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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   380 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke. It's more scholarly and less popular than expected. The title apparently means that for all the woke signalling being done, actual wokeness is more about appearances and ambition than anything.

I just started Jane Austen’s Emma. I’ve been meaning to read more ”proper” books for a while and I recently watched and loved Clueless (1995) which turns out to be a very well regarded modernized adaptation of Emma to a 90s high school setting. Thus getting an annotated ebook seemed a natural choice (for the high, high, price of $4.50). Wish me luck, lol.

Some googling for translations has also revealed an interesting example of elitism in literary circles. People recoil at the very idea that someone would translate older English language Classics to modern late 1900s / 2000s English and tell you to just suck it up with the overly complicated sentence structure and completely changed meaning of words. However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly - is somehow perfectly fine. Goddamn elitists…

I just finished the bound copy of selected Canterbury Tales. I was doing a tale a day, and today was the Prioress, and, weird. It was just a blood libel story. A Christian kid really loves the virgin Mary, and some Jews take exception to it and murder him and throw him in a latrine. Miracles occur and the body is found and the Jews are punished.

It's such an odd inclusion in a set of tales I mostly associate with humorous tales of disloyal wives and dishonest preachers. I guess it's just the times? But it's so vicious! Is it satirical? It doesn't seem so. I guess "also Jews are evil and Satan lives in their hearts" is just a message Chaucer also wanted to include?

What the Hell Did I Just Read? (John Dies at the End: Book 3) by Jason Pargin. FWIW, I didn't like the second as much as the first but #3 is exploring concepts that are more interesting to me and I'm liking it better than #2.

I finished Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True during the week. It was pretty good, and I really did get the impression it had been gestating within the author for a long time. It concerns events which happened in the late 90s, but was only published in 2022. I really did feel like Hsu has been writing about these events in private journals for decades, trying to process his feelings.

Reading Lying for Money for the third time. One of the most entertaining non-fiction books I've ever read, I just cannot get enough of it.

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