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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   2247 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 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?

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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.

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?

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