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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1064 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

Almost finished Al-Ghazali's Book of Contemplation and trying to go through his Censure of Wealth and Miserliness. Still on Macpherson and others.

About half-way through Bennett's The Tainted Cup, essentially biopunk Sherlock Holmes. It's a genre where I can't really rate it til the denouement, and it's about as woke as you'd expect something published in the mainstream in 2025 to be, but it's been reasonably well-written so far.

About three-quarters of the way through Ubik.

How are you finding it?

It's pretty trippy. I like reading books where I have no idea where the story is going to go next and I feel like the rug will be pulled out from under me at any moment. I'm enjoying it a lot more than The Man in the High Castle (which I read last year), but not quite as much as A Scanner Darkly.

Just started re-reading John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin. I scored the sequels on sale for cheap from the Kindle Bookstore and it's been so long since I read it that I really don't remember much of it outside of my enjoyment of it.

Started The Count of Monte Christo.

Had to read that one for French class in high school. The way Edmond got cucked was particularly painful. But his revenge schemes were way too elaborate, and would never work in real life; man needs to learn that shooting is not too good for his enemies.

What I remember most is the way his cellmate promises to teach him "mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted" within a couple of years, in a prison with nothing in the way of materials. Which goes against everything I know of pedagogy. But, then again, Alexandre Dumas was a writer, not a mathematician or a physicist.

Good book. Public domain, too, so lots of adaptations, some of them great. Probably the standard modern version would be the 2002 movie with Jim Caviezel, but if you are ever in the mood for something a little more exotic, Gankutsuou is excellent (and particularly innovative for choosing to tell the story from Albert's POV).

Gankutsuou was pretty great and I still think about it a lot many years later, but I have to say that the way they tampered with the end was abhorrent to me.

Maybe it's been a while, but my personal head-canon was that Edmond didn't get cucked, and his fiance only married his enemy to protect Edmund's son she was pregnant with at the time.

...yeah, maybe it's time for me to re-read the book. I blame the anime for this.

That's actually from the movie, which reveals that Albert is Edmond's and Mercedes's son, and that she only married Fernand to provide him with a father (Fernand is unaware, so in this version, it is he who is cucked). In the book, Albert is Fernand's son, and Mercedes married him after eighteen months, having given up hope that Edmond would ever return.

Ah, that explains it, then. Well, glad to see I atleast pulled it from somewhere, as opposed to the idle and delusional musings of my mind.

Only ~100 pages in but I've seen the film before and know the story. So far my only complaint is that it can read like the gears in the narrative are slipping and making the story jerk forward unexpectedly. It's probably intended as a clever literary device to create intrigue but it feels like I've stroked out and missed a chapter.

I don't mind a little liberty with realism, it wouldn't be much of story if he just got thrown in prison and died of dysentery.

Hey, I'm sure there was simply not as much as much "mathematics, physics, history" to go around 180 years ago.

Almost as good as The Count of Monte Carlo.

I had to reread that one so many times to figure out how good it was.

But much, much better than The Count of Monte Crisco.

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