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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I've finished The Handmaid's Tale. It's a book I'll have to read again sometime, since there's clearly a lot which I haven't noticed. Can't say it ever came together for me, but maybe that's because I didn't really understand its thrust. The tone throughout was sterile, which was probably intentional, given the motifs of waiting and idleness. The world itself never made a convincing dystopia; it was way too lax in just about everything, and the sense of fear of reprisals or of other people never became more than a literary suggestion. The writing was quite good.

It proved as curious as Atwood, who has not been a predictable simpleton when it comes to politics. On the one hand, it could be read as a screed against the religious right, but the picture is always muddled by something, like the quoting of the communist from each according to his ability. The last chapter muddies the picture even further, making us wonder to what extent this is to be taken as history or myth. As a myth, it may be something of value, something worth a closer look. As a history, it is laced with what seems like old arguments among old activists which seems to limp on eternally, even up to paranoia over viruses.

Going to try some Agatha Christie next, which perennialy seems to be collecting dust on my shelf.

Re-reading How Not to Write a Novel. Not really for the writing advice at this point, but because it's genuinely entertaining, especially the snippets of deliberately bad writing throughout.

Oh man, I've worn out multiple copies of that book. I'm constantly recommending it to people as worth reading even if you have zero interest in writing a novel or fiction of any kind. I can quote so much of it from memory.

  • A sex scene that is only half right is like half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten: it is a bloody, godawful mess.
  • This particular kind of ending is called a deus ex machina, which is French for "are you fucking kidding me?"
  • This particular kind of plot twist is known at the folie adieu, which is French for "are you fucking kidding me?".

Great book.

I started reading The Moving Target, thanks to a recommendation from @RoyGBivensAction.

Mishima's Runaway Horses.

I unexpectedly ended up enjoying Spring Snow, so I quickly picked up the next part of the tetralogy. It's also quite good, though I can understand why people generally praise the first book over the second - having a conspiracy instead of a romance as the main plot probably didn't have as wide an appeal, and right-wing terrorist as the main character was probably a bridge too far for many. I can more easily identify with the protagonists in Runaway Horses: Reactionary fencers obsessed with death and middle-aged white-collar profressionals, and everybody's an autist. Yeah, that's my cohort alright, more so than the effete noblemen of the first book.

Haven't quite finished it yet, so please don't spoil it.

Also from it, RE everyone's favorite culture war topic:

Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to be required to give constant proof of one’s manliness—to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today.

To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak. But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.

I think relatively intelligent women are also aware of this and it is a source of frustration and resentment for them. A beautiful woman has innate value to society pretty much no matter what she does – that’s rather obvious. But the thing with innate worth is that, well, it’s innate and constant. You’ll be valued as a beautiful woman for sure, but not for anything else or anything more. You can try proving your intelligence and abilities but everyone will just assume that it’s only your pretty face that gets doors opened for you. You’ll never be more than you already are. This does not apply to men who, on the other hand, have no innate worth to society.

True in a romantic way, but in real life I think the difference is less than is suggested by Mishima.

To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.

To be a man is mostly to be born, work, marry, have children, and die, old and frail and weak, unless you are either unlucky and die young at the hand of fate or kill yourself, like the author. Gay men have the most romantic notion of masculinity because they both worship it and can play act an extended adolescence that lasts through to middle age, when many of them wither or sink into deep depression.

Women have more ‘innate value’ than men, given their society, class, other demographics etc, yes. But the ‘given’ is doing a great deal there. A poor man on welfare in a very rich country like Switzerland or Denmark has far more ‘value’ (in the sense of a system looking out for him, providing for him, a safety net, the ability to coast through life) than an average woman in most of the world, for example.

“You will never be more than you are” is interesting. I don’t think that’s true literally, but even if it was I think this kind of deep life satisfaction, an identity as someone who has made something of themselves, is much more psychological, internal than it is external. There are people who achieve middling success who believe they have climbed mountains, and those who have done the same who consider themselves abject failures. The difference is in the head, not beyond it.

I suggest two thought experiments.

  1. Let's assume that Denmark goes into a serious economic crisis and consequently the government decides to cut down own welfare spending? Which demographic is most likely to lose their handouts first, if not poor men, especially single men?

  2. Take a 20-year-old pretty single woman from the poorest region of Ukraine and take her to a Danish town. Compared to a 20-year-old poor but handsome local man on welfare, which of them do you think is more likely to receive more attention, time, money and resources from Danish society?

/////////////

Also, is your argument then that homosexual men romanticize the concept masculinity because they are unable to experience their own masculinity by being a husband and father?

This is arguing the ‘intrinsic’ point where I agree with you anyway. Stripped of all possessions, social connections, class, citizenship, wealth, and any other designator of value, the young woman has more ‘innate value’ as a womb than the young man, all else equal. So yes, if you take away a billionaire’s wealth and they’re just a penniless old man, their social capital is far diminished. But in the real world, where social capital includes all of those components, this is just a thought experiment.

Take a 20-year-old pretty single woman from the poorest region of Ukraine and take her to a Danish town. Compared to a 20-year-old poor but handsome local man on welfare, which of them do you think is more likely to receive more attention, time, money and resources from Danish society?

Neither necessarily. If anything Denmark’s increasing conservatism on immigration means the citizen will get more support, although Ukrainian refugees have received plenty. If you mean ‘in the dating market’ then sure. But of course most pretty twenty year old Ukrainian women don’t make it to Denmark. They’re either in Ukraine or maybe Poland.

Also, is your argument then that homosexual men romanticize the concept masculinity because they are unable to experience their own masculinity by being a husband and father?

That may be the case but I think it’s a small component of it; some romanticize straight family life but far more common is as with Mishima or BAP the romanticizatiom of the warband, the troop, the master and commander fantasy of all-male life at sea. Part of its sexual, all these otherwise straight men encouraged by circumstance implicitly into male company; gay men are attracted to the most outwardly masculine men, deepest voices, bulkiest muscles. But I think when you’re attracted to something you romanticize all aspects of them, they romanticize male camaraderie too.

Read the four years ago, like many enjoyed the first most. Mishima--I tell someone I've read a good deal of Mishima--and they sit up, impressed. If I say I've read a dozen Murakami novels they shrug. What I have to then admit is that I read in translation, in English. Mishima's kanji and word choice is apparently miles away from Murakami's more accessible prose, and to read Mishima in Japanese suggests a strong command of the language. Like comparing say Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King as an English reader. I say all this not knowing if you're reading in Japanese, English, or German.

I am glad I read the books, though, without spoiling, I will say they did get weird. Then again Mishima was, by my reckoning, a pretty big nutter, and I use that term in the Commonwealth sense of "fucking nuts." I do enjoy much of his writing though. I recently lent a friend a copy of Ai no kawaki or Thirst for Love and I believe his response was "Wtf did I just read?"

I wonder if Mishima had Italian and German (so post-Axis) contemporaries, with the same sort of experiences and talents as he had.

I feel like Mishima's particular form of narcissistic suicidal homosexuality would be difficult to percolate anywhere.

I'm reading an english translation. Much as I enjoy reading works in their original language, I stop short of learning new languages entirely just to read a handful of books.

Manuel Marrero's Bodycount. Borderline unreadable, and certainly less of a novel and more of a rant. But the man runs a good press.

Rambo van Halen's Hollywood Samizdat. It's just his twitter threads. He's a good enough writer that it's still a great read, and if you're interested in modern film industry and not on twitter it's worth buying, but also hard to call it a novel.

Ezra Pound's poetry. How does anyone achieve this boldness, this daring? It would be worth going mad to write like that.

Alternately bouncing between "The Making of The English Working Class", a very interesting history book, albeit colored somewhat by the authors Marxist sympathies and "Too Like The Lightning", a mid-to-near future science fiction mystery-thriller. Between the two of them, I think I prefer the history book. It's quite long but feels, for lack of a better term, very real in way the sf doesn't. Lest this sound like a dig, I should emphasize I give full credit to "Too Like The Lightning" for trying to envision a plausible near future that is different from our own world yet plausibly derived from it. The author is swinging for the fences; it's just that the price of trying to swing for the fences is sometimes you miss.

To be honest, I got about ten pages into that book a decade ago. Read the bit about how their society considers it taboo and obscene to gender people and noped right on out.

Eh, it's definitely done in more of a thought experiment way than a give-me-sjw-points way. Part of the subtext is that people are constantly falling into gender roles whether consciously or not, and the narrator draws attention to this.

Then perhaps I was harsh. I still don't think it's really for me - the 'isn't gender interesting' stuff palled for me halfway through le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness when I was 21 - but I take your point.

I still have to read that one! Is over-rated or as much a classic as people say?

The Lies of Locke Lamora. The writing smacks of the fedora, if you catch my drift - but the plot is engaging enough to keep me interested.

Although I can't help but wonder why the Thiefmaster needed dispensation from Capa Barsavi to whack Locke, but apparently didn't need it for Viselin and just killed him and his buddy on the spot.

The first is the best of the series, sequels are just less coherent retreads.

Oh thanks for letting me know. I'd been vaguely meaning to read past the first one for like the last ten years so it's nice to be relieved of that.

As with nearly all heist novels, the books have a chronic lack of actual heisting. Why would you take an awesome premise like "Ocean's 11 set among the villas and back alleys of fantasy Renaissance Venice" and immediately throw it away to write a half-baked pirate adventure and a nonsensical political thriller?

The writing smacks of the fedora, if you catch my drift

Reddit certainly loves it, yes. Read it on recommendation from one of the SF subs, and hated it. Its main weakness is that Locke is such a Mary Sue. I find characters that simply excel at everything annoying. Other than that, it's decently written Fantasy James Bond with forgettable world building.

Would not recommend.

I really enjoyed it back when I read it ~15 years ago. I started the sequel but got bored and dropped it near the beginning. I don't especially remember why. I've always kind of wanted to go back and finish it, except the author went George R.R. Martin on us and it's been 13 years since book 3, and I don't want to get re-invested in a series that might never conclude properly.

So, what are you reading?

I just started Platform Decay. Murderbot is comfortable science fiction, to me. It's not groundbreaking work, but it is smoothly executed and enjoyable. The series definitely does a bit of anti-capitalist pandering but this never does successfully undermine its meritocratic undertones. The TV adaptation was also watchable, though strictly inferior (and more inclined to lean into the pandering).

Devouring Man Eaters of Kumaon.

Upvoted for word choice.

I tapped out on Les Miserables at page ~500 due to its unsatisfying filler:killer ratio and read the synopsis on Wikipedia instead. Can't win them all.

Now reading some Will Self short stories.

Honestly, audiobooks are great for those long 19th century novels. I just tune in for the interesting parts while driving/doing chores/whatever. Whether this counts as reading is of course a matter of perspective

Nothing in my life at the moment but SPMM notes for the MRCPsych Paper B and the book I'm meant to review for ACX. One of these is significantly more pleasant company than the other.

Well, the end is nigh. Another week and change, and I won't have to devote quite so many irreplaceable neurons to remembering which antipsychotic is least likely to make you piss yourself in your sleep (risperidone, at a relatively continent 6.2% rate of nocturnal enuresis, versus clozapine's stately one-in-five). Or to remembering whether male British prisoners are more likely to be antisocial assholes or drug-addicts (the former, I think, given that roughly 47% of male prisoners across surveys meet criteria for ASPD; the massive overlap with substance dependence being something the syllabus and I have agreed, by tacit treaty, to disregard).

I'd appreciate recommendations, by the way. God knows I'd like to have something to read once I'm done and dusted. The first Paper A made me depressed. The second Paper B is pushing me towards a psychotic break, which would at least have the dignified completeness of a full syllabus run-through. The system makes me understand how the forensic system works, so it can drive me nuts and admit me for a firsthand tour.

A stupid syllabus full of inane questions, then further mangled by SPMM into a form whose clinical relevance is mostly aspirational, and my sorry ass parked somewhere in the middle of it. At least I'm not a gynecologist.

Since you're looking for recommendations after this, I would think that Heidegger's essay "The Age of the World-Picture" would be very fitting.

You know what you've done. Soon, my psychiatrist will know what you've done too.

I have actually browbeaten all of my physicist friends into reading The Age of the World-Picture plus his essay Science and Reflection, and the uniform response has been "he gets how it really works." Having Werner Heisenberg to bounce ideas off probably helped. Someday I will write some effortpoasts on continental philosophy of science for rationalists - Feyerabend is the one everybody knows, but Heidegger, Junger, and even Deleuze are closer to what I hear from actual scientists about the process of research than anything from analytics.

at a relatively continent 6.2% rate of nocturnal enuresis

Per dose or per patient?

Per patient. If it made your piss yourself that frequently, it would be a shit drug. It's still a... not great drug, but it's better than untreated schizophrenia.

Of course. I just read and wondered if some patients had an innate susceptibility to side effects while others never did. Would be interesting if so.

As a lay person, it’s always complicated looking at lists of side effects. Take a side effect of:

Very rare: stroke.

Does that mean that every time you take it, you are rolling a 1:10,000 chance of stroke. Or is it 1e-9 for a young healthy person and 1:10 for a very elderly person who’s already had one stroke? And so on.

The BNF provides a way to convert from intuitive explanations of risk to quantifiable forms. Common is like >10%. Very rare is like 1:10,000. That's not in terms of every time you take the pill, it's what you'd see in a patient who is taking the pill for prolonged periods of time.

And yes, patient demographics do change things. The elderly are particularly annoying, they'll collapse if things aren't dosed just right.

Yes, I see. I remember being very worried when I was doing the paperwork for my heart op and saw that risk of death was perhaps 1:200 to 1:100.

Then I got to the ward, looked around at my fellow patients (all over 70 and mostly very frail) and thought ohhh... And I felt better :P

I wish I understood the nature of resilience in general, really. The fact that the brain continues to work essentially as normal when doused in brain-altering chemicals like alcohol is really staggering when you think about it.

Sky Pride on royal road.

The description felt very generic eastern cultivation story. But I finally gave in and read it because of its long tenure in the top stories. Even though it is generic and plays standard tropes quite often I feel many of the elements are done well.

What I feel it handles best is the ugliness of a cultivation world. Or at least having a non psychopath OP that finds the psychopathy of the setting horrifying and trauma inducing.

Been following this with a few friends since November last year - quite good, I second the recommendation.

Entertainingly, it does pretty well on the daoism front. I tested this out against a few people I know who were in the middle of reading the Zhuangzi and it took much longer than I expected for them to figure out I was pretending at knowledge by aping a webnovel

I gave it a very fair shake and was mostly disappointed. The prose leans purple, the protagonist is... okay, but "quirky" in a manner I do not find charming. He's painfully earnest, and the feral child being resocialized deal overstays its welcome. It's been long enough that I've forgotten much of my criticism, but I'd describe it as a mid novel at best.

That's a shame, because To The Far Shore is up there in terms of novels I've read on RR. Post-post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail, with radiation magic and fallen civilizations rediscovering muskets and the ruins of hyper-advanced civilizations that came before? You bet I enjoyed it.

Both are by the same guy, which is annoying. It means Warby can write. He just can't write this.

Consider the starts. Mazelton begins media res, he arrives at TTFS ready to fire: paranoid Ma assassin with an almost pathological lack of empathy, an inventory of opinions about everyone in the room, instincts honed by a clan that treated "eat carrion if you must" as parenting advice.

Tian arrives with nothing. The opening arc is the author manually installing a soul, one trauma-recovery beat at a time, and the prose is straining for emotional registers the protagonist can't yet supply. That's where the purple comes from. Lavender adjectives are what you reach for when your POV character is still booting up.

Xianxia compounds it. The genre wants a genuinely virtuous MC so cultivation breakthroughs feel earned, which makes "sweet boy from the trash heap" the obvious play. It is also rather played-out in the genre, and once Tian commits, his available range is roughly Pure to Slightly Less Pure. The supporting cast keeps trying to drag him somewhere more interesting. They were losing, when I gave up on it.

My favorite of his is https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/83045/weeaboos-unfortunate-isekai-the-necromancers-gacha - charming and macabre.

It's funny I was thinking of tagging you, since you are one of the only other cultivation enjoyers I know. But our tastes consistently do not align. To the point that I should be getting reverse recommendations from you, asking what you hate to find something I like.

I'm not sure I agree with the "purple prose" accusation. I do find there are stories where I will just skip over things and feel that I'm not missing anything. This isn't really one of those stories.

One thing that is described quite often is the elemental cycle. If you know the cycle already I can see how this feels like purple prose. I do not, and constantly forget it. The in text reminders are helpful not extraneous for me.

I also struggle with Eastern names. The author does seem to go out of their way to reintroduce characters or at least make it very clear who they are. If you don't struggle with names these parts would also be wasted on you.

The main character's earnestness is one of my favorite parts of the story. Psychopath MCs are incredibly hard for me to stomach, but so are whiny bitch MCs. It feels like Tian is far from either of those pitfalls.

It's been long enough that I'm not 100% sure if my memories of the prose being purple are entirely reliable. But I do remember feeling like it was overwrought, that Warby was trying too hard. I think a common thread in media I don't particularly like is being too "tropey". If I can predict pretty much exactly what's going to happen in a story arc without even having to read it, yeah, why really bother?

There's only instance in the section of the book I read where I was went "oh, that's cool". It was when he got sent off to whack a demonic cultivator, and decided to risk his life to save civilian prisoners. So far so basic, but then I think it turned out that his senior brothers were monitoring him all along, and if he'd done things in an utterly ruthless way, they'd have killed him for being a potential future demonic cultivator himself. Good idea.

There's the loveable senior brothers thing, where you just know what's going to happen. The tsundere female foil of privilege, where you can sleepwalk into knowing they're going to end up friends/lovers. I could go on for a while, or I could, if I remembered more of the story. C'mon. All I ask for is more originality than that. It's not an awful book, God knows there's some serious horseshit on RR, but I'd give it a 6/10 at best, below my threshold for sticking with it in the hopes of it getting better.

On a semi-related note, I think only the Chinese write good Xianxia. The Western knock-offs just don't capture the vibes, it's even worse than when the Japanese try to depict a Western school in their media. That Greco-Roman "Cultivation" story on RR, whose name escapes me? Holy fucking shit was it bad. Great concept, execution so mediocre I could cry.

There's the loveable senior brothers thing, where you just know what's going to happen.

They ground him, eventually adopt him. He is nearly broken when he has to watch some of them get killed in what feels like a pointless war with a heretical sect.

The tsundere female foil of privilege, where you can sleepwalk into knowing they're going to end up friends/lovers.

Turns out she is not actually privileged, or that she is basically at the bottom tier of "privilege". They do become friends. Turns out later that her mentors use his ass whooping of her as a teaching lesson for her to be less of a loud mouth. The mentors point out that you never know when someone might be a hidden dragon or have a powerful backing so you should always be polite and courteous. Which is something so blindingly stupid and obvious in a cultivation world, but it seems rare that any story actually mentions it and notices it.

The main part I think you would have liked is the depiction of war. The MC is a thirteen year old in a war zone. Once he manages to distinguish himself a little they try to get him a slot as a hospital orderly which is relatively safer. Its safe from violence but not from Trauma. He is watching his senior brothers and sisters get murdered and mutilated in horrific ways. The heretics they are fighting like to use poison, necromancy, and gu (insects/parasites). The war also seems to be very pointless from the MC's perspective. Certain practices by the sect he is in are very callous towards the lives of the lower sect members.

Its very much a "shit is getting real" moment for a xianxia. Which is very much not the typical vibe for any xianxia. Which is part of why I thought you might like it more. Xianxia vibes can get very wishy washy about human tragedy. Exterminating families, including the children. Blowing up whole cities. Horrific wars with massive casualties. etc. And these things typically don't feel like they have much weight to them.

I also hated the greco roman cultivation story. Because it seemed like it would be a lot of navel gazing and gay wrestling without much power progression.

About to start Shatterdark: System of Nil book 2 by Tim Paulson. Still would rate the first as 3/5, but want to see what the author does with the world and the characters he created. Of course, I had to devour Out Law: A Dresden Files novella by Jim Butcher, since it just dropped, and I'm happy to recommend it to fans of the series.

Finally, shout-out to @FtttG, who let me beta read the book they'd been working on. Fun!

One chapter in to GB Stern's The Matriarch.

Going to try some Agatha Christie next, which perennialy seems to be collecting dust on my shelf.

If you haven't read either already, I would highly recommend And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

About to finish Mage Errant. I'm liking it, but it has definitely slipped from a 4/5 to a 3.5 over the course of the last book so far. It's a shame, because the series had a lot of potential. Too much filler and random side character action right after a cliff hanger for my taste though, it's absolutely relentless during this book.

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