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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   513 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.

I finished reading Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima. It wasn't what I expected from the man, I first bounced off with "WTF is this effete nonsense?", but ended up actually being quite engrossed by the writing, even if just in the English translation. Once one gets past the main character's completely alien upbringing and mindset, the book goes through various fairly universal themes and does a very good job of it. Can recommend.

Since I intended to be a little more active in martial arts this year (specifically longsword HEMA, but I'll need to branch out since there's no HEMA nearby), I looked into literature that would go along with it. Which, to say the very least, did not go as expected.

I don't even remember how exactly - it might've been through the youtube asuggestions - but I ended up starting to read "Baki the Grappler", a so-called "shonen" manga. I put it down again very quickly, because it had jack nothing to do with martial arts, and was instead all about fantastical magic dressed up in impossibly-muscled guys performing physically impossible feats on each other. Not recommended.

Next up, I read "Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without A Fight", another manga about martial artists without the anatomical and physical impossibility. The fight scenes actually had more sense to them and were roughly on the same planet as "believable". Still, I can't exactly recommend this work, because it's also just plain old porn.

And since my bag of recommendations wasn't still entirely empty, I finished it off by reading "Kengan Ashura", which seemed to be just another "Baki", with impossible muscles doing impossible things, but at a closer look that was just exaggerated presentation, and underneath was a lot of real martial arts...intermingled with more muscle magic. Real whiplash when it went from real-world striking and grappling to "lol just vibrate your body at 3000Hz to become invulnerable". Also weirdly formulaic, in how the bystanders are always surprised by grapplers striking and strikers grappling, how you can tell the power level of a character based on whether he's injured (very strong), unarmed (strong), armed with a knife (weak) or armed with a gun (extremely weak). Also weird how the characters constantly claim to kill each other, and break each other's necks or punch each other hard enough to shatter concrete, but then everyone just gets back up. Again, can't really recommend.

Lesson learned, I guess. Don't fish in the wrong waters.

I would recommend sticking with Baki. It's the best fighting manga, way better than Ashura, with some amazing fights. But like you said, it's a shounen, it's meant for teenage boys, it's not meant to be realistic.

Also if you do read it, start with the original Grappler Baki (1991) which is more grounded than than later ones.

Otherwise if you want realistic martial arts manga, the best one I know is All-Rounder Meguru, which is about MMA.

There's also Asumi Kakeru which is also MMA, and quite close to All-Rounder Meguru. The author also has another manga about Sumo.

I love fighting manga and martial arts, and so I've read basically everything translated, but if you're looking for something realistic for a HEMA practitioner, you're not going to find much. Either try lowering your standards, or just skipping manga. Besides All-Rounder Meguru.

Maybe try Vagabond, which is a manga about Musashi, but it's not finished, what is there is really good though, but again, I don't know how realistic the fights are.

Last week I finished Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Since completing my 2025 new year's resolution, I've become much less disciplined about reading: this one took me a full month to read, despite being accessibly written and barely 200 pages long.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. On my edition, the cover blurb is from the (now disgraced) Neil Gaiman, who notes how far ahead of his time Dick was. It's really striking that this book was published at the tail end of the 1960s, decades before its central theme (our fundamental inability to distinguish reality from illusion) became the go-to in Hollywood cinema: The Matrix, eXistenZ, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall*. The latter example is particularly interesting as, although it's officially an adaptation of Dick's short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale", it mashes up a bunch of different ideas and themes from assorted Dick novels and stories, such that it might be more accurately categorised as an adaptation of Dick's entire oeuvre rather than any specific work. The scene in Total Recall in which Quaid meets Dr. Edgemar in his hotel room has no analogue in its source material, but seems to have been drawn from a similar scene in Ubik.

When I first watched Total Recall only a few years ago, I remarked that one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was that I love 90s action movies that are goofy and over-the-top, and I also love sci-fi movies that are existentially unsettling: Total Recall is the first (and to date, only) example I can think of where a movie tried to do both at the same time, and pulled it off. (Any goofiness in The Matrix is unintentional.) This is entirely in keeping with the source material: Ubik, like many of Dick's stories, is an existentially chilling nightmare, but also tremendously silly, with Dick clearly having enormous fun imagining the fashions of the future ("a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla, and bermuda shorts" or "a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers"). It's also, as I mentioned the other week, a tremendously horny book: there is perhaps no author in the Western canon who loved breasts as much as Dick did. The three-titted hooker in Total Recall may have no analogue in Dick's writing, but I can't help but think he would have approved. While Total Recall may not be the best cinematic adaptation of Dick's work (in terms of impact and influence, it's hard to argue with Blade Runner, and I loved its Villeneuve-helmed sequel; Spielberg's Minority Report is excellent, despite having nothing in common with its source material beyond the basic premise), I think it's the most faithful cinematic representation of his aesthetic: chilling, goofy and horny in equal measure. It's a shame he didn't live long enough to see it.

A colleague lent me Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True, and I'm about 80 pages in. Hsu is a second-generation Taiwanese-American who attended UC Berkley in the mid-nineties, where he befriended a Japanese-American fellow undergrad named Ken who tragically died young (although I haven't gotten that far yet). It's well-written and an easy read, but everything about it, from its nineties nostalgia (of course he meets riot grrls in college, of course he's devastated when Cobain dies) and polite airing of grievances about the Asian-American experience feels awfully familiar. I don't expect ever to read it again.

*The 1990 Paul Verhoeven film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, not the redundant 2012 remake with Colin Farrell.

the cover blurb is from the (now disgraced) Neil Gaiman

Is he still disgraced? The whole thing seemed so silly I kind of assumed it would blow over.

Apparently he recently got around to denying the allegations, after staying silent for a full year. The article mentions that he's recently finished a new book: I suppose whether it sees publication will be the litmus test.

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.

Sounds interesting. The buddy cop novel actually has its own wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dance_of_Genghis_Cohn

The book made Romain Gary one the guys I want to dive into this year, he's fascinating. WWII vet, fought under De Gaulle, married Jean Seberg before the FBI drove her to suicide. He actually won the Goncourt prize, the French equivalent to a Pulitzer in fiction, twice, despite the rules saying that you can only win it once, because he released another book under a pseudonym and his fake persona won the prize.

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.

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