, but I know there's a lot more going on.

Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.

Especially on smaller tables, I'd add at least the pocket pairs >7. And once you're down to 4 players or less, you can also start thinking about playing the lower pocket pairs and "suited garbage" (face card + 7-9).

Yeah, that sounds like the games we had in the past. Though it's been a few years, so some could have levelled up in the meantime.

So for this week's "What Are You Reading" thread, we're coming to the end of the year and I just finished a few books, so I'm going to post my whole 2025:

Books 2025

Same rules as last year. These are the books I finished in the year 2025, meaning I read them, on paper or screen, all the way through. There are some other books I started but havenā€™t finished, I donā€™t give myself credit for those.

I aim for 26 books finished every year, so one every other week. Mostly because you hear about figures like Teddy Roosevelt reading a book a week, and I cut that in half for various reasons and try to stick to it. This is a totally arbitrary personal goal, and it is funny to me how IRL itā€™s almost impossible to discuss with anyone without it turning into a weird personal dick-measuring contest. Thereā€™s almost no one I talk about it with who doesnā€™t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasnā€™t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHMā€™s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.

I donā€™t get why, to me, itā€™s only relevant to me personally, because only I can know how I read things. What I skim and what I comprehend every word of. The quality of the stuff I read. How much free time I have. Iā€™m not really interested in comparing with people, but they canā€™t help themselves IRL, it touches a nerve. Which I guess it does for me to, but only to me, in that this is important to me in some way.

Anyway, recommendations if you want stuff a mottizen might like, or if youā€™ve read it and want to discuss it, feel free to comment.

I define a ā€œbookā€ by format, a bound codex front to back.

Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger ā€” Might have been the most fun I had reading anything this year. Itā€™s a great book in its own right, a gonzo creative writing exercise in half-invented rumor mongering gossip about people you might have heard of vaguely. Read it, afterward youā€™ll be able to confidently expound these anecdotes at parties, and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.

The Odyssey Emily Wilson ā€” A lovely, crisp new translation. I try to read Homer at least once every year. There are a lot of things I got out of this version that I didnā€™t get out of other versions. Translation is its own art. Wilsonā€™s work is right at the border of what Iā€™d consider a useful translation. Read it if you have read the Odyssey before, but want another angle.

Where Men Win Glory Krakauer ā€” A biography of Pat Tillman. Iā€™ve always liked Krakauer ever since reading Into the Wild years ago, when I gift Tolstoy to anyone I inscribe it ā€œListen to Pierre.ā€ The book is a real throwback to early GWOT times, how everyone felt right after 9/11, and just how bad the cover up was. The book is a bit of a hagiography, despite Krakauerā€™s best efforts, trying to portray Tillman as something other than a professionally violent guy who saw an opportunity to do some real violence for a good cause, but it leaks through in journalistic accounts of Tillman sucker punching other teenagers and hiding the assault charges from colleges to avoid the consequences of his actions. Read it if you feel like it, but it bogs down in the second half trying to figure out exactly what happened to Tillman when I donā€™t really care.

Rivals Jilly Cooper ā€” This is such a fun romp, I read it with my wife. A Jeffrey Archer type 80s business heist forms the scaffolding of the story, but itā€™s all just window dressing for various characters to bounce off each other in various erotic combinations. Itā€™s a shame bisexuality hadnā€™t been invented yet, Cooper could have done so much more if you have a few utility players on the team. Read this if you want something funny and light at the beach, sheā€™s a good enough writer that some of the jokes make me laugh out loud.

Alperton Angels Janice Something or Other ā€” A modern epistolary mystery novel told through text messages and notes apps. It starts off pretty good, and seems like it might really work, but ultimately it was one of the worst books I read this year. I read it with a friend, and when we were 3/4 of the way through, I posited a ridiculous twist ending as a bad joke, and thatā€™s exactly what she did! The whole book is ruined in the last ten or twenty pages! Bails on everything that was interesting in the first part. No one can write a good ending to a scary book anymore! Do not read this one, and if you do stop 3/4 of the way through and just remember it that way.

The Sandman Omnibus Neil Gaiman ā€” From a pile of recommendations for graphic novels that yā€™all gave me, I pulled this one. I donā€™t know if it counts as a book, itā€™s a comic. But if I had bought it in print, it would have been like seven books or something like that. Iā€™ll just count it as one. Really strong work, very interesting, at first itā€™s a little bit too far into just being comic book slop, but it develops in interesting ways. Reading it around all the Neil Gaiman controversy, it made me think a lot about the way Gaiman projects himself into the work, and a particular kind of man. Gaiman wants to be a master who doesnā€™t want to be a master, a feminist patriarch who wants to uplift women who want to be his slaves. His behavior with women makes perfect sense reading his work, and itā€™s hard to see how fans of his expected anything different. Read this one if you want a long fantasy read without too much thinking.

Fewer Rules Better People Lam ā€” Itā€™s barely longer than a pamphlet, but makes a compelling argument for why removing laws and regulations is necessary to produce virtuous outcomes for everyone. Read it so that when you buy copies for all your local councilmen you can explain to them why they should read it.

Ask Not Callahan ā€” A history of women destroyed by the philandering, and other crimes, of the men in the Kennedy clan. I have this bad habit of reading oppositionally: when I read a polemic against someone I make points for the, and when I read a polemic for them I make points against them. In this case, while I was blown away by the detailed research into all the terrible things that had been done, and the ridiculous horniness of JFK and brothers and fathers and children and cousins and nephews (seriously, itā€™s genetic) I didnā€™t necessarily buy all the harm they were supposed to have done. Read this if, like Mrs. FiveHour, you love Kennedy dirty laundry, but Iā€™m still in search of a neutral historical group biography of the JFK-RFK-Teddy group; everything is either slander or hagiography and it nearly always focuses on just one brother and mentions the others when I want all three of them to the same detail.

The Story of a New Name Ferrante ā€” Second book in the Neapolitan quartet. Exquisitely written, and worth reading for the art of it, but a whole lot of nothing happens for the most part, itā€™s a lot of work to get anywhere. Read it if you like the series, Iā€™ll get to the third and fourth this upcoming year.

Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace ā€” My big project for the year. Iā€™m not sure what to say about it. Itā€™s brilliant. It feels like it one hundred percent predicted the modern world in many ways, but itā€™s also so long and so intricate and so weirdly plotted. Reminds me of and probably inspired Motte-Adjacent writer TLPā€™s and his hatred for his own reader, DFW is engaged in a meta conflict with his own reader. Itā€™s brilliant but it is almost intentionally bad, disgusting at times for no reason, but the writing is so brilliant, I canā€™t make up my mind. I love DFWā€™s short stories, but this took me several tries to read, and in some ways I feel like at its best Infinite Jest is a collection of short stories that are connected into a madcap plot. Iā€™m still processing this one. It appears in the list where I started it, but I finished it much later. Read this if you want to read something brilliant, and donā€™t mind that the author actively hates the audience, you probably owe it to yourself to read it once, it might be the last really great book ever written.

Moneyland Bullough ā€” A pretty good nonfiction book of anecdotes about different ways that rich people use the tools of international law to hide, launder, secure, and otherwise use money. An ok and pretty informative book, but kind of lacks in a moral argument without fully committing to anticapitalist marxian analysis. If itā€™s their money, why canā€™t they use it how they want? Who cares about divorce laws for billionaire trophy wives who get traded up? Read it if you want a quick light read for information, I got it off the free pile at the bookstore.

Journey to the End of Night Celine ā€” What a slog! Why do people like this one? I went in expecting some really interesting cynical WWI book, instead I got a half-assed Henry Miller, a book with no characters who ever felt either realistic or admirable, just an absolute slog of a book that never even hints at an interesting point. Donā€™t read this one unless youā€™re determined to finish some stupid list of books, like I was.

The Official Preppy Handbook Birnbach ā€” Oh my God you need to read this. Donā€™t talk to me about ā€œThis is what they took from youā€ on twitter if you havenā€™t read this. WHAT A TIME! WHAT A PLACE! WHAT A FEELING! This book captures what it felt like to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place at a certain time, and if youā€™re like me youā€™ll be deep diving eBay for vintage Lacoste and cashmere for a few weeks afterward. Itā€™s a two day read at most, written as a how-to guide for being perfectly preppy, from cradle to grave. Read this if you love subcultural study and love Americana.

300 Miller ā€” When the movie came out my Boy Scout troop could recite most of it from memory on a ten mile hike, I decided to finally get back to the original material. Wow, was it different. Where the movie felt very GWOT, about beautiful manly White Greeks fighting shifty turbaned Brown Persians. The comic art style makes the Greeks look vaguely like an anti-negroid attack ad from Harperā€™s in the 1870s. It was decent, but exactly the same as the movie for the best parts, without the inherent homoerotic ā€˜miring of Gerard Butlerā€™s abs. Skip it.

American Sniper Kyle ā€” Read it for Memorial Day weekend. A quick, interesting read. I have a notes app draft of an effort post about how the book feels more like an athlete memoir than a war memoir, Kyle feels more like Michael Jordan than he does like Carlos Hathcock. Ultimately to pad the book out they include a lot of his wifeā€™s reminiscences about the period, which I really didnā€™t care about, and the editions released after his death include a bunch of eulogies about how great he was. Itā€™s a quick read and influential so Iā€™d recommend reading it.

Storm of Steel Junger ā€” This was one of my favorite books I read this year. Excellent, brilliant, lovely, incredible, harrowing. Absolute masterpiece. Junger was a brilliant free spirit, who wound up in the most important places on the Western Front, and wrote about them as they happened. Made me want to read everything by Junger, which I plan to. You need to read this one.

Band of Brothers Ambrose ā€” I have a personal connection to this unit, and I loved the HBO series, so for me this was one I should have read a long time ago, and finally got around to. It was the right moment for WWII historiography, and itā€™s such an interesting account of such an interesting journey for the Screaming Eagles and Easy Company in particular. Thereā€™s a lot of inherent depth to a work that has that much first hand interview to it. Read this one at least once.

Fat City Gardner ā€” Recommended by Alex Perez as a great boxing book, itā€™s a fictional account of two struggling pro-boxers, one teenage almost-an-up-and-comer and one 30ish never-was. Itā€™s a real nuts-and-bolts boxing book, and a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California. Short, punchy, a really solid book, read this if you like the fight game.

The Fight Mailer ā€” A literary journalistic account of the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman. Iā€™m fascinated by Ali, a singular figure in world history. When our cousins from Austria visited by Great Aunt back in the 60s, the first thing they wanted to do was travel to Deer Lake to try to catch a glimpse of Ali. The best way I can describe in modern terms is maybe if Shohei Ohtani was also Kanye West, or if Tom Brady was also Bronze Age Pervert, if an athlete whose brilliance cannot be denied was also a controversial political and cultural figure. Mailerā€™s writing is good, and he had a LOT of access, but the book itself was ultimately mediocre. Read it if you feel like it, itā€™s short and easy, but it mostly just teased me, and made me want to read Eigā€™s Ali biography.

Original Sin Tapper ā€” An interior history of the end of the Biden presidency. I read it with my wife to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a review on the motte. Mediocre and boring, an exercise in trying to do a directional autopsy. TLDR the Biden senility crisis was totally unpredictable and no one outside of Biden and his two best friends did anything wrong. Donā€™t bother reading it, just read my post about it.

All the Light We Cannot See Doerr ā€” A well reviewed WWII book about a blind French girl and a German boy escaping allied bombing at the end of WWII. It started out well, but the ending was totally limp. And, to be honest, Iā€™m not this guy normally, but one of the things I really liked about the book was that it kept the atrocities mostly off-screen, but then at the very end it goes into a very unnecessary explicit gang rape scene of the Red Army and German women. Which was just such a weird change in tone that it bothered me a lot. I thought it was good that he didnā€™t turn the WWII story into a Holocaust centered story, which too many authors canā€™t resist, but then to turn around and focus in on anti-German atrocities while avoiding German atrocities sets off my crypto-Nazi alarm bells for a book that isnā€™t that. Skip this one, not worth the effort.

On The Marble Cliffs Junger ā€” Jungerā€™s Animal Farm, his allegory mythology of the rise of Hitler. Junger was always a right winger, but Junger hated Hitler, Ernst Jr was killed by Nazis for involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, and Junger himself was only spared because Hitler was a fan. Iā€™m not sure I really got it, I keep meaning to take some time to go back and read interpretations of it to see if I can really get into Jungerā€™s feelings and values within the work. Probably read it if you are a fan of Junger, but not otherwise.

JFK Jr An Oral Biography ā€” I never really knew who JFK Jr. was, only knew him from references from others. This book was a fascinating dive into a very interesting person. How would you move through life if everyone wanted to make love to you? Everyone. The female speakers in the book that donā€™t want him are so up-her-own-ass about being just frineds that you can tell that not sleeping with him is a weird kind of active choice. The beautiful man that everyone wants, the son of a martyred president who in turn was famous for fucking starlets. Literally everyone wanted him. Women wanted him, men wanted to hang out with him to play the MAC system off his scraps. Itā€™s fascinating. Among other anecdotes: JFK Jr. once had an intervention for a friend, and invited his cousin RFK Jr. to come to share stories from RFK Jrā€™s own addiction struggles, RFK Jr. proceeded to share stories so harrowing that JFK Jr.ā€™s friend decided that he himself didnā€™t have a problem at all because he was nowhere near RFKā€™s. Read it if you like the Kennedys, like Mrs. FHM.

Coup dā€™Etat Luttwak ā€” Luttwakā€™s original provocative how-to book on taking a government by Coup Dā€™Etat. Not as good as I expected it to be, I liked all the Luttwak Iā€™ve read, but when I finally tracked this one down, it kinda fell flat. Itā€™s interesting, but all felt kind of obvious, like one of those self-defense manuals that say things like ā€œdonā€™t walk home alone.ā€ Maybe if you want to read it, try to find the original, I had the updated reissue with modern interpolations which kinda ruined the flow. Gets a donā€™t bother from me.

The Sun Also Rises Hemingway ā€” Maybe the best book I read this year. Hemingway is probably my favorite author of all time, the greatest to ever do it, numero uno, the best combination for my money of being a readable masculine author who is also a brilliant and important literary mind. The book itself is all about conflicting visions of masculinity, the big question is who is the cuck? The idiots who read Hemingway and see a simple view of masculinity have never read this book or understood it. Read it.

To Have and to Have Not Hemingway ā€” And of course, as soon as I get on a kick of wanting to read Hemingway because I love him, I run into a terrible one, the worst of Hemingway. Commercial, racist, derivative, flat, unrealistic. A mediocre noir about a Key-West smuggler and his fat wife. Iā€™ve got plenty of stomach for period-appropriate racism, but this one was a step too far for me, the main character seems to be willing to betray chinks just because theyā€™re chinks, and Cubans just because they are Cubans, thereā€™s no moral logic to justify his actions except his racism. I get an unlikeable protagonist but this guy is so annoying and bullshit-tough-guy-hard-times that I actively root against him and for the rich guys forcing him out of Key West and the Cuban revolutionary gangsters shooting at him. Skip it unless youā€™re a Hemingway completionism.

Ride the Tiger Evola ā€” My first introduction to Evolaā€™s thought. Iā€™m fascinated by his self description at his trial after the war, when asked if he was a Fascist he replied ā€œNo, Iā€™m a Super-Fascist.ā€ His doctrine of internal resistance without external action is interesting, but ultimately it might be too esoteric for me to actually understand whatā€™s going on. If we have any Evola-heads on here, feel free to DM me and explain it to me. Iā€™d recommend it, but I donā€™t know that itā€™s for everyone anyway.

Cry Havoc Mann ā€” A memoir supposedly written in an African prison by a British mercenary leader. A series of stories about overthrowing corrupt African regimes, written seemingly by a character from Cooperā€™s Rivals, an upper class Englishman of the Old-School, in a regimental tie and full of the old times. The last gasp of the colonialist. Read it because itā€™s fascinating, but donā€™t take anything he says too seriously.

Portnoyā€™s Complaint Roth ā€” The first person account of a Jewish man to his therapist, describing his struggles with his sexual mania over his first thirty years. Oedipal doesnā€™t even begin to cover it. At times it seems uniquely Jewish, at times it uses the Jewish experience to universalize to the male experience, but when I identify with Portnoy it makes me nauseous. It makes me want to read more Roth. Also a good example of a book where it was widely recommended, but the anecdotes that people pull out of the story are all from the first 30 pages, so the idea you would get from the reviews of what the book is about is wrong, itā€™s not about a teenager itā€™s about a 35 year old man. Absolutely read this one, and DM me to discuss what you think of it.

Soul on Ice Cleaver ā€” The letters and essays of a Black Panther in prison in the 60s. I picked it up because Iā€™d seen it cited so often by Darryl Cooper, and everyone else on the alt-right internet citing Cooper or learning it from him, about Cleaver writing about rape and isnā€™t that terrible that leftists loved this guy. I quickly found that those quotes were taken pretty far out of context, as is typical for any gotcha meme like that, and thereā€™s a much more interesting conversation to be had about what is going on in Cleaverā€™s writing, and Cleaver is kind of interesting in his own right. Iā€™m thinking of diving into the leftists of the time a bit. Read it if youā€™re interested in an ā€œof its timeā€ period piece.

The Naked and the Dead Mailer ā€” My least favorite book I read this year, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of an island hopping WWII Pacific battle. This book was terrible. It somehow managed to be boring despite being a short book about WWII jungle warfare, it managed to be testosterone sapping in its maudlin vignettes of miserable American lives left behind despite being a war novel, despite following only a half-strength platoon of men the characters still managed to be repetitive and unnecessarily boring, despite its pretensions of grim realism it uses too many confusing literary narrative innovations to have any immediacy. Skip this one unless you want to read it to commiserate with me about how terrible it was.

Glorious Exploits Lennon ā€” A fun Classical Historical novel, set in Syracuse after the failure of the Athenian invasion, two buddies set out to put on a prisoner-cast production of Euripides Medea to preserve the art in case Athens is destroyed and the work lost forever. It reminds me a lot of the vintage Chris Moore novels I loved in middle school, showing we can still do that kind of thing if we want to, even if Iā€™ve been disappointed by Moore himself lately. Mostly funny, written in a modern Irish vernacular rather than trying to do the stately or pseudo-accurate Greek idiom thing, some moments that will make you feel or think. Does a really good job of writing about prisoners of war without caring about who was right or wrong in the war itself. Read it, itā€™s a fun little book and wonā€™t cost you anything in time or effort.

Comment below with what you're reading this week, what you read this year, or any thoughts on any of these books. Feel free to DM me or get my TG if you want to discuss any of these in more depth than makes sense on a forum post.

A mishmash of books:

  1. Tactical Barbell II (K. Black)- possibly the most useful and practical book on Conditioning. this is IMO a must read.

  2. Burn Math Class (Jason Wilkes) - for learning maths. Starts with basic addition rule and takes you to calculus level in a fun, engaging manner with a maturity. It is not kiddish stuff. Great writing as well as great mathing. Unputdownable. I hope this guy churns out more such books.

  3. One Rough Man (Brad Taylor): Pure spy-action thrillers. just like Vince Vaughn's (Mitch Rapp series), or the JRs (Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan, etc.). Currently, I am on number 9 in the series. (yeah, it isn't brainy stuff matching the main thrust of this forum, or intellectual stuff like in rest of this post and its replies; but i am loving it and recommend it with full force). Whenever there is dull point in my reading, kind of feel lost or too heavy or too disorented, I come back to something like this genre to get the full pleasure of reading for reading purpose, and not for some "improvement" or "great thinking" or "deep understanding". Pure Joy. it is similar in intent to A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, which I liked too, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

  4. The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert: very limited cast, but very tense thriller. early work of Herbert (much before Dune). very enjoyable.

  5. Spandrell's Blog: from first to last article. Including Bioleninism. Lot of interesting stories and a different, ?more realistic, worldview. Very engaging style. Highly recommend. Had read about him in this forum only, about his essays (don't remember the original post).

  6. The Cicada and The Bird - a new translation of Chuang Tzu (Christopher Tricker): the only book which initiated me properly into the stories of Chuang Tzu (/Zhuangzi). It is a reorganized translation and explanation of the seven Inner Chapters of Chuang Tzu. Plus some other stories from later chapters. IMO, his take is the single best introduction to Chuang Tzu (who arguably is the greatest philosopher).

  7. Whatever and Submission by Michel Houellebecq (English translations): former is a depressing read, and I didn't feel very good about it. but the writing is powerful and hooks you up. Latter is a very famous novel about a fictional story of how islam will take over France- it does have the feel of Whatever and the plot is very realistic, makes it very readable and definitely must-read in a CW context also.

Didn't have time to do proper service to those books I read yet (surprisingly, the list is longer than I remembered), I decided in the meantime to do the list of fails - those books where I started reading, but got stuck and put them aside, either for a while or forever.

The Annihilation Score (Charles Stross, Laundry Files) - I used to enjoy Laundry Files series, but the quality has gone downhill, and by this one it became unbearable. Also the author himself is a completely un-sympathetic (to me) character, which I would be inclined to overlook if the work were good, but it isn't. To the discard pile it goes.

Use of weapons (Ian Banks) - I enjoyed Player of Games, but this one just didn't work for me. I feel nothing for it and it felt like wasting time. Undecided whether I want to continue with Banks in general (recommendations welcome) but likely done with this one.

Mercy of Gods (James SA Corey, of The Expanse fame). Actually an opposite reason - it's pretty good as a book, but way too dark for me right now. With all that's going on around me, I feel like I just can't stomach that much of physical and psychological torture, death and suffering. I am only a weak man. Maybe I'll return to it in happier times.

Unbearable lightness of being (Kundera, obviously) - this one is very famous and I totally don't get it. It's not bad, just, you know, meh, and I expected more. I set it aside and will return to it, probably, when I'm in more suitable mood for it or maybe just older.

A Tale of Two Cities (you know this one) - ever more famous and highly praised book than the former, true classic, same symptoms. I mean, I am not saying it out of contrarianism, I even actually like his style and wordsmithing abilities, but with some books (with much less technically capable writers too) it makes me care what happens and why, and this, for one reason or another, does not.

Burmese days (Orwell) - Orwell is most famous for the book everybody heard of, but he's a genuinely good writer overall (IMHO) and I enjoy his writing. But this one also was a bit too hopeless for me - I understand why one could write a book about "everything is shit and is going to shit" (especially when everybody else pretends it's actually going peachy) but reading it when everything had gone to shit, and goes to shit even deeper now, is taxing. I will likely return to it next year.

Barbarians at the Gate (Bryan Burrough and John Helyar) A very, very detailed book about how the big business is done, on the example of RJR Nabisco. Very interesting, but the amount of details is a bit overwhelming, so I had to take a break. Will likely finish it sometime next year.

I thoroughly enjoyed TULoB. Worth finishing.

I love IJ as well. Apparently the footnotes are to simulate a tennis match. Talk about pissing off the reader. I wrote a large review of the book here, and would love to discuss with you.

https://deusexvita.substack.com/p/review-12-of-2024-infinite-jest

Interesting recommendations, thank you. Favorites this year, hmm...

Book of the New Sun - lengthy, somewhat confusing, could have skipped the last book, did not care for the "grand" side of the narrative. Still, a wonderfully mysterious world, suffocatingly old and tired. I'm a sucker for well executed, organic "deep history" settings.

The Camp of the Saints - far beyond my expectations, must read, it's dreary and terrifying, but also fun, a rear-guard action. The invaders are beyond wretched, but (intentionally) barely register as threatening, it's all about the the endemic absence of conviction in the European natives, gleeful self-righteousness of the traitors, resentment of the "minorities". Hilariously crude at times but never malicious, uniformly even-handed, compassionate. Funny, for Russians to not open fire on the masses crossing the Amur so as not to prove the ork accusations right.

Schild's Ladder (Greg Egan) - perfectly good story, but more memorable for the depiction of transhuman societies. Entire planetary communities willing to wait centuries in stasis for a one member to make their lightspeed-limited field trip to another colony, just to not exclude them (or, to guilt them into coming back soon). Disliked how the author did the anachronauts dirty, though, not letting them make the obvious but reasonable complaints, stawmanning them as primitives with "XIX-century morality".

Embassytown (Mieville), Stoner (John Williams), The World of Yesterday (Zweig) I would also recommend.

I kickstarted my year by re-reading Reverend Insanity. I won't bore anyone with a recap, all I'll say is that it took me 4 months to finish not because I was slow, but because the novel is both great and very, very long. About 5x the entire HP series.

But I digress. Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. Go read it.

Outside of that singular, four-month nostalgia trip, this was a bad year for books. It felt like walking through a library where all the ink had run, leaving behind only the faint smell of pretension and pulp.

The Golden Oecumene Trilogy (John C. Wright) I am sitting on a full review of this, much like a hen sits on an egg that refuses to hatch. The barrier is purely technological. I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.

The story concerns Phaethon, a man in a post-human utopia who decides he would rather own a spaceship than be happy. It is solid hard sci-fi. Wright builds a world of remote-controlled bodies and dream-logic Internet architectures that feels surprisingly robust. It is the sort of future the effective accelerationists dream about, assuming they stop tweeting long enough to actually build anything.

The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson) I have already written about this. The premise is a banger: The Black Death kills 99% of Europe instead of 30%, leaving the world to be carved up by China and the Islamic Dar al-Islam. We follow a group of souls reincarnating through the centuries, trying to build a history that doesn't end in trench warfare.

It is a good book that fails to be great because Robinson treats Buddhism less like a religion and more like a narrative device he bought at a discount store. The theology is contrived. The characters feel less like reincarnated souls and more like KSR wearing different hats, lecturing the reader on the inevitability of scientific progress. It is Whig history with a side of curry.

Perdido Street Station (China MiƩville) I tried. I really did. I read half of this brick before throwing it across the room, or I would have, had it not been on my phone, and had I not been worried about scratching the screen.

MiƩville is a talented writer who has fallen in love with his own adjectives and the way his tongue tickles his taint. The setting is New Crobuzon, a city that is essentially London if London were made entirely of grime, cactus-people, and Marxian alienation. So basically just London, albeit with denizens who are more literal in their prickliness. The plot allegedly involves Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin trying to restore flight to a bird-man, which eventually unleashes psychic moths that eat minds. Oh, and he also fucks a cockroach woman. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the cockroach bit is above the neck.

But getting to the moths is an ordeal. You have to wade through three hundred pages of atmospheric sludge. It is navel-gazey. It is the literary equivalent of a goth teenager showing you their collection of preserved insects for six hours. The pacing is nonexistent. MiƩville seems to believe that if he describes the dirt on a windowpane with enough polysyllabic words, it constitutes a plot point. It does not. 6/10.

The Simoqin Prophecy (Samit Basu) This was a re-read of a teenage favorite, and unlike most things from my teenage years, it holds up.

It is Indian fantasy, a genre that is tragically underrepresented. Basu takes the standard "Farmboy Saves the World" trope and beats it to death with a cricket bat. The hero, Prince Asvin, is sent on a quest, the only sincere man in town, surrounded by people who know they are in a book or at least have a refreshing tendency to say fuck you to the plot and do sensible things. It is meta without being annoying, which is a rare feat. Tracking down the epub for the third novel required me to scour corners of the internet that haven't been visited since 2008, but it was worth it. Western readers might miss the puns, but good satire transcends cultural boundaries.

The Outside (Ada Hoffmann) There is a specific genre of modern sci-fi that I call "HR-punk." The Outside is the apotheosis of this genre.

The protagonist is an autistic scientist who accidentally invents a heresy that attracts eldritch gods. She is autistic. She is also a lesbian. The author is autistic. The author is possibly a lesbian. Did you get that? The book will remind you. It confronts the cosmic horror of AI gods who eat human souls, but the real horror is the prose.

It feels less like a story and more like a diversity statement written by a committee of Lovecraftian entities trying to avoid a lawsuit. It is absolute dross. The identity politics are not the subtext; they are the text, the cover, and the barcode. It is a book that demands you clap for it, not because it is good, but because it is brave. It is not brave. It is boring.

Theft of Fire (Devon Eriksen) This is more like it. A decent sci-fi page-turner. Itā€™s about a roughneck space trucker and a genetically modified heiress trying to steal a superweapon. Itā€™s The Expanse meets Firefly, but written by someone who really, really likes engineering schematics.

I am a Richard Morgan fan. I like Hard Men Busting Heads (In Space!). Eriksen delivers this. The physics are hard, and so am I : radiators, delta-v, the silence of the void. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the "ChatGPT Problem." It makes predictions about AI that became obsolete roughly three weeks before publication. I look forward to a sequel.

The "Mid" Pile: Footfall, Live Free or Die, Through Struggle, The Stars I group these together because they all suffer from the same pathology: The inability to write a human being who sounds like they have ever spoken to another human being.

  • Footfall (Larry Niven): Aliens who look like baby elephants invade Earth. They are called the Fithp. The military sci-fi is competent, but the characters are cardboard cutouts that Niven seemingly forgot to paint. I liked Ringworld in my youth. I wanted to love this. I did not.
  • Through Struggle, The Stars: Standard mil-SF. The author hands the characters the Idiot Ball whenever the plot requires tension. It is frustrating. It is like watching a horror movie where the teenagers decide to split up to search the haunted asylum, except here they are commanding starships.
  • Live Free or Die (John Ringo): This is part of the "Troy Rising" series. It is extremely "Humanity Fuck Yeah." Aliens build a gate in the solar system, and humanity fights back. How? Maple syrup. I am not joking. The protagonist leverages the galactic demand for maple syrup to fund an orbital defense platform. It is a libertarian fever dream where the free market literally saves the species. It is soft sci-fi for people who think Ayn Rand was a documentary filmmaker.

Space Pirates of Andromeda (John C. Wright) Wright again. This is an odd duck. It feels like Wright watched Star Wars, got annoyed at the physics, and decided to rewrite A New Hope with accurate orbital mechanics.

We have a princess, a gallant Space Cop, and an evil empire with a Death Star. But in addition to the Force, we have very rigorous adherence to the laws of thermodynamics. The dialogue is baroque. The characters are larger than life in a way that feels operatic. It is a 7/10 novel that I finished on a long flight, sandwiched between a crying baby and a man who smelled like old cheese. It passed the time. I will not read the sequels. I have mountains to climb, and by mountains, I mean another four million words of Chinese cultivation novels.

and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.

Arbuckle was the defendant in three widely publicized trials between November 1921 and April 1922 for the rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe. Rappe had fallen ill at a party hosted by Arbuckle at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel in September 1921, and died four days later. A friend of Rappe accused Arbuckle of raping and accidentally killing her. The first two trials resulted in hung juries, but the third trial acquitted Arbuckle. The third jury took the unusual step of giving Arbuckle a written statement of apology for his treatment by the justice system.

Talk about nominative determinism. But also what an ordeal.

Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.

Infinite Jest

One I need to reread. It's been over a decade since I read it.

Fat City Gardner ā€” ... a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California.

Always recommended as a boxing book, but the parts about the bleakness of life in Stockton on skid row for the working classes is what I took away from it.

On The Marble Cliffs Junger ā€” Iā€™m not sure I really got it,

How I felt after reading Eumeswil, but I still need to get around to Marble Cliffs. Glass Bees, by comparison, was direct and easy to follow for a tard like myself.

Portnoyā€™s Complaint Roth

A fun read, but well over the line of how much Jewish neuroticism I find acceptable. It wasn't a surprise, I knew what I was getting into, but man. It's never-ending. I thought American Pastoral and Human Stain were better, especially the latter. Roth has amazing sentences on almost every page of his writing.

I was thinking I didn't break a dozen books this year, but apparently I broke 2 dozen, not even counting the re-reads. I don't think I'll finish Karamazov by the end of the year since I'm 2/3 done right now.

Serious and Less Serious Stuff
Barth ā€“ Sot Weed Factor
Franzen ā€“ the Corrections, Freedom
Kesey ā€“ Sometimes a Great Notion
Chabon ā€“ Wonder Boys, Yiddish Policeman's Union
Chuck Kinder ā€“ The Honeymooners
Buzzati ā€“ The Stronghold
Ellroy ā€“ LA Quartet, Underworld USA trilogy
Ellis ā€“ The Informers, Lunar Park, The Shards (got halfway, then quit--ridiculously padded and a good editor would cut half)
Malaparte ā€“ The Skin
Wodehouse ā€“ The Jeeves Omnibus 1-4
Tartt ā€“ The Secret History
Clavell ā€“ Shogun

Horror
Sarban ā€“ The Sound of his Horn, The Sacrifice and Other Stories
Nevill ā€“ The Ritual
Hurley - Starve Acre
Thomas Tryon ā€“ Harvest Home
Stoker ā€“ Dracula

Rereads
Vandermeer ā€“ 3 Ambergris books
Mieville ā€“ Kraken, The Scar
Laird Barron ā€“ first 3 short story collections
Bishop ā€“ The Etched City
Pynchon ā€“ Vineland

Evola

While I have a few of Evola's books in my que, the only one I've worked through so far is 'The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit'. It's definitely an... interesting read.

I'm not sure if his perspective actually influenced CS Lewis or was merely a reflection of the greater philosophical perspective of the time(early 20th century), however. I did enjoy reading it, though, as it's the first book that ever defined what 'Hyperborean' actually meant.

My books of the year (read, not published) short list:

Wanderer, Sterling Hayden. Last days of the tall ships, Hollywood, OSS partisan shenanigans in Yugoslavia, sailing to Tahiti with the kids in a custody dispute.

We Will Never Be Here Again, Svein Tuft, yeah, it's a sports book, but Svein's a pretty interesting guy.

In Search of the Forty Days Road, Michael Asher. Burnt-out ex-SAS man retraces historic camel trading routes in Sudan. Scenes of buying his first camel and a sword straight out of D&D.

Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer. Sprawling and overlong but it gets going pretty good eventually. Supposedly very influential in the US officer corps.

300, Frank Miller

I haven't read this one, but I have read The Dark Knight Returns and a few Sin City comics.

There's a stock narrative in comic books, that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (gritty, confrontational deconstructions of American superhero comics) ushered in the dark age of superhero comics in the 90s and early 2000s, in which creators like Todd MacFarlane and Rob Liefeld were constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptability as far as sex, violence etc. go, but missing the subtlety and nuance that made Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns so effective.

I think this critique has merit when it comes to Watchmen, even though I no longer hold it in as high esteem as I once did (not because of its edgy content ā€“ in point of fact I think Moore's later From Hell is superior, in spite of being even more violent and raunchy ā€“ but because of its "look how clever I am" qualities). But to be quite honest, I don't think it's applicable to Miller. All of his works that I've read have seemed exactly as crass, one-dimensional and grimdark-for-the-sake-of-grimdark as MacFarlane and co.'s are made out to be. I will concede that Miller is a better artist than Liefeld (but then, who isn't?), but that's not the form the critique generally takes: it specifically holds that Miller is superior because of his greater sophistication and nuance in storytelling than his imitators. And nothing in his oeuvre that I've read has come close to justifying that claim.

Anyone who's tried to tell you that Miller knows anything about nuance is full of shit. Comic books aren't generally known for nuance period and Miller was considered a brick through the window even then. The problem is trying to isolate the work from the effect it had in the comics space. And Miller isn't just a writer, he's not a very good writer. As a comics artist he's actually more interesting despite his work getting arguably worse over time.

TDKR is seminal. Not because of how good it is - it's okay, if some scenes and sequences are purely edgy twists on existing Batman lore - but it's essentially become so influential that large chunks of it ended up incorporated back into Batman canon. And the artwork and presentation fits it perfectly. I maintain that the animated adaption Part 2 probably drives home how well/not well it's aged, especially when compared to commonly accepted "modern" Batman, but the sequence of him confronting the Joker is probably the best we've ever gotten including the live action adaptions. Year One I consider basically bland cardboard in comparison, although the fetish Batman readers seem to have for grittier origin stories is well served.

His Daredevil stuff is generally good to excellent, but the Netflix TV adaption that steals liberally from Man Without Fear is arguably as good in its first couple seasons.

I don't think you are completely wrong about Story of a New Name, which was mostly just a continuation of MBF. But I found book 3 and, especially, 4 to be existentially gripping and, the latter, devastating.

I look forward to them when I get out of town in the spring then!

They just feel like spring books for me. Maybe February if I drive south a few miles.

Like you, my new year's resolution was to read at least 26 books this year from start to finish*. It's not quite the end of the year and I'm fairly confident I'll add Cryptonomicon to the list before January 1st, but seeing as we're all doing it, here's my list. At the time of writing I've read 28 books from start to finish this year (16 by male writers, 12 by female), in chronological order:

  • Rejection (#4 fiction) ā€“ in spite of certain reservations, I can't deny that this was one of the most entertaining books I read this year, primarily on the strength of its first three stories. It is a terminally online brainrot novel: it's also pretty good.

  • Katalin Street ā€“ a solid novel which offered me some insight into the experiences of Hungarian Jews during and after the second world war, which I'll never read again.

  • Boy Parts (#3 fiction) ā€“ wonderfully nasty. Wears its influences on its sleeve (it's basically "what if, instead of an American male stockbroker, Patrick Bateman was a female British fetish photographer?") but puts enough of a spin on it to carve out its own identity. Its protagonist (as a friend of mine put it, a "female fuckboy") is vicious and awful, but never to the point of feeling like a caricature, and it made me empathise with one of her victims a great deal. The only thing that will date this book to the early 2020s is the insincere woke window dressing: no one is fooled by the token trans man character. It doesn't matter what you "identify" as: the message of the book, to me, was that there are men and there are women, and sometimes men are awful to women but women can also be awful to men, and there's nothing remotely "empowering" about the latter.

  • The Trial ā€“ Dull as dishwater and a chore to get through. I loved Metamorphosis, so I don't know what kind of off-day Kafka was having when he wrote this. Numerous artistic works have induced the "Kafkaesque" sensation far better than the work widely credited with introducing it.

  • Montaillou ā€“ I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.

  • OrbĆ”n: Europe's New Strongman (#2 non-fiction) ā€“ I read this for research, but found it eminently readable and informative. Highly recommended if you're interested in the modern far-right and democratic backsliding.

  • Kiki de Montparnasse ā€“ a biography of some French woman who appeared in photos in the 1920s, in the form of a graphic novel. It was fine.

  • The Garden of Forking Paths ā€“ a short collection of several of Borges's stories, including the one of the same name. Thought-provoking and prescient.

  • The Door ā€“ also by Magda Szabo, author of Katalin Street above. Longer, slower-paced and not as good.

  • The Disaster Artist (#3 non-fiction) ā€“ OH HAI MARK. The most purely entertaining work of non-fiction I've read all year. I imagine even someone who's never seen The Room would find it interesting, particularly in its examination of life at the bottom of the Hollywood ladder. Virtually all Hollywood memoirs are by people who've succeeded there and hence chock-full of survivorship bias-laden advice about the importance of working hard and never giving up on your dreams: it's still refreshing (and quite sad) to be reminded that you can be strikingly handsome, a decent actor, have the relevant contacts, be hard-working, determined ā€“ and still not make it. Also vastly superior to its workmanlike film adaptation.

  • Mina's Matchbox ā€“ fine, but some of these modern Japanese novels feel a bit formulaic.

  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ā€“ pretty cool, I love anything Lovecraft-adjacent.

  • Spoilt Rotten (#5 non-fiction) ā€“ who doesn't like a phlegmatic, digressive rant about how England sucks because of woke?

  • The Man in the High Castle ā€“ interesting and provocative, but doesn't really work as a novel (unlike my beloved A Scanner Darkly). Constantly jumps between a diverse collection of characters whose plotlines barely intersect and few of which have any kind of escalation or payoff. A "slice of life" alternate history novel, if such a thing exists.

  • The Perfect Heresy ā€“ like Montaillou, I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and like Montaillou it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.

  • Unsong ā€“ technically my second read, although Scott edited it quite significantly from the web serial version. As I said a few months ago, a mixed bag. Scott is nowhere near as good at writing fiction as he is at writing blog posts ā€“ but his blog posts are among the best in the world, so he shouldn't feel too bad about that.

  • It Starts with the Egg ā€“ I read (skimmed, really) this one for research. Very informative.

  • The Secret of our Success (#1 non-fiction) ā€“ fascinating, one of those tremendous works of pop science that makes you go "ohhhhh that makes so much sense" every other page.

  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (#5 fiction) ā€“ tore through it in three days. When Christie's on form, you can't beat her. Best if you go into it blind. Going to see The Mousetrap tomorrow night, can't wait.

  • Free ā€“ comparisons with Elena Ferrante are apt. An interesting and informative eyewitness memoir of Albania's difficult transition from socialism to a market economy.

  • Speaker for the Dead ā€“ I loved Ender's Game, but alas can't say the same about the sequel. Found it quite dull, honestly.

  • Stories of Your Life ā€“ I loved it almost as much as Chiang's other collection, Exhalation. Highly recommended.

  • The Year of Magical Thinking (#4 non-fiction) ā€“ the only work of non-fiction that made me tear up this year. Essential reading for anyone who's lost a spouse, and anyone who doesn't want to.

  • The Remains of the Day ā€“ I didn't like it as much as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but it was still really good. Further thoughts.

  • Doxology (worst book of the year) ā€“ I hated this book so much I ranted about it for several hundred words here. The most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book all year ā€“ indeed, perhaps for the last decade. I find it hard to imagine a person who would enjoy reading this book, even if (unlike me) they agreed with its politics or had a particular interest in the subject matter (New York's punk and indie rock scene in the 80s and 90s). Irredeemable trash. Please don't let Zink publish another book again. This isn't just a question of a plot development that didn't pass the smell test or a single unlikeable character: on a stylistic level, her writing is fundamentally, irretrievably bad.

  • The Outsiders ā€“ the best book I've ever read that was written by a 16-year-old, not that that's saying much.

  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (#1 fiction) ā€“ I had a feeling halfway through that this would top my list for the year's fiction. Granted that I've only read one book from start to finish since, but nothing is yet to dethrone it, even after reflecting on the other books I read this year. A lot of you disagreed with my gushing, but misgivings about its politics aside, I simply cannot deny the emotional impact this book had on me. Any novel that can make me feel like I know its characters personally and desperately want them to get what's best for them is doing something right. Heartbreaking and moving.

  • The Story of a New Name ā€“ as I said, I can really admire what Ferrante is doing on an intellectual level, and yet her novels for the most part leave me cold. The impact would have been heightened were her books not so frightfully slow.

  • Cryptonomicon (#2 fiction) ā€“ what can I say about this book that hasn't already been said? The silly parts (elaborate descriptions of the mechanics of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal; the process by which a family of mathematicians divvy up their mother's legacy; some hackers cracking into their partner's computer, only to find that he's using it to compose a Penthouse letter about he and his wife's sexual fantasies) are among the silliest of any book I've ever read. In the hands of a lesser writer (say, Stephen King) I'd say they're fluff which should be trimmed for pacing's sake ā€“ but it's hard to care that these narrative digressions have nothing really to do with any of the four main plot threads when I'm literally laughing out loud, which few books can make me do. On the other hand, the descriptions of the brutality of Imperial Japan's southeast Asian campaign are hauntingly gut-wrenching, and Stephenson succeeded in making me care about his characters to the point that I wanted the best for them by the end. It must be in the top five longest books I've ever read, but the page count felt entirely earned and at no point did I feel the pace dragging (which is more than can be said of Atlas Shrugged and Gone with the Wind ā€“ still good books, to be clear). A staggering achievement.

*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.

*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.

Interesting, in my accounting I put books in the year I finished them. Probably because the point of the exercise for me is actually finishing books, rather than being in the middle of so many books that Mrs. FiveHour yells at me because they're all over the place in our bedroom.

I really do need to read the Outsiders at some point.

The edition of The Outsiders I read was a mere 216 pages, you could comfortably read it in a few hours if you were so inclined.

I'll have to pick up a copy next time I take a weekend trip.

Not a complete list, I don't remember all the fiction, and some of them are either so specialized in focus to be irrelevant, or I just read on a bet and a review is besides the point (eg, Minotaur Milking Farm after it became a short-lived twitter meme, which beyond its obvious problems was also just bizarrely normie).

Conventional Books -

A Market of Dreams and Destiny: Alternate universe London Underground Gaiman-esque fantasy where everything has a price. Serviceable prose, decently interesting universe, but it needed several editing passes or maybe even a serious rewrite. The author has too many viewpoint characters and too little meat to each tone, the politics go beyond overt to the point of hilarious inconsistency, there weren't any real big payoffs or conclusions, and the central questions just didn't hook me much. I was kinda hoping for a something akin to Fable Of The Swan, so might expectations might have just been too high for what's ultimately just angsty slash, but I just came away feeling meh.

Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that. I'd actually read Icarus Hunt a couple decades ago, but I'd filed it away as a Zahn one-off; stumbled across the reset of the series in a B&N and splurged. I think I prefer the characters from Hunt, since for goofy publishing reasons, Plot and subsequent stories focus on a different set of main characters, but each story still works great and a not-absolute-best-tier Zahn character is still a great character. Not my single favorite Zahn series -- I think the Conqueror's Trilogy just had a better central gimmick -- but well-executed and consistently clever and easily beats Blackcollar.

Hugo Award Novels: yes, I still get the packet, though it's harder and harder to justify paying for it. Mostly a lot of meh. A Sorceress Comes To Call is well-executed prose and nothing else; The Ministry of Time has a great idea it does absolutely nothing with, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about as shallow as xenofiction gets. Alien Clay's the only one I'd really put a vote into, and that's just workable rather than deeply memorable -- it's far from Tchaikovsky's best.

Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way: a bunch of No Starch Press compsci books. I'm mostly self-taught (and worse, self-taught in weird focuses), so these were a kinda interesting read from a formal programming perspective. They're all pretty reasonable for their subjects, but what those subjects actually were and how closely they related to computer science versus computer engineering was rough at times. Computer Graphics From Scratch is literal 'how you'd do things without a graphics API, which you will never do', while on the other extreme Data Structures the Fun Way was a distillation of the various 'how do B-trees do and why would you actually use them'. Only real big complaint I have within the content was Code Craft, which felt both very opinionated on what coders should be doing and simultaneously fell prey to many of the same problems that mauled the old Clean Code movement. On the other side of things, The Book of I2C and Introduction to Computer Organization were the sort of writing that seem like great dives through layers of abstraction that I was looking for. Dunno that I could recommend any of these on their sticker price, but the shop regularly offers deep discounts.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Yudkowsky's AI safetyism to the masses. Takeaway: Not Great, Bob. There's few things more frustrating than a good writer making bad arguments for a position you think is worthwhile, and Yudkowsky's written single one-off jokes (eg, Moore's Law Of Science Fiction) that were more compelling than this book, while providing only the least-plausible defenses against his proposed horror stories. The first half of the book is telling us how People Won't Just in the face of a superintelligent system, and then the second half gives a list of things that would work if People Would Just. Few people are going to buy into the assumptions, here, and those that do won't trust the conclusions. I've long complained that post-golden era LessWrong erred by emphasizing pivotal moments and extreme runaway, but the book comes across as less grounded in its speculative fiction than Friendship is Optimal, and where a reread of FiO leaves people going oh fuck, I keep coming away from sections thinking they'll be dated in years, if not months. Maybe there's something valuable here I've missed because I've read Yudkowsky since the 00s, but I just don't see it.

The AI Con: Takeaway: Even Worse, somehow. Where Yudkowsky seems likely to be dated quickly, The AI Con seems like it was dated before it even started writer. Computers Make Mistakes, IQ Doesn't Exist, Stochastic Parrots, Water Consumption, yada yada. I don't know if the authors originated this stuff or just absorbed it from those around them, but they sure as hell didn't care whether anything was meaningful or correct. Even where it should have been strong, on the economics and social impact, it still couldn't bother: "bossware" is up there with eyetracking for something that could become a dystopian hellscape, and deepfake ransoms are already making the world cyberpunk in the worst ways, and the authors can't actually sell those stories. Finally, the policy proposals are a grab-bag of the impossible and/or useless.

((There was some "how to deal with AI for normies book", too, but the part where I can't remember the name tells you about how valuable it was: think three-hundred-plus pages of 'ah, but LLMs do X' that were marginal predictions for Llama.))

The Unplugged Workshop : woodworking handtool-focused crafting guides. Hard to review this because, outside of watching a few youtubers, I just don't know the topic that well, and it's impractical enough that few people I know do either. Worse still, it's definitely an intermediate-level work, with only occasional accommodations for beginners like myself. Still, highly readable, well-organized, functional, and good project layouts, and the stuff I've tried so far has... well, not always turned out well, because I'm used to chisels as a de-riveting tool, but at least been more limited by my skill than that of the writer. Even if you're really into woodworking, a marginal buy, decent borrow.

Complete Guide To Sewing: I was told this was The Standard Book on the topic, and I can see why. Where a lot of 'beginners to experts' books tend either, this covers the whole spectrum from before your first stitch all the way to deep project work I couldn't even begin to understand. Not an enjoyable read by any means, but a good reference. The projects are my only big complaint: not only were they clearly marketing to a specific demographic that had zero overlap, these felt more like they were trying to help guide people who were already working from a pattern, leaving you to really guess at sizes and shapes. If you're doing anything sewing-wise more serious than patching torn pants, worth a buy... but get a used copy.

Comics -

Promethea: another one I'd read before, but that was borrowing it from a library, and now the local comic book store had the full series in trade edition. It's an Alan Moore comic, with all the benefits and costs that involves : wildly metafictional, deeply detailed, uncomfortably sexual, not quite as clever or as dedicated to its principles as the writer wanted it to be, and with an unfulfilling conclusion. Still, if you like Common Grounds or Astro City, it's worth looking at, and far more approachable and optimistic than the typical Moore comic.

Black Summer: second verse, same as the first: read it in the Obama era, and now could find it in full TPB. It's a very late GWOT story, and intensely political about it. The first pages have a superhero with blood-drenched hands lecturing the White House Press Corps about how 9/11 was planned and the Wars In the Middle East were just filling for corporate greed and the last two Presidential Elections were stolen, but he's Taken Care Of The Problem. The only men and women who can challenge him are the five(ish) surviving self-enhanced members who once worked with him... if they want to, and can get past a government presuming they are his allies. It'd run into political disfavor before it had even finished, as by 2008 concerns about a President's legitimacy had become much more popular in the wrong side of the aisle. In 2025, a man surrounded by floating eyes talking about stolen elections has rather different political valiance (and Ellis would get cancelled for other reasons). But where Ellis's other works in the same time period were either pointless gore porn (No Hero) or have a couple interesting scenes trying to cover up threadbare plot and nihilism (Supergod), Black Summer remains interesting enough to keep on the shelves, even if (or because) it'd never get written again. Not quite good enough to recommend as a buy -- the conclusion just doesn't feel earned, to the surprise of no one familiar with Ellis -- but might be worth a borrow.

Online Published -

Contention I and II: average Joe gets isekai'd into an alien or post-human world without even the clothes on his back, and gets to do the Primitive Technology speedrun. There's some really good plot seeds here -- the main character's obviously flawed in relevant ways without being an absolute asshole, there's a big driving question about the local precursors that's escalated really well, the not!magic system is useful and compelling without overriding a lot of the discovery and exploration bits. But it's also only two novellas into a story that seems built to go on for another two or three books minimum, the author only started on Book III in the tail end of last year (currently patreon-only), and that makes it hard to recommend.

Kitty Cat Kill Sat: basically Rimworld - with one of the more sadistic storyteller options - meets cozy fiction, where an (accidentally) self-uplifted domestic cat pits herself against all the plural of several post-apocalypses. My gold standard for xenofiction is Book Of Night With Moon, and Argus doesn't quite get that high. The plot's a little too meandering, the payoffs need to be set up better, and it needs an editing pass. Still a fun rampage, happy to have paid for it.

Reaper's Lottery and Executioner's Gambit: furry scifi, with very heavy raygun gothic and gumshoe inspiration. It's intensely furry, like the rest of the Hayven Celestia works, enough to probably be offputting to anyone else, but like Skinchange (cw: featureless furry nudity, scifi violence) it's got a pretty strong core underneath it.

Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that.

If I were to describe why I liked the series a lot, I'd say because of how it reminds me of Vlad Taltos "in space!" The smartass protagonist finds himself inside plots-within-plots and has to piece together what's going on and improvise a solution. A formula I'm yet to get tired of, as my father used to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, unless you're paid by the hour.

Black Summer

I think it deserves higher praise here than you're giving it(though I'll confess that I'm a shameless Warren Ellis fan) if only for the fact that it basically subverts the entire expectation of what a political assassination entails and why they're always bad('Lots of people hated John F Kennedy. He barely got elected. But Lee Harvey Oswald isn't remembered as an American hero. Just a prick with a gun who killed a president. That's you now, John.')

The last moment where all the surviving Heros were all girls and all that implies was still a little cringe, though.

Yeah, especially given the broader zeitgiest at the time, it was a genuinely surprising take, and the level and degree of conflict between the heroes and the government is a much more nuanced take than the "you people are young" summary he'd give in interviews. As an exploration of political philosophy or philosophy of war, it does a pretty good job, if limited by its time and its awareness.

My big complaint's just that it doesn't really feel great about its characters. It's a comic book, and a short-run series at that, so expectations are never high to begin with, but the ending is undermined not just because It's Woke, but because it doesn't really feel like a conclusion for the characters that got to it. Tom feels very Batman-inspired and Horus very Superman, and that's a classic for a reason. Do their perspectives actually say anything about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? About assassins criminals being a cowardly and superstitious lot? Or if they're working as alternative company counterparts to Captain America and Iron Man, anything about their political philosophy? Artemis pointedly compares the US government with the Nazis in one argument with Dominic: did he persuade her before his death, or was her violent persona and facing always an act?

You don't need this sort of deeper layering. Black Summer benefits in the sense that not doing it means you can't do it poorly, like No Hero or The Boys and their utterly wretched X-Men parodies. But it's frustratingly noticeable given how little else there is to say about the characters.

That said, I do think it's one of, if not the best, Ellis short series. So part of it's probably me not clicking with him as a writer in general.

Black Summer(and Supergod, and No Hero) probably work alot better in the overall context of the time - not the political context, but that of comics overall.

Warren Ellis is one of those writers where he does something completely new and off the wall - sometimes it works, sometimes it stumbles - and then everyone around him scrambles to copy it because 'holy shit this is actually something new and innovative and exciting and' rather than doing anything new and exciting they just copy/paste until it's a bad parody(See: Extremis, Nextwave, Authority, probably a few others that I missed.)

Warren Ellis is pretty much a Comic Book Writer's Comic Book Writer. I have no idea if the stuff he wrote on his blog still exists in any sort of form nowadays, but several times he went all-in describing the creative process and history and what he has to do not only to write comic books but what it takes to get it published.

And he was very, very big on the concept of using comics as a medium to push out new ideas, and do them cheaply. He actually wrote a comic with this entire goal in mind - Fell - and I think it's worth checking out.

So, yeah. Warren Ellis doesn't really do characters. He does ideas, concepts, lobbing them out like hand grenades before moving on to something new - which, again, when the comic book environment is focused on reboots and milking the same characters for endless decades, makes for quite the refreshing change.

So, it's a fair criticism. I think he can do characters - stuff like Transmetropolitan, Doktor Sleepless, arguably Planetary with Elijah Snow - he just... doesn't. Most of the time.

I guess I'll do the same even though nobody asked:

Less Than Zero by Ellis - Quite a read, really dark. I whipped through it though, it's kind of gripping. It felt very 80s so no surprise it was released in 1985. I would recommend this book to skinny women age 18-25 with an occasional coke habit.

Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley - Pretty funny and possibly the most British thing I've ever read. It's about an early career English history professor in a provincial university and his struggles. It might have done lasting psychic damage to me when I was a freshman in college and a massive misanthrope with a superiority complex. I'd recommend it to grad students and adjunct professors who can't seem to get a tenure track.

The Case Against Education by Caplan - I was convinced by the arguments that education is mainly signaling. I also can get behind his proposal to massively increase spending on vocational schooling.

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment by Marsden - After WWII we looked to the liberal intellectual elites to help us forge a new national identity, and they failed which caused the rise of the Christian Right. I was more fascinated by how it was considered perfectly normal for everyone to call themselves a liberal at the time. I thought it was OK but kinda boring.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - I read the whole trilogy which has a name I forget. It's sci-fi about a spaceship's AI that gets trapped in a repurposed human body. I don't usually like female sci-fi/fantasy writers but this was decent enough. The treatment of gender is weird. The protagonist calls everyone "she" and acknowledges that some cultures get very offended if you call the wrong person "she". I figured a super smart AI ought to be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman but what do I know, I'm a chud after all.

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen - This is his autobiography. A lot of the first part of the book reads like a string of standup comedy bits, which it probably was. If you watch Radio Days it could have been yanked right out of this book. Then it gets a bit boring where he talks about his failed first marriage and career ups and downs. But there's a significant part of this book that is him defending himself against the molestation allegations, attacking Mia Farrow, and defending his relationship with his now wife. I was happy to read his account of these things, since nobody seems to care about his say on the matter. Only read this if you're a fan of his, obviously.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker - This was my only DNF this year. I wasn't learning anything I didn't already know and Pinker is very longwinded. I think in the future, I'm only going to read his books that are more recent than 30 years old, on subjects I know very little about. It felt like reading Ancient Greek philosophers trying to do science because of how dated the research was.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Adams - I figured I should have gotten around to this at some point and I'm glad I read it because I was missing a lot of nerd jokes on the internet for the past 25 years and I now know where it's from. I didn't particularly like it but it would have been 15 year old me's favorite book of all time. There's a reason it's in the YA section.

City by Simak - Having developed superior methods of transportation, humans all retreat into the countryside as cities are no longer necessary. Simak's version of the end of the world isn't destruction, it's isolation, which seems kind of relevant today. Very inventive book told from the perspective of a dog civilization in the far future that is somewhat skeptical that "humans" are a real thing and not something made-up.

Hyperion by Simmons - Awesome. Really appreciated all the different perspectives and stories. My favorite book this year.

The Fifth Season by Jemisin - I read all three of the Broken Earth trilogy. Very mediocre fantasy. I wrote about it in one of these threads before. I'd recommend it to women who still think the Hugo Award is a mark of quality.

On the Marble Cliffs by Junger - I also read this and loved it. Make sure to read the Stuart Hood translation. I took a page out of an the ACX review of it from last(?) year and made my wife read it to me while I was high. Had a similar experience to the reviewer in that I found the descriptions too intense at one point and made her stop. Second favorite book this year.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge - A bit of a slow starter but it was worth it. It's about a runaway AI trying to destroy the universe and the one weapon that can stop it exists on a planet of medieval-era dogs that operate as individual packs rather than solo beings using special organs to communicate. If you're into more male oriented sci-fi it will work for you.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow by Zevin - I was surprised by this one. A GenX woman writing a story about a video game company could have been a disaster for me, but it was great. A bit sentimental and melodramatic. It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.

Looking back, I think I'm going to read more nonfiction next year. I've been hesitating to tackle Nixonland by Perlstein so maybe that's what's next.

Hyperion by Simmons - Awesome. Really appreciated all the different perspectives and stories. My favorite book this year.

Make sure you read the sequel - there are books past the sequel that seem to be more unevenly reviewed but I liked the sequel quite a bit.

First time I read Hyperion the sequels felt like a letdown, so I set them aside. Second time I read through them, it was all awesome. I plan to re-read the whole thing again sometime in the future.

If you liked Lucky Jim, then I highly recommend The Old Devils by Amis, which is about the misadventures of some old drunks. Both pathetic and very funny.

Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley

Absolute heater, this.

Less Than Zero by Ellis

I'm not sure if he ever surpassed the debut. Maybe his sophomore novel, The Rules of Attraction. Less Than Zero might be the only book of his which isn't way too long.

It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.

Glad I wasn't the only one here who loved it.

I figured a super smart AI ought to be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman but what do I know, I'm a chud after all.

I am at 85-95% credence that the AI probably could, but the point is that it (its creator) is a chauvinist who doesn't care. The Raadchai are culturally superior with their pristine gloves, tea, weird relationships, and calling everyone "she". Everyone else and their pronouns and other distinctions are uncivilized, disposable material to be assimilated in a process of ruthless colonization. It a shitty dystopian society.

I couldn't decipher was the author making a subtle meta level argument or (more probably) found herself making it while writing an internally consistent treatment a random feminist "let's subvert some expectations" idea she had, but I think it has subtler implications than she or majority of the Hugo crowd cheering for it realized.

I guess I'll do the same even though nobody asked:

I asked!

I've been hesitating to tackle Nixonland by Perlstein so maybe that's what's next.

I was underwhelmed, I didn't really get much of a thesis out of it. There's better books on the same topic.

I took a page out of an the ACX review of it from last(?) year and made my wife read it to me while I was high. Had a similar experience to the reviewer in that I found the descriptions too intense at one point and made her stop. Second favorite book this year.

Wow you have no idea how much you just annoyed my wife in three weeks.

Less Than Zero by Ellis - Quite a read, really dark. I whipped through it though, it's kind of gripping. It felt very 80s so no surprise it was released in 1985. I would recommend this book to skinny women age 18-25 with an occasional coke habit.

Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley - Pretty funny and possibly the most British thing I've ever read. It's about an early career English history professor in a provincial university and his struggles. It might have done lasting psychic damage to me when I was a freshman in college and a massive misanthrope with a superiority complex. I'd recommend it to grad students and adjunct professors who can't seem to get a tenure track.

I'm adding both these to my tbr pile.

Make sure to read the Stuart Hood translation.

I strongly disagree and much prefer the NYRB translation, but a sign of a strong novel that we can disagree on the translation but both love the book. Given the method, you may enjoy Junger's book on drugs, Approaches (not my favourite of his but has some interesting stuff).

I'm currently at 20 books and I doubt I'll finish Le Morte d'Arthur in the next three weeks.

Thereā€™s almost no one I talk about it with who doesnā€™t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasnā€™t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHMā€™s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.

Aren't those the three most obvious responses?

  1. It's cool you did this and I wish I did

  2. It's dumb you did this and I'm glad I didn't

  3. It's cool you did this and I did it too

My top books this year:

  1. Two Years Before the Mast: an absolutely incredible story of seamanship, camaraderie, and the old west. Reading this book in the California summer was an unforgettable experience. It is on the very knife's edge of exponential growth taking root in California that has lasted through today. Be sure to read the author's postscript on his return visit 24 years after and his son's postscript 72 years after. An unspeakable sense of nostalgia and yet also a sense of what stays the same.

  2. A Confederacy of Dunces: Absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read, period (and yes I've read all the Britbong funnymen). Even better if you've met a couple guys who reflect facets of the substantial and well-formed soul of Ignatius J. Reilly.

  3. Anna Karenina: A book like this is hard to even review, but it's certainly worth your while. One small aspect: it's deeply amusing that Tolstoy seems to think that subsistence farming is basically the right and proper mode of agricultural activity for the Russian landowning class. Disregard mechanization. Leave behind optimization. RETVRN to mowing hay from dawn to dusk with a sickle, shoulder to shoulder with the illiterate peasants. If you're making any money, you're doing it wrong.

If you're making any money, you're doing it wrong.

Tolstoy was born into a very aristocratic old money family. I am not sure what'd be the US equivalent of this, maybe like Kennedy? And he didn't like how things were going, so obviously the opposite of what he saw is correct - if my family has tons of money and relies on other's work to provide for us, the right thing is to have no surplus and dig the dirt with your hands and mow with the sickle.

It was a scythe actually, but directionally correct.

Doing the work yourself does not logically exclude the possibility of mechanization though.

A Confederacy of Dunces: Absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read

I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one, I really did not understand the hype. Most of the book I just felt sorry for this fucking loser's poor mother.

I hated Dunces so very much. I didn't even make it halfway before I started hoping for Ignatius' death.

It's probably because you're almost a Britbong.

Did you like The Ginger Man? I hated that one, by the end I was hoping he and his buddies would get the lethal injection but apparently Irish people love it.

Huh, I've never even heard of The Ginger Man. Might have to check it out.

Anna Karenina: A book like this is hard to even review, but it's certainly worth your while.

I read it for the first time in high school, and barely understood it. I read it again a couple years back, and enjoyed it greatly and got a lot out of it, but felt like I got bored of it near the end. Then that same week I was reading some interview in the NYT Sunday Book Review, and the author said he didn't really get Anna Karenina until he turned 40, and I sat there like fuuuuuck I gotta wait another seven years?

Two Years Before the Mast: an absolutely incredible story of seamanship, camaraderie, and the old west. Reading this book in the California summer was an unforgettable experience. It is on the very knife's edge of exponential growth taking root in California that has lasted through today. Be sure to read the author's postscript on his return visit 24 years after and his son's postscript 72 years after. An unspeakable sense of nostalgia and yet also a sense of what stays the same.

Somehow I'm both not sure what this book is about, and sure I want to read it, from this little review.

I wasn't getting Anna Karenina for a long time, probably until about 40s too. Though I was a bit hampered by the fact that it had been taught in Soviet school, and that can give a bad taste to anything. Tolstoy himself was in his 40s when writing it, so that also may be a factor.

Has been an uneven year in reading for me. Lots of half-read interesting finds in the open access sphere. The most interesting have been With and Without Galton, Red Dynamite and A People's History of the Classics. There's been a lot of personal reads, religious and national. Also, Umineko, if that counts, has been pretty good up to Episode 5.

Serious reading! Found your take on Junger interesting (fyi, his son was sent to a penal battalion for making anti-Nazi remarks, and killed in Italy either by partisans or the SS). After the war, his anti-authoritarian writings become less allegorical and more straightforward, I think in part because he wished he could have taught his son better in the arts of subterfuge. I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it - though the first time I read it I was too blown away by the prose to see anything but beauty. Likewise, my DMs are always open for questions/thoughts re: Junger, and my invitation to that reading group discord server continues to stand.

On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity. He sees his role as somewhere between as JOI (literally, Himself) trying to communicate to Hal, and an AA sponsor trying to demonstrate to a Newcomer why the steps and slogans and meetings and so on are so meaningful. As such, he tries all kinds of crazy stuff to get the reader to really hear him; I think even the difficulty of the book is an attempt to get you sucked in and caring about it in a way that you wouldn't for a traditional narrative.

Highlights of my reading this year:

  • Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. Extremely difficult, but has given me an entire new conceptual vocabulary and philosophical lense, which is an incredibly rare thing to find after an otherwise wide-ranging philosophical education.
  • Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.
  • Paul Fussell: The Great War and Modern Memory. An artistic/literary history of WWI, which goes deep into the aesthetic and conceptual world of its combatants, both what they brought into the War and what emerged. Really excellent, though heavily focused on the Allies (German writers other than Junger are barely mentioned, and the Eastern and colonial fronts footnotes to the Western)
  • Malcolm Cowley: The Exiles' Return. The same story from another perspective, Cowley is writing a retrospective of the Lost Generation of American writers, who often experienced the War as noncombatant volunteers and then bounced between Greenwich Village and interwar Europe.
  • Michael Farrell: Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. An academic book on how circles of artists and writers form, organize themselves, and find common patterns of social roles within the group. Mostly made up of case studies on particular circles, like the Inklings and Impressionists, and I found the author's theories mostly compelling. The Freud chapter doesn't really work, because it focuses on a dyad rather than a group, and the feminist chapter is clearly just there to be PC, but a good read for anyone in creative spaces looking to improve them.
  • Contemporary alt-lit: I'll do a longer effortpost on this after a few more books, but I've been reading a lot of stuff from The Scene, Dimes Square, Based Publishing, etc. The ones worth reading so far are Noah Kumin's Stop All The Clocks (just a very good read. Even my boomer parents enjoyed it), Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers (emotionally powerful, ruined my weekend), Daniel Matthew's Pervertathon (sometimes not as funny as it wants to be, but the ending is the only time this year I've burst into uncontrollable laughter at a book), Calvin Westra's various short books (experimental stuff pulled off perfectly), Mike Ma (even if he now feels a little less contemporary), and The End magazine (short fiction). I can't speak for Passage Press's new authors, since my black friday bundle is still being shipped, but I've heard most of them read short stories/excerpts and am excited to - Justin Lee in particular.

I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it

I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.

On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity.

I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?

Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.

This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.

Contemporary alt-lit

If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?

Forest Passage is the late Junger's most straightforward work (not to say it is straightforward!), and the closest thing to an anarch's manifesto. Hope you will enjoy and always happy to discuss.

I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?

So think about the Professional Conversationalist scene at the start, and then the conversation between the Wraith and Gately at the end - JOI is desperate to communicate, but he can't get past Hal's interior walls and really speak to him. The postmodern novelist is in the same predicament, nothing he writes can cross the walls of detachment within himself and the reader. He creates the Entertainment as a way to communicate, but it only produces all-consuming obsession (n.b. we never truly know if the Entertainment is absolute bliss, or if it's simply that withdrawal from it is immeasurably painful). I think the Entertainment is both the capacity of media/Substance consumption to consume human life, and also a sincere attempt from JOI to escape that. And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.

This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek.

Yeah this is definitely a compelling reading. Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them. I'm not sure I buy that, but will be looking for that on the next read. The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.

If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?

I would say Stop All The Clocks is probably the most paradigmatic. It's set in New York, it's got questions about art and AI, it's got the conspiracy angle. It also tones down the annoying tics that other similar novels have (I read three that all did the same bit about iPad tips being set too high, and the cod-Pynchon maximalism of a lot of these books never lands with me). Alternatively, pick up a copy of The End and get a buffet - they are print-only (though I believe pdfs used to be on their website), but you can preorder the next issue in the link from their Instagram bio.

P.S. You may enjoy this cartoon

Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.

Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.

Scrolling back through my Amazon and Royal Road accounts for highlights:

  • Thresholder ("rational" worldhopping; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars, very fun

  • The Stubborn Skill-Grinder in a Time Loop (Chunin Exam Day, but progressing into xianxia power levels rather than regressing into a Sasuke poop incident; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars

  • Tenebroum (evil genius loci happens to become a necromancer; Royal Road, Amazon): 4 stars, fun

  • The Systemic Lands (Earthlings are dumped into an extremely harsh "system" world at regular intervals and struggle to form a civilized society; Royal Road review, Amazon): 5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3ā€“9, 3 stars for book 10 (see details at the linked review)

  • Death After Death (Earthling is dumped into a world with multiple interlinked "levels" of history that must be "solved"): 5 stars, very fun

  • The Years of Apocalypse (magic student is dragged into a time loop and must use it to save the world): 5 stars, very fun

Also, the first half of the acclaimed Worth the Candle (books 1ā€“6 of the original AO3 version, now apparently reorganized into books 1ā€“4) has been made available for purchase on Amazon if you want to support the author.

Anyone wanna share their peptides/supplements stack that actually does something? My current stack (aside from very basic stuff like Vitamin D):

  • Omega-3 for skin, inflammation, cognition - made a difference for my skin, not sure about anything else, make sure to get high quality one
  • Magnesium Glycinate for sleep - makes it easier to fall asleep, and helps with not feeling dead on wake up on nights when I don't get enough sleep
  • Selank: for anxiety, mood regulation, depression - genuinely makes me feel more happy and stable. I've been going through cycles of rumination, depression and mild panic attacks at night and they've pretty much stopped. I still get negative thoughts at night here and there, but instead of automatically falling into a negative feedback loop I can just observe the thought and move on. This is my first cycle of selank, so not sure how it's gonna go in the future but I'm very surprised to see such noticeable changes, usually with stuff like this changes are marginal.
  • Creatine: had to stop this one for now, but it's great for the gym. I've been reading research on 10gr dose providing visible cognitive benefits, so I will try that instead of 5gr to see if it makes a difference next time I can hop on it.

Daily stuff:

  • 2 caps fish oil
  • Protein shake (2 scoops whey protein)
  • 10g creatine, mixed into my morning protein shake (or 5g morning, 5g evening mixed into my recovery protein on a workout day)
  • 2 multivitamin gummies

On/off:

  • 3 vitamin D tablets when I remember to take them. Quantity not based on anything, but I was in the onset of a nasty-feeling cold a few weeks back and 3 tablets and a nap deleted it.
  • 213 complex - this is what actually got me started on supplements, but I tend to space out when I'm on it because it tends to make me feel like I have a cold. Helped somewhat with my afternoon sleepies but really helped with managing weight, though it's not the most comfortable sensation. Feels like I'm on the verge of uncomfortably full a lot. Also has a melatonin thing to help with sleep and cortisol reduction.

I have a desk job so my physical activity is mostly my kickboxing habit, my supplement "stack" is largely based on the recommendations of my friend who's a sports trainer and I adjusted quantities somewhat based on how I felt after a session. I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what benefits each supplement gives me, but I feel better than I've felt in a decade.

Semaglutide for weight-loss and energy.

I've gotten off the horse for megadosing on Fisetien for Reasons(and I really need to get back on) but it remains the one supplement I should never give up simply because every time I megadose at the start of the month, my reaction can vary wildly - from nothing at all to sleepy lethargy as if I'm fighting off an infection to voracrious hunger to - well, you get the picture. It's an odd supplement that always makes me raise an eyebrow.

Creatine is something I'll sample occasionally, and is basically rocket-fuel for training. I tend to use it sparingly, as it's obvious effects wear off pretty quickly.

I've said this here before but I went on creatine and had good gains from it but jfc it gave me the most insane charlie horses in both legs at the same time during hill climbs. I had a few episodes but the worst was stuck on my ass for a few days during a hiking trip as a result before I thought to stop taking it.

Best guess is this was some kind of atypical dehydration related thing exacerbated by the creatine causing excessive muscle tightness but I don't really want to fuck with it anymore. My doctor was totally confused but did order bloods and it showed my creatine kinase levels were elevated for weeks.

I can't stick to anything, but what I've seen results from when I use them in between:

-- Creatine will make me put on ten pounds of mostly muscle instantly.

-- Nutrafol, with persistence, has got my thinning hair looking less thinning. Might not reverse altogether, but I feel like it's buying me time to get to 40 and just shave it all off before it becomes really problematic.

-- Collagen supplements reduce finger strain when I'm climbing a lot

it's buying me time to get to 40 and just shave it all off

Did it at 28. Zero regret.

I rock a Johnny Sins Jason Statham look. "Bald + beard" is a little overplayed, I think. Plus, if you have a jawline, show it off.

We'll see how I look by 40. I've tried buzzing it down to a 2 a few times, and I have an odd shaped head, I feel like I look like a baby, and also like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.

like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.

Lol. Yeah. Those looks will happen. But any guy who's in decent shape and over 6'0" already has had to practice his "I'm not going to do a murdering!" body language. You'd be fine.

I get my omega-3 in the form of liquid fish oil. It's absorbed better that way. Tastes horrible though.

I also take D3 (large doses during winter every day, less during summer) and magnesium glycinate in the evening. Sometimes potassium citrate.

Vitamin K2 (trans-menaquinone-7) to make the D3 go where it should in the body.

B12 during periods of less animal product consumption.

I'm intrigued by this Selank thing. First time I've seen it. How did you hear about it?

B12 during periods of less animal product consumption.

I've tried it long time ago, unfortunately gave me really bad hormonal acne (went away after I stopped taking it)

I'm intrigued by this Selank thing. First time I've seen it. How did you hear about it?

It's been around for a long time, I've first read about it 10+ years ago when I was briefly interested in biohacking, but never got around to trying it. There's a 'chinese' peptide craze right now among techies and finance bros, I've finally decided to do a deep dive and try the one that I thought would benefit me most and it turned out pretty good so far.

Looks like Selank is a Russian invention though? If it's been around for that long, it should have been better known and regulated by now. I don't think I'll be able to buy it where I live, except as a 'research chemical'.

Yep, it is Russian and has been around since 1980s, but a lot of other peptides these days come from China and India. I'm assuming USA isn't interested in regulating stuff like that because it's so cheap so can't make much money off it. I also bought mine as 'research chemical' and had to mix it myself.

Hmm. Do you have to prove you're a researcher in any way?

Nope as far as I'm aware. I got mine off ebay, found a seller with lots of recent sales and went with it.

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