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PaperclipPerfector  22hr ago (text post)   378 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Conrad's Lord Jim. Backlog not moving.

Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles. Just finished "Winter King" and now starting "Enemy of God." Listening to the audiobooks read by Jonathan Keeble and having a great time.

I just finished Romain Gary's The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a genuinely mind-blowingly brilliant literary work that I only heard about because I saw it in the book review section of a vintage 1968 Playboy magazine I was reading. It's a buddy-cop novel set in the 1960s about the ghost of a Jewish comic that haunts the SS officer turned police chief who shot him, who have to solve a series of murders of naked men found around their German town. The best book I've read this year so far.

I also read Mann's Death in Venice, which...what the fuck? It's just that? This is a well known literary book I've run into mentions of many times, and it turns out it's just a book about an old German who spends the whole book mooning after a "beautiful" twelve year old Polish boy. I was less disgusted by Lolita. Just, what the fuck how was this published in 1912 Germany?

I'm starting the Canterbury Tales which is kinda leaving me flat. I think the translation I'm reading, which is the one leftover from the great books course I took in undergrad sixteen years ago, is kinda bad. It uses a lot of minced oaths, which just seem odd. It uses the word "screw" a lot to mean "have sex with" which just takes me out of the piece, it should be either "make love to" or "fuck," any other term is unpoetic to me. Stuff like that. I'm trying to do one tale a night, and the good news is the book is just a few of them, so I can switch translations soon, does anyone have a favorite? I prefer poetic beauty to accuracy.

Great book. I am finally finishing up A Thousand Plateaus, reading Calvin Westra's Moth Girl (very good, he's unique right now). Just finished Dog Soldier, incredibly well-written and high-octane read, one of the most cinematic books I can recall. It's a crime it was never made into a movie afaik.

This Book is Full of Spiders (John Dies at the End: Book 2) by Jason Pargin.

Finishing Spinoza's Ethics. Actually com around to it after the very confusing first section. Also reading the second book of Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy and the Golden Compass in Italian.

There's an interesting rhetorical strategy I have been seeing lately from tankies and Islamic Republic apparatchiks: calling the Israeli-American alliance the "Epstein coalition", and describing American troops as "soldiers of the Epstein regime".

Does this idea have any traction among the local population, or is it entirely confined to extremely-online English-language propagandists? I imagine there is a lot of demand for conspiracy theories involving Judeo-Western debachery.

At least some of the "Trump is doing this to distract from The Files" feels a bit reminiscent of that time when a president facing salacious scandal at home decided to bomb Serbia. I'm going to withhold judgement on the accuracy of the either claim here.

The ayatollah was tweeting about it before he got got.

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