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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   624 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.

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.

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!

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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