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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1742 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men.

Charlie Parker detective series

There’s 23 of these

Private eye whose family was killed and kinda starts seeing the dead?

I’m on book 3 - fairly charming and just kinda easy reading

I've recently started Robin Hobb's Assassins' Apprentice. I read and enjoyed The Liveship Traders ages ago so thought I'd give her earlier series a try.

I just started Ha Jin's In the Pond last night. It's been a page turner so far.

Finished Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. Good God, I have so much to say about this one. All the same Clancyisms as Red October. Not nearly as much charm. A glacial plot where the many characters shuffle around like communist zombies until they reach their assigned stations. Hilarious, often but not always on purpose.

Thing is, this book captures a certain worldview, one where bad guys only exist because the good guys have their hands tied. I’m convinced that it offers insight into the general neocon project as well as our current iteration of populism. I wish I’d kept notes of all the passages I want to quote for the motte.

Also finished Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a very gay Victorian crime novel. An orphan thief takes part in a plot to marry and defraud a secluded heiress. I found the prose delicious and the plotting devious. High points for characterization, as well, with each member of the cast stressed and miserable for extremely different reasons. Would recommend.

Current book is O’Brien’s Master and Commander. Also very British, though sixty years earlier. Totally not gay, no sir, not in His Majesty’s navy.

Love the historical context. Love the jargon and the repartee and the bizarre economics of prize-hunting. Above all, love the personalities of these dedicated, skilled characters playing off one another as they get into life or death situations. Perhaps this is the peak of “guys hanging out” fiction.

Perhaps this is the peak of “guys hanging out” fiction.

Which also makes it very popular with (a section of) women; the relationships between the characters are given as much importance as the action, and people change and develop over time (while remaining very much themselves).

Action, adventure, hot guys in naval uniform being unbashed BFFs, what more could you want? 😁

Tom Clancy was one of my favorite authors growing up; I read all his stuff up through Rainbow Six, and I'd say it definitely shaped my worldview, first in a "this is how the world is" way as a kid and teenager, and then contrasting the backlash as reality intruded as an adult. Favorite books were Without Remorse, Clear and Present Danger, and the Sum of All Fears. Even looking back without rereading them, there's a ton of passages that look very, very different from an adult perspective than as a naive kid, and I've often thought you could use his books as a pretty good example of why the political world he portrayed has collapsed so badly since.

Yes! Yes, exactly.

Setting aside the bizarre pacing of Patriot Games, it’s still founded on Cold War principles. Clancy (by way of Jack Ryan) tries to rehabilitate these principles for use against something that isn’t a nuclear superpower. But he writes thrillers, not philosophy, and it just doesn’t come together at all.

Spoilers, obviously, for a nearly 40-year-old novel.

The terrorists are set dressing for a meandering slice-of-life novel. Jack recovers in hospital. Jack meets famous people. Jack assembles Christmas presents. Jack does insider trading. Real plot points!

Eventually he is convinced to join the intelligence community’s terrorist manhunt. This leads directly to the only real conflict in the book. Everything before and after has obvious answers. Is it okay to disarm and shoot a terrorist? Are drugs bad? What about communists? Should you be prepared to defend your family when all else fails? Easy questions. But the question which actually haunts Jack Ryan is whether it’s okay to execute captured terrorists without a public trial. Since, you know, the jury might be swayed from the right outcome.

Wait, that’s not quite right. Jack can’t decide if he should feel bad for contributing to such extrajudicial executions. Partly because he’s an unapologetic believer in democracy and individual rights, partly because one of the terrorists had tits visible from orbit.

Jack talks himself into it by reasoning that terrorists, like pirates, are hostis humani generis. When possible, they should get the usual protections, but if that keeps them from their just deserts, we shouldn’t feel too bad. They waived their rights when they tried to hide behind them; we only extend them back as a courtesy.

This is just—so—aaarrrrggggghh. It misses the whole point. And it’s easy to see the throughline to the War on Terror, the general expansion of the executive, all the way through to Trump II. Sweep the hard problems aside. Nothing is impossible if we stop holding back. Do the right thing, critics be damned. We’ll make it legal or at least shield you from any consequences.

I understand the appeal. We can just do stuff, or at least pick a guy who will totally do that stuff on your behalf. It’s easier than working out the details.

And here we are.

I just have to point out a clever joke in the title that almost no one notices. The Patriot Game is the title of a pro-Republican Northern Irish ballad that was popular during the Troubles. There are a lot of versions, but one of the most popular ones was by two Irish brothers named Liam and Tom Clancy.

The song is not simply uncomplicated pro-IRA, it's set in the period of the Old IRA (before the Troubles, though in the transitional period between the War of Independence/Civil War of the 20s and the resurgence in the 60s/70s).

Written by Dominic Behan, who came from a Republican family and whose brother, Brendan Behan, was arrested in Britain for being part of a bombing campaign in the 30s, it is based on a true event and is told from the viewpoint of a young IRA volunteer who was raised on, and believes, the romantic idealised version of Irish-British history and the Republic and the armed struggle, and who dies in what is practically a pointless attack. As he lies dying he questions does this really achieve anything or benefit anyone?

The Clancy Brothers did do the definitive version, but other Irish groups like The Dubliners covered it also.

The tune is mentioned most of the way through the book, but I had no idea any Clancys were involved. TIL.

The only things I remember from Patriot games were the next time I'm driving and the van in front of me' doors open and shooters pop up tap the breaks to have the weight transfer make them miss and C cups are visible via satellite.

The John Clark parts/stories are the best in my opinion.

I started that one a few years ago out of interest in Jungian archetypes but I quickly tapped out when I realised it's not about Jungian archetypes, it's about Men Who Take Turns Crying Together.

My impression is it's one of those books where any people who need it will never read it and the people who'll read it probably don't need it.

Read Project Hail Mary, by Any Weir. Some mildly interesting "Science, Fuck Yeah" scenarios, but as a whole it's entirely overrated. Barely even literature.

Mistress of Mistresses, by E.R. Eddison. Took me some getting used to because of how much it differs from The Worm Ourobouros, but I'm picking up steam right now.

Read Project Hail Mary, by Any Weir. Some mildly interesting "Science, Fuck Yeah" scenarios, but as a whole it's entirely overrated. Barely even literature.

I liked the Astrophage idea, and the implications of something like that existing. The science, the boost to technology, the effects on climate, the wars. Kinda liked the entire design of Rocky, too. The linguistic aspect sucked, though. I also enjoyed the amnesia gimmic, works really well as a story telling device, and uses the flashbacks in a good way to push the story forward. Grace being a coward was also an "interesting" twist in the end - nice idea, but made absolutely no sense considering that he never acts like a coward throughout the mission. The rest was... exactly what I would have expected of an Andy Weir story. So I wasn't disappointed, my fault for reading the book, really.

Still looking forward to the movie, but mostly because I enjoy looking at rockets lifting off. But Jesus, what made the studio people decide on putting the biggest spoiler imaginable right into the trailers? Worst example of a trailer I can think of. Catastrophically bad.

70 pages into Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a very inside-baseball take on cyberpunk/hard SF which approaches impenetrability at times, and Watts uses far too many italics for my liking, but I'm curious to see where it goes.

As much as I enjoyed the book, my feelings about Peter Watts echo my feelings about Ayn Rand. Like on on one hand I get it, on the other I can't help but think that the popular lessons taken from this story are not the lessons you should be taking from this story.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs"

Atlas Shrugged is a great book screed set of words put on paper if you suffer from very specific forms of people pleasing type behaviours. One thing I struggled with being raised by parents who were less than ideal was the feeling that my life was all for other people; I had to do what my parents wanted me to do, including giving them the money from my job; I had to accept that I deserved to be alone because I wanted a girlfriend; I had to accept that my destiny was to work 80 hours a week in a tiny shoebox to pay for other people, then die alone and unloved when I was no longer economically useful.

I'm not kidding when I say that Atlas Shrugged was one of the most useful things I ever read; the willingness to just say "no, it's okay to be selfish" was huge to me. I'm not going to say it's a masterful work of literature - but it was exactly what I needed to hear when I read it, so I will always defend it.

Her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, was what awoke me to the realization of how my codependency (that very specific people pleasing behavior) was crushing my soul. It was my first breath of fresh air in a long journey of recovery. Iron Man 1 was my second.

I've thought it's a reasonable storyline if you take it as a dystopian novel (about the Laffer curve, of all things). Still long-winded, but it makes more sense to me sitting next to 1984 and Brave New World in ways that show how society can fall apart (in this case by Big Government's effective marginal tax rates). As gets mentioned occasionally, the villains don't feel that unrealistic.

The villains were based on the Communists ruining the Russia she grew up in and escaped. They’re not unrealistic because choices that absurd and worse happened, and are happening.

I am not sure why, but for me the idea had always seemed natural. "It's ok to be selfish?" Well, duh, of course it is. I mean, I am not a psychopath, I empathize, I donate money to charity, I help others, some people even say they like me (weird, I know), but being selfish always came easy to me. Maybe that's why when I read Atlas Shrugged it wasn't a big revelation to me - maybe I was even somewhat underwhelmed. Like, if I'll be even more selfish that I already am, I will kinda be an asshole, and I don't really want to be an asshole. At least not much more of one than I already am.

That's cause you're not a crazy person, unlike me, who is verifiably insane.

So I'm going to talk a bit about my parents' style of parenting, while trying to avoid enough specifics to give away exactly who I am - so you can hopefully kind of get why it made a difference to me.

I was the oldest child of several; my parents were very clear on how little they wanted to be married or have kids (my mother, specifically, told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them). An overriding theme of my childhood was that I had to earn my right to exist; I wasn't allowed to listen to music, spend time with other kids, or any number of other specifics that would certainly give me away. I was forbidden from inconveniencing them in any way (so like, I was "allowed" to go to a friend's house, but only if I could get there on my own; when I was 8 and my friend lived 30 minutes away by car, this was obviously a challenge).

With my siblings, the situation was a lot more about sacrificing for them; my parents loved to buy enough food for all but one of us to eat, and then would guilt me into giving up meals for them (my father was an extremely wealthy man, and his take-home pay was over $300k a year). They did the same with other things, like school trips or clothes or whatever else. Although I was nominally allowed to "take" any of the offers made, if I did I was told it would make my siblings suffer, or I'd be depriving the family, or whatever.

As a result of this upbringing, I was a horrible nervous wreck when I graduated from high school; I took an adult job as a programmer which I worked while I did my degree, but I felt so guilty about the amount they were paying me that I literally only cashed half my paycheques from the job, and burned the rest (for reference, they were paying me around $500 a week). I couldn't make or maintain any sort of friendships at all because I felt that everyone was tolerating my presence because I was useful, so I spent years in therapy over it - actually, for the first 3 years of therapy, I literally couldn't say a word to my therapist at all because I felt so much like I was ungrateful and deserved it.

My mental model of myself at this point was that I was someone who'd had a good upbringing, but that there was something horribly wrong with me that made me too tainted to be around other people.

So at around this age, one of the book series I was reading was Terry Goodkind's "The Sword of Truth." (Yes, yes, I know - don't judge me, I was like 18-21). One of the books in the series (called "Faith of the Fallen") follows a woman named Nicci who expressed the exact same emotions that I was - she saw herself as a bad person. The book itself was not great - but it resonated with me. I remember that this was around the sort of time that you could go online and like, talk about books with other people, so I looked up the book to see what people said - and on top of everyone criticizing it, they mentioned it was like "Atlas Shrugged" (which, from reading Atlas Shrugged, it absolutely is - like, it's literally at the fanfiction of it level). Reading that was a huge revelation for me - before, I'd felt like I had to do everything that other people wanted, because I could do it and I had to pay back my upbringing, and because I was only tolerable if I was doing everything for others.

I am not the person mentioned in all debates are bravery debates, but the same sort of thing happened to me.

told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them

Wow that sucks. I mean I can get regretting having kids - it's not always easy, and stress levels can be enormous. But telling it openly to your own kid, and trying to get the kid kidnapped (and likely murdered)... that's just fucked up.

That kind of readjusts my priors a bit. Maybe I never needed to be told it's ok to be white me, but clearly there are people who are, and books that do it for them are doing a good work then. Of course, some people who are already assholes enough might read it and become excessive assholes, but I think that'd happen to them anyway, so overall the effect is still positive.

I can't see the comparison. Like, at all.

Mind, it's likely due to my odd little niche of absolutely adoring Blindsight while having an attitude of sneering disgust toward the writer himself.

Agree, I don't see much similarity. But I suffer from the same predicament - I am a big fan of Watts' writing, and no fan at all of the man. Which unfortunately happens with more than one contemporary writer. It's easier when couple of centuries has passed and you can enjoy the writings without bothering too much with how the author's personality was totally disgusting. Yeah, maybe, but the guy is dead for 150 years, so who cares.

Curious to see how that applies to this novel.

Also, Atlas Shrugged slaps.

Honest answer, It's an interesting story that raises legitimate questions about the the nature and value of consciousness. At the same time there is a certain sort of person who is going to interpret the narrative not as a thought experiment but as a blueprint and/or instruction manual because they are autistic

What about for Rand? Same thing?

I bought and started The Sun Also Rises, but I only made it about halfway through. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me, mostly ordinary-ish people doing ordinary-ish things. If there's supposed to be some great appeal to it, I just don't get it.

I've been reading The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski too. He was an Africa correspondent for Poland's state newspaper in the late 50s-early 60s. He's got a lot of stories about the adventures of travelling around Africa in that era and of the political chaos surrounding the end of colonial rule. The descriptions of how a lot of people in Africa live seem amazing to me - many of them have such completely different values than anything I've encountered, and you can see the ways in which those values shape their societies. Apparently their family and tribal ties are so strong that anyone is obligated to help anyone else in their family or tribe any time they can. As a result of which, for practical purposes, apparently nobody ever saves or accumulates anything because everything gets used up as soon as they get it. Obviously, not every single person lives like that, but it seems to be quite common.

Kapuscinski is a wonderful writer. Sadly little of the culture of obligation he describes has changed since then, though young people's access to the internet is starting to blunt it. Good for Malthusian survival, bad for capital accumulation.

Just finishing up The Wizard's Cat (The Wizard's Butler Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.

Just finished The Quantum Thief which was an amazing trilogy.

Probably about to start the Dreamblood duology.

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