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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2165 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Burnham's The Machiavellians. Feeling a need to revisit the roots of neoconservative thought.

Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm always fascinated by revolutions and civil wars since almost no one actually wants to fall into them, but one step after another makes people escalate to that point.

Re-read the Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, and then started working through some Elmore Leonard novels and a number of the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald.

The Lew Archer novels started to be published just as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels were winding down. Upon re-reading, the plotting in the Marlowe novels is quite threadbare (although they do improve over time, and Lady in the Lake and Long Goodbye are leaps and bounds better than the first ones). However, as a glimpse of 1930s-1940s California + really sharp commentary, they're excellent.

The Lew Archer novels are much, much better plotted, and a good snapshot of California as it exploded in the 1950s-60s. The writing isn't quite as sharp or witty as Chandler's, but it's close. I don't think I'll read them all, but I've read 7 so far and will probably read another 3. I'm curious to read his take on the 70s in the last two novels (published '73 and '76).

Started rereading The Dresden Files after my fiancés uncle kept raving about it. It’s a fun romp so far, though I had to laugh at all the “science hasn’t solved disease, or starvation, or war.” I’m religious myself, but science has a strong case for mostly solving all three of those.

I'll warn you that the author has largely stalled on the series. At this point I'm not sure if he'll actually finish it.

I'd bet on Jim over Rothfuss or Martin, but yeah, still frustrating. Mind-reading a bit on the most recent book I think he'll wrap the series up a book or two faster than originally intended, but could still be another 6-10 years. And even that's assuming he doesn't have another Dresden Slump.

What? We just got a new book this year. Before that we got a new book (technically two, but it was effectively one story) in 2020. He hasn't stalled out at all.

But it hasn't. People still get diseases, they still starve, and there's still war. Science has mitigated the first two things, sure (it really can't solve war as that's a problem of the human heart), but it hasn't solved them.

That's true, but "Solved" is used colloquially as "mitigated" in many contexts

Finished The Tainted Cup. Good, prose quality fell off a little toward the end, resolution was reasonably clever. It's got WSFA syndrome, but only to the extent it's obvious why it was written that way, rather than suffering from being written that way.

Bell's And We Are Not Saved. I bought it a few years ago when having a discussion with ymeskhout, as a crux example of how a lot of things that Rufo gets accused of being dishonest about actually happened, but largely left it on the shelf. Was going to try a deep crunch into how this sort of work smuggles false or misleading claims by clown-nose-on and clown-nose-off between academic work and 'popular writing', but my notes aren't really coming together in any real readable narrative, even presuming anyone else would care enough about it. There's some value to seeing what tools of persuasion are being used, here, to distinguish the honest from the malicious or misleading, but I could have done that with Rufo's writing for free.

For fun, Eldridge and Deveau's Game Over, from this discussion. It's so heavily and clearly written for women -- weirdly, despite a front cover that looks like standard male gaze smut -- that it's not that sorta 'fun', but looking at how the prose and social interactions work is still enjoyable.

WSFA syndrome

I'm not familiar with this term.

Washington Science Fiction Association. Along with the similarly-named World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA, no I don't know why), they were kinda on the other side of the Sad Puppies on the whole Hugo Award wars from a decade ago. Some stories are written 'for' a specific space, and just as you don't give a dog-lover a Newbery Medal-winning story, a lot of people who found Gentleman Jole annoying won't like The Tainted Cup.

Each of the three has a certain flavor of story that really glues into their particular social environment - WSFA tends heavily toward a lot of vaguely neuroatypical mystery stories with box-checking social awareness checks - whether because the author likes that sorta thing themselves or because they were trying to cater to their awards or both. I'd expect more the former here, since WSFA's mostly a short story place and The Tainted Cup isn't, but it's one of those things that pulls you away from the world-building when you see the pattern.

I've been re-reading Larry Correia's collected works. The man is a modern day Robert E Howard, except less classy. I love it.

Last week I also read Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, his account of his platonic relationship with a Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. I'd never read anything by Kerouac, and on paper his writing style (stream-of-consciousness narration peppered with overwrought religious adjectives and a lackadaisical attitude towards punctuation) sounds like everything I hate about experimental prose. But I was surprised to find it oddly compelling, such that I read this (admittedly very short) book in two days. It helps that, unlike in On the Road, Kerouac doesn't commit any serious misdeeds or act as an accessory to anyone else's: he comes off as genuinely protective of the title character, and it's darkly amusing how this bumbling gringo gets exploited and ripped off by just about every Mexican he meets.

The Doomed City by the strugatsky brothers; thé prose is a bit dumbed down in translation but it’s an interesting and thematically rich story. I’m at the part where the good Nazis have taken power from the mentor and turned the sun back on.

Seven years ago, I stopped at a petrol station in Italy and found a discarded copy of Robert Gutwillig's After Long Silence. I decided to take it with me, and it sat unread on my bookshelf ever since.

On my morning commute the other day, I finally decided to give it a go. After ten pages I was already bored, and gave up.

Luckily I'd prepared for this eventuality, and also brought A Canticle for Leibowitz with me. It's a very old, battered copy with extremely fine print, and I'm only about five pages into it. The prose is a bit baroque for my liking, but I'm interested to see what happens next, which is more than can be said for the previous book.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is amazing.

Lots of stories tell you X happened Y thousand years ago, but it doesn't make sense. For example, in A Song of Fire and Ice, where the Night's Watch has been holding the Wall for eight thousand years and the Starks have ruled the north for just as long and I'm like "bro, the oldest organization in the world is the Catholic Church, which is barely two thousand years old, and the oldest dynasty is the Imperial House of Japan, which has been around for fifteen hundred"; talk about medieval stasis!

By contrast, A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place over 1,200 years, and it makes you feel every one of them. Technology changes, fashions change, political factions change, but you can believe that the monastery and the Catholic Church endures, though Rome was nuked in the backstory. It's a very beautiful novel with strong themes of cyclical history and faith. The future imperfect stuff is fantastic; if you liked Scott Alexander's "The Witching Hour", you will love it.

Just do yourself a favor and never read the sequel.

I read that book and quite enjoyed it. Then read the author's afterword in which he details his experience on a bomber crew destroying the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino in WW2. Nazi soldiers were using it as a fortress. It was a stone structure on a tall rocky section and was indeed a fortress. But a 1944 American bomber crew can easily wipe out a 1500 year old fortress by dropping bombs on it.

Turns out those Nazi soldiers had left earlier and war refugees were sheltered within. They accidentally massacred a bunch of noncombatants and destroyed the birthplace of the Benedictine order. Miller says he was reviewing the ending of the book and realized that the priest pinned beneath rubble and waiting for death was something he actually caused. What a finish to a great book.

I don't see any evidence that there were refugees in the Abbey, though it also seems that there probably weren't any german soldiers in there either.

Huh.

I recall him feeling bad about bombing those people. Googling a bit I see claims supporting this.

Didn't even know there was one, huh.

What’s up with the sequel? In general terms please, and spoilers so as not to ruin it for FtttG.

In addition to the other comments, the se-inter-quel also very much has a plot that goes absolutely nowhere. At least that's how I remember it, I read it in 2008 so some time has passed. Still, I do remember much more from other books I've read that year, so that might be a condemnation of its own.

It's just a really ugly book; one that represents a Walter M. Miller Jr. that had grown cynical and disappointed with the Church. It has none of the idealism and hope that characterized Canticle, and I'm not surprised that the author killed himself.

I mean, Canticle took place before Vatican II, and presumably the sequel was written when the church was at its ontological low point.

Yes, I see. Poor man. I thought he just had a sudden eruption of despair, I didn’t realise he’d lost hope to such an extent.

I’m going through the business of getting Confirmed at the moment and indeed the church is startlingly silly on many occasions but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

White Noise by Don DeLillo. Been wanting to read it ever since I saw the movie a while back, and it's pretty much what I hoped it would be as a book. Thus far (the airborne toxic event has just concluded for the curious), I'm impressed at how well the movie hews to the overall book, especially in tone.

God, I hated White Noise. "Wow, supermarkets are kind of weird and alienating huh?" Yes, Don, I suppose so. I don't think you needed to devote a quarter of your novel to making that point.

Really? I love supermarkets.

I love supermarkets, but I get DeLillo's point that they can be a bit weird if you approach them from a virgin point of view. But this point should have been made once.

People I knew who experienced western supermarkets with truly virgin eyes (coming e.g. from the USSR) seemed to not be alienated either.

Yeah, AFAICT people feel strongly about White Noise one way or the other. Me, I'm adoring it for the constant bloviating and overall absurdity, just as I did the movie. Probably doesn't hurt being old enough to actually remember the Eighties, either.

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