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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2581 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Said's Covering Islam to my list.

The Will of the Many

About 2/3rds of the way through.

Happily brought me back to Epic Fantasy (or whatever genre this is). I love everything about it and already got book 2.

Finishing book three of the Charlie Parker detective book series. I like the characters. It’s pulp.

Started that book that’s a bunch of authors doing The Stand stories in universe? It’s dumb in spirit of the original, King blessed it and fortunately didn’t write for it, fun so far. I think I’m 4 stories in.

The Book of Jhereg, Steven Brust. A mob boss/troubleshooter/assassin working in a fantasy city. He solves problems with a combination of sword, sorcery, witchcraft, and powerful friends.

It’s kind of like mid-series Dresden Files, except set in Morrowind. Magic is common but not egalitarian. There are all these guilds and institutions with their own histories. Everyone, including the protagonist, is super racist.

Great fun. I suspect it’s had a lot of unspoken influence on rogue archetypes in fantasy.

I read the first few books of that series a couple of years ago, and I really liked it until like the third or fourth book, after which I dropped it and never read more. The author was going through some shit and decided to include it in the book and it was one of the worst things I've ever read.

I finished Teckla last night, and, uh. I hope it’s the one that got you. That was a complete train wreck. It’d be one thing to just watch the relationship implode, maybe with an understandable dose of self-destructiveness. But combined with the ideological debates? New frontiers in anti-elf racism? Protest politics?

I’m amazed that the author is still alive. He had to be hanging on by a thread.

If this isn’t the book that you had in mind, I don’t want to know what happened next.

That's the one. From what I hear the series gets better after that, but that book demolished any interest I had in continuing it.

That's almost certainly the one. I've heard that one of the author's friends got killed by drug dealers when he was writing it, so he didn't think criminals were so 'fun' anymore. The next book (Taltos) is a prequel and one of the best in the series though.

The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. I struggled to understand Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology before and this book has been much clearer to me. About 40% of the way through and, though this isn't really the correct way to distinguish them, it's only now getting out of laying the metaphysical/phenomenological groundwork into more recognisably unique claims about authenticity, the concept of the Other etc. Obviously the concept of Dasein is recognisably Heidegerrian too and the other topics are still derived from that so this distinction isn't a philosophical one, but just from a reader's perspective everyone has their answer to Descartes, whereas now it feels like the book is on to totally new ideas.

I will have to read Being and Time eventually because Heidegger isn't someone you can just get the gist of. He departs from common sense and the normal usage of words and creates his own precise definitions such that you'll be lost if you read something without understanding the previous pages. I don't think it's obscurantist though, you'll get tripped up on hyphenated constructs but the definitions of things like 'there-being' are written clearly somewhere. It's just that without the benefit of traditional usage to rely on you have to keep a lot more in your head at once to follow along.

Also reading H.L Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book was written in 1908, before Kaufmann told us not to trust Nietzsche's sister and apparently even before some of his more famous books had been translated into English, but also before WW1 Germany and then the Nazis had built their own mythos around Nietzsche (and before later scholars and philosophers reacted in the opposite direction). I'll have to read more to see if the former are scholarly quibbles or major barriers to understanding, but Mencken at least has the benefit of having a blank slate encounter with a relatively new philosophy. I haven't reached the meat of the philosophical exposition yet but so far this book is quite easy to read.

Currently reading Jane Austen's Persuasion for church book club. (Everyone can pick the Austen novel of their choosing; this is in observance of her 250th birthday. I've previously read Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey and enjoyed them a lot, especially the last one.)

I'm about 1/3 of the way in and I have to say, she has not really got me to care about the characters much yet. Anne seems a decent girl, but I don't know why it's so impossible for her to move on from Captain Wentworth, for all that he's very charming and everyone likes him. As we meet people like Charles Hayter and Captains Harville and Benwick, we repeatedly see that there are plenty of nice men around. Eight years after my first relationship, I never thought about it anymore.

After finishing my second Flashman book I've turned backwards and started Tom Brown's School Days.

Have only read the early section so far where it paints a charming pastoral picture of un-industrialised rural England. Now Tom has arrived at Rugby and it reads a bit like what I imagine Harry Potter to be like, minus the spells, where boarding school is a big adventure taking place in a grand holiday camp for the superior class of urchin.

The Years of Apocalypse on Royal Road.

A rare example of a time loop story done right. I can hardly name another two (Mother of Learning, and Reverend Insanity). The premise is standard fare for the genre. A student at a Wizarding College dies, wakes up in the past, and realizes she has to optimize her way out of a catastrophe. But the execution is where it distinguishes itself from the endless scroll of mediocrity on Royal Road.

It's good stuff! I found it off a recommendation on /r/rational, and the person who endorsed it noted a relatively grounded approach to the mechanics of time looping (consideration for the butterfly effect, at the very least) and an exploration of the psychological toll of reliving events while surrounded by people who start fresh.

Most time loop protagonists slide inevitably into sociopathy. If you know the people around you will reset to their factory settings in twenty-four hours, they stop feeling like people and start looking like NPCs. Their suffering ceases to have moral weight because it has no permanence.There are no consequences, after all. Unlike RI, the protagonist is a young woman, who, while competent, isn't an amoral monomaniacal monster. When she's cast on a competency-porn set, said competence is earned through hard effort.

It touches on the "Groundhog Day" problem but treats it with the severity it deserves. How do you maintain sanity when you are the only entity with continuity of consciousness? How do you avoid manipulating people when you know the exact sequence of inputs required to get a desired output? The story does not shy away from the fact that this process creates a hardness in a person, a callousness that is difficult to wash off.

The author, who actually bothered to read up on engineering or physics, treats magic as a branch of mechanics. This is "hard magic" in the Sandersonian sense, but it leans closer to hard sci-fi. When the protagonist constructs a spell, it feels less like chanting in Latin and more like debugging code or wiring a circuit. It scratches a very specific itch for competence porn, satisfying the part of the brain that enjoys watching capable people solve well-defined problems with available tools. The magi-tek is closer to tech than Harry Potter.

I'd tentatively give it a 8.5/10, as of reading about 80 rather lengthy chapters. The older I get, the more specific and niche my taste in fiction gets. It's a curse, but occasionally I can find a salve for the wound. This probably counts.

It touches on the "Groundhog Day" problem but treats it with the severity it deserves.

IIRC Harold Ramis once said in an interview that realistically, Bill Murray would have spent a few hundred years just getting up every morning and murdering the whole town, but that it wouldn’t have fit the tone of the film.

can hardly name another two (Mother of Learning, and Reverend Insanity).

Have you read The Perfect Run?

Much more humor focused, but still pretty great.

I've heard the name, and I know it's got time travel in it, but little else. The very high rating is promising, I'll take a look, thanks!

It's kind of a superhero story with the MCs power being setting a save point and reloading to it when he dies (and some other related powers). The story is about him achieving his "perfect run" after a particular save point.

Something that makes the story a bit different than other timeloop stories is that we enter it kind of in the middle or the end. The MC has had the power for a very long (subjective) time and has already been very affected by it.

The same author actually has an ongoing story that is also a time loop story (this time litrpg), called "The hundred reigns", in which the MC somehow inherits the "evil overlord" class in his sleep one night from his father and has 100 hundred reigns (lives). The issue being that he is a bastard (as in not trueborn), has no power, the court and the world at large doesn't understand how the Overlord class works and believes you get the overlord class by killing the previous overlord and are more than happy to kill the MC to get the class. Also, the empire is threatened by invasion, is on the brink of civil war and rebellion, the Overlord is hunted by a centuries old Elf oracle, and there is possibly an apocalypse on the horizon.

An interesting aspect of the worldbuilding is that people in general don't have "classes" or level at all, for that you need an item allowing you to tap into a cultural archetype as defined by a kind of collective oversoul. Activating the class puts on an armour or costume related to the archetype, like a superhero or kind of how like classes/jobs work in some JRPGs. To level up you can either kill powerful things or act in accordance with the archetype but eventually you probably need to do both, which could be a bit of an issue when you have a class modelled after a literal demon...

That loops are a limited resource leads to things being somewhat different from some other time-loop stories since the MC can't just throw away tons of loops to achieve his aims.

Just finished Wolf Totem, about a quarter through Man Eaters of Tsavo, thé autobiography of a British colonial officer who killed thé world’s record man eating lions. It makes me wish my son was old enough to read chapter books too; perhaps I’ll revisit in a few years.

Debating between The Doomed City and Alexander to Actium next; this book won’t take me long.

A pretty interesting book called Red Helicopter, tells the story of a private equity guy who ended up CEO of a failing fashion business, and turns it around by focusing on intangible assets like goodwill and kindness. Spotted it at random in the library and have been enjoying so far - it's relevant to me since I'm in the early stages of starting a small business. We'll see if the thesis holds up!

I'm actually between books at the moment, having just finished Desperate Measures: Convergence Book 5 by Craig Alanson. I'll probably be starting Path of the Mitespeaker: 12 Miles Below Book 7 by Mark Arrows tonight.

Thresholder has just ended—on a huge anticlimax, but I guess readers should have been expecting that for a while. The author's postmortem thoughts and plans for the future are also available.

I haven't finished it, but I read well over a hundred chapters. It's one of Wales' weaker works, it feels awfully dry, especially compared to Worth The Candle. The protagonist is about as cookie-cutter as it gets. Of course, weak-for-Wales makes it above average, but I find it hard to recommend very strongly.

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