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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2678 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This time around it is resonating, perhaps because the abstract desire for freedom is on my mind.

I’m curious to know if I’m truly the only person on TM who finds reading fiction to be extremely difficult…

I've been on a huge fiction candy binge. I don't know how many books a year I was reading per year for the last 10 years but it's been pretty intermittent. Start with the birth of my second kid I gave up all mobile gaming, and have read what I feel is an unhealthy amount. 7 Dungeon Crawler Carl books and on book 12 of He Who Fights with monsters in 5 months. Wife even says I've been doing more than my fair share around the house and taking care of the kids. Still feels like wasting a lot of time.

I was always a "smart kid" growing up but I hated reading. Of course I discovered blogs 10 years ago and I enjoy reading Discourse about news and current events (and i don't do it to learn about the issues or the events).

I realized a couple years ago that I just don't like fiction and narratives that much. There are dozens of us maybe!

Very interesting. Good to know I’m not alone.

I was always very much an autodidact. I never really “took off” in terms of any burning desire to read until I was maybe 16 and when it happened I raided my father’s library and tried reading everything I got my hands on. Don’t know what it was but one day something just clicked and I dove right into it.

I’m not as smart as people think I am. I feel like I’m deceiving people at times when they say that. Yes, I’ve read a lot of books, but genius is unmistakable when you see it. When you see what the kids at MIT can you, you’ll quickly understand why these people are in a different galaxy.

One thing I always do when I read non-fiction is pay very close attention to the book’s bibliography. These are a gold mine that often go completely ignored by the reader. It often links directly to other books, articles and other authors. I’d always go and look up those books and the background of these authors to see what their expertise is in.

What that meant was I always kept my ear close to the ground such that even if I didn’t know the answer to a question (usually because I was more interested in reading something else), I knew ‘exactly’ where to look and who to ask and could “point” people directly to the answer and give it to them that way.

I think I’m maybe more rational or educated than I am “intelligent” in the sense of just raw mental horsepower. I have a very good memory and rarely forget things (although it’s a problem because usually when I don’t want to engage a point with someone I just tell them “I forgot” or “I don’t remember,” and those who know me very well, never believe it), but very few of the ideas I’ve come up with were invented by me. A lot of the time I’m quoting or paraphrasing or extending the logical arguments of others I’m persuaded by it really feels like plagiarism when others attribute it to me.

That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?

It doesn’t mean I’ve never read it, I’ve read a lot of fiction that I like, including most of the classics of old science fiction, but a lot of it is also a drag.

My father was a voracious reader all his life and loved his science fiction. But back when he was in high school he tried reading all the Dune books in sequence and said he just couldn’t do it because he abhorred Herbert’s literary style. He said Herbert is overly descriptive, he felt suffocated by reading him and didn’t let you as a reader use your imagination. And then one day he picked it up again and read every Dune book back to back in the same day and felt pumped up afterward; somehow he was able to just do it.

I’ve read all the Dune books too except for a couple from the prelude series that Brian wrote. I had the exact ‘opposite’ reaction my father had. I absolutely loved Herbert’s writing style because you didn’t have to do any work. Everything is given to you. I found myself not having to do any intellectual heavy lifting and everything simply fell into place.

I’m sure it’s related to other odd quirks I have. I also can’t stand Quentin Tarantino films for instance. God, I hate his movies. And it comes down to his non-linear storytelling. I intensely hate that. Watching that stuff leaves me feeling schizophrenic and nauseated and confused as hell.

Mentally I tend to be a holistic thinker. I naturally operate in the mode of “seeing the big picture.” I struggle mightily proceeding with a story in piecemeal (it’s probably why I was also bad at cardboard puzzles as a kid). I lose my sense of reference when things tend to go “off script” from the plot and much of the time don’t even recognize when it’s happening. I remember once, my dad and I went back and watched old black and white episodes of the Twilight Zone and he got frustrated at me for failing to pickup the moral of the story and he was guiding me through each episode as we were watching it.

There’s a lot of fiction I love and even more I dislike, but it varies widely depending on who the author is. I’m sure it’s all fundamentally related to the same thing. I tend not to pickup and context very well. Maybe my friends were right and I am a high functioning autistic. Who knows.

I've never read Dune but this makes me think I might like it. Is it like reading a textbook? Do you like reading textbooks?

Both of the fiction books I've ever binge-read were hard scifi. I only read them because I had heard second-hand what the themes were, and they sounded interesting. Both of them had "that one chapter" where the author dropped the thin veneer of story to dictate the book's theme like a textbook. This is not a criticism exactly, but just something odd I noticed.

I wouldn’t say it reads like a textbook in a non-fiction sense, but I found reading it to be easier than other people have. And yes, I do like reading textbooks. Broad surveys of things, hard science primers, encyclopedias, handbooks, material that tends to have a direct focus on a given topic, etc.

Fiction books written in textbook style:

Adding A Disturbance of Fate. Warning: heavy doses of Kennedy idolatry and boomer leftist althist wank to be expected.

edit: Also A Short History of the Future and the classic After Man and the somewhat lackluster follow-up Man After Man.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Is there a specific term for this type of literary style?

I think there unfortunately is not. The closest tropes seem to be Scrapbook Story (the story is composed of in-universe documents, which may or may not be textbooks) and Encyclopedia Exposita (the story uses excerpts from an in-universe textbook as chapter epigraphs, but is not itself an in-universe textbook).

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