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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

I decided to see what web serials were all about and picked up A Practical Guide to Evil. I've read the first two books (which is like one sixth of the whole story) and I'm done with it. I ain't reading a series that is more than five times longer than War and Peace unless it is at least twice as good. And this book is not.

At its heart, PG2E is a YA novel with obvious influences: you can see when the author channelled GRRM, Yudkowsky, Rosenfelder. And it could've been a good YA novel if it had a good editor that was willing to do two things:

  • get rid of sixty percent of the text
  • bring the quality of the prose of the first chapters to the level of the latter ones

I understand that both goals are really hard if not impossible to achieve when you are self-publishing your work chapter by chapter, but I am not satisfied with the quality of the final result at all. I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

Oh, and I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

Of all the web serials I've read, I don't think even one approached War and Peace in terms of production value per chapter, for what it's worth. Then again, I didn't like War and Peace and liked most of the web serials. Maybe I'm giving Tolstoy too much credit, the joke goes he was paid by the word.

I didn't finish PGtE either, felt too sloggy. Mother of Learning I liked, even though the prose is obviously second-language English (thankfully not as bad as Reverend Insanity).

Web serials are, I suppose, for the same people who like TV shows over movies. They like the setting, might as well watch the events unfold for 60 hours (12 books) instead of 2 hours (1 book) where all the scenes and character interplay would be necessarily compressed.

(Funny enough I dislike TV shows, primarily because they consume my time at a fixed rate. A web serial I can just readingspeedmaxx.)

I think a TV show that goes for just one, or a couple of seasons is the perfect size. Long enough to avoid shortcuts necessary to fit the plot into a couple of hours, but not too long to start accruing unnecessary padding.

Haven't you enjoyed any sit com, procedural, or other long form fiction where it mostly consists of "monster of the week" with the meta progression mostly being getting to know the characters a bit better?

I have, but I haven't enjoyed one for maybe a decade. Since my kid was born, I'd guess.

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