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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3516 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through al-Ghazali's Arrangement of the Litanies. So far it is surprisingly interesting, given that I thought the practical aspects of worship would be boring for a non-Muslim. Backlog has been stuck for a while.

Baldree's Legends and Lattes series.

Mixed feelings on it. It's very fanfic-tier, of the literally 'what if the adventurer retired and worked in a coffee shop' sense, which is what I was looking for, and in contrast to a lot of fanfic there's both a genuine grabber and a central plot arc instead of people just waffing at each other. But it's also painfully woke. I can deal with stories where I don't agree with the politics. It's annoying when it gets in the way of the rising tension, though.

Boiling your deuteragonist's backstory down to 'was discriminated against' might save us time, fair. When it's everybody's backstory, it's not really shorthand, anymore. When a threat hanging over the protagonist is defused as soon as you stop interacting with their human male flunkies and find out that she's an older woman, it's become self-parody.

Which is a pity, because there's a stronger story buried just a few steps deeper, and at points Baldree stumbles into it. What are the logistics of a new business, how does the Rules For Rulers concept apply at small locales and small gangs, what are the fantasy world ramifications of 'adventurer' being an actual job, what ramifications does retired adventurer bring, when they show up and get explored they're done well. Even the lesbian romance has tension to it, even if it's not my cup of tea. But then you get back to progress as its own byword and luck magic, and the tension just deflates again..

But it's also painfully woke

Yeah I just don't have time for that stuff any more. There are plenty of good books.

Just finished Isles of the Emberdark by Sanderson. I'm not a big Sanderson fan, but new girl is and I'm trying to give him another shot. This one was very entertaining; I couldn't put it down, but it was also terribly written. Cringe, repetitive descriptions and dialogue, one dimensional characters, and chock full of millennial humor. I loved the plot and world building though, so think I will be diving back in for more Sanderson, probably in Spanish so I don't have to deal with how terrible of a writer he is on a sentence by sentence level.

Also reading State and Revolution by Lenin for philosophy book club. In contrast to Marx, who I found to be interesting and insightful, Lenin comes off as an idealistic and dogmatic blowhard. The closest analogy I can think of outside of leftist spaces is Saint Augustine and other early Christian writers versus the Bible (with the Bible being Marx for Lenin). Lenin's polemics against Kautsky reminded me a lot of Augustine railing on Origen: they both have very strong opinions without a lot to back them up, both in terms of logic and in terms of what their gospel truth actually says.

I finished Penance. As I predicted, of the three female murderers, the third is also revealed to have been sexually abused as a child, meaning two of the three were definitely sexually abused as children by male adults, and the third may have been too (she's established to have been acquainted, via her father, with the universe's equivalent of Jimmy Savile). For those keeping score, of the female murderers in Clark's first two novels, 100% were either definitely or probably sexually abused as children or teenagers by adult male guardians.

The novel frustrated me more and more as it went along. When it works, it really works, with spot-on portrayals of the dynamics of friendship groups among teenage girls and the dark sides of Tumblr fandom culture. But there are so many pointless and irrelevant digressions that add nothing and go nowhere. For instance, one of the murderers is established to be an avid fan of two American school shooters, whose murder spree is a mish-mash of the Chardon high school shooting and Columbine (I vaguely recall Scott stating that the former case is what persuaded him that capital punishment has its uses). She writes creepy fanfiction about one of the killers, clearly projecting her own psychological issues onto him. Fine. But right at the climax of the book, Clark devotes several dozen pages to describing how this school shooting went down, in a town several thousand miles from the main action of the story, populated with characters we don't know. What's the point of this? What does it add to the story?

Then right at the end, it's revealed that the in-universe author of the true crime book we have ostensibly been reading up to this point may have embellished or invented some details about the events of the story. This was clearly intended as a postmodern "how much of what you've read is true???" moment, but by that point I didn't care. Whatever the in-universe "truth" of the story, I know that Clark thinks that the only reason a female person might murder someone is because they were sexually abused as a child. Beyond that, I don't think I need to know much else.

It's a curious example of a patched together from the headlines story. As mentioned above, one minor character is a transparent stand-in for Jimmy Savile, and one of the characters is obsessed with a fictional school shooting modelled on two real cases. Numerous other infamous true crime cases are referred to under their actual names as well. It was only after I finished it that I discovered the actual murder with which the A-plot is concerned was itself modelled on a real case which took place in Indiana in the nineties.

On to The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It's rather a slow read, but Rosen has a great eye for detail and his prose is stylish enough that it's not a chore to get through. Rosen was childhood friends with Michael Laudor, a legal genius who sadly suffered from schizophrenia, but who was able to flourish in academia with the aid of various accommodations. For a long time he looked like a prime example of how a mentally ill person could triumph over his disabilities, to the point that Brad Pitt and Ron Howard were looking to make an inspirational biopic about him (a project which eventually became A Beautiful Mind), right up until Laudor stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoia. At the point I'm at in the book now, Rosen is just describing his childhood and adolesence and how he came to know Laudor.

Well, I mean an abusive childhood background is pretty textbook for any kind of serial killer or spree killer. Getting three for three might be a bit rote but it’s not unrealistic. I’ve never read the book though.

I made the argument at greater length in my latest Substack post. I find it interesting that Clark only feels the need to explain villainous behaviour as the product of childhood trauma when the perpetrator is female. The male perpetrators in her books never get any such pat explanations.

Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe. I originally bounced off Book of the New Sun several years ago, stopping at the jarring disconnect that happens between Shadows and Claw. But i finally got around to reading it again, this time I have made it to Sword.

These books remind me of a quote from Les Grossman’s Magicians where Dean Fog remarks “I’m powerful enough to discern that I am stuck in a time loop but not powerful enough to do anything about it”

It’s the same here. I’m a smart, and discerning enough reader of complex philosophical fiction to be able to discern some of the layers going on, but also to understand that I am missing a large amount of the subtextual narrative that’s actually going on, and it is an extremely irritating feeling. I feel like I need a PhD in literature to make sense of this book on a first read. I know that most fans reread this series but I have never had to reread anything. Add to the fact that I can’t just casually read this and it compounds my annoyance.

Don’t get me wrong i love the series. That part of my mind that loves complicated abstractions and theorizing about hidden connections just eats it up. However i just sigh every time some other piece of literature gets brought in the book because now i need to pay super close attention lest i miss that the corn maidens are actually a mythologized parable for how to harvest energy from a black hole.

That's Gene Wolfe for you! I read a collection of his short stories in my late teens and it melted my brain (in a good way). I could just about recognise that there were a ton of things going on that I wasn't getting.

Re-reading really does repay, because there will be parts where you go "Argh! That is what was going on? You fooled me, Mr. Wolfe, you genuinely had me going there".

I know that most fans reread this series but I have never had to reread anything.

It's one of the series that really makes for an enjoyable rereading, especially after you finish all five books. You get to notice lots of hidden stuff, plus the prose is delightful, so it's not a chore.

Severian is a clueless guy walking an Earth encrusted with the stories and dust of a billion years of human civilization. He's got no idea what's going on under the surface, and neither do you.

Yes, but is the novel written by Severian as the events are happening in his clueless state? The narrator makes many choices about what and how to relate.

The novel is written by Severian as a memoir, but he never figures out all the answers before he writes the memoir.

Currently reading The Salt Fix by Dr. James DiNicolantonio, because I got curious about whether I am or am not eating too much salt. Hoping to come out of reading it with some clue how to get an idea of whether I am eating too much, not enough, or an okay amount of salt. My attempts to get some idea about this from other sources has not been going very well so far, other than to make me think, eh it's probably fine.

Mother of Learning. I'm 40% into Arc 2, and I'm starting to dislike it. Arc 1 had some actual (though flat) characters and plot development, and while I can accept the necessity of some downtime in a story, Zorian has been grinding his skills and marking down high-level sidequests to be done later for too damn long. Domagoj's taken "progression fantasy" too literally.

It's like Groundhog Day, but you have to watch Phil Connors painstakingly learn the piano and chainsaw carving and the rest of the stuff he needs to win Rita's heart.

upd: Okay, just as I wrote this, the protagonist finally returned to the city, and the plot is slowly moving forward again. I guess I'll see how much plot steam there's left.

The progression details never got me to "starting to dislike it" territory, but I do agree that they were the parts of the story I least enjoyed. They felt like they were killing the pacing and my interest.

I can't call them "the worst" or even "my least favorite" parts of the story, though, because when my son read it he ate most of that stuff up, and "repetition is the mother of learning" is exactly the mantra that smart lazy people need drilled into us.

I don't know if the book actually reinforces the idea that "repetition is the mother of learning" well. Zorian has spent around four years in the time loop. Let's make it equivalent to eight years of regular learning, since he has an inherent motivation to study twice as hard. Minus two years to complete the basic education (he's a third-year student), that makes six years. Or three master's degrees. And yet he's already an extremely dangerous magical ninja: a mind mage, an alchemist, an artificer and a battlemage in one. And a few more subclasses sprinkled in for good measure.

The real advice that the book is giving to smart lazy people is "spread your attention as wide as you can, it's not too hard to become better than average at everything if you're good at learning, when you have a massive toolset, you only have to find the right tool to solve any problem; deeply specialize only in the things you're unnaturally good at". Sure, there are some sentences about shaping exercises and regularly casting magic missiles sprinkled in, but so far, he hasn't defeated anyone because he's been practicing one kick 10000 times. On the contrary, it's because he has learned 10000 kicks.

I liked the slow burn, but the later portions definitely get more exciting and I thought the climax was very good.

What chapter name?

Gah, I don't remember them. I went to bed when he started the second loop in the magic academy city after a long break and met the cat shifter lady for the second time.

Currently working on Project Mars by Wernher von Braun. It's some of the driest science fiction I've read, with essentially no new science or engineering but filled with such an abundance of detail and explanatory calculations, it's obvious this was something he viewed as a serious proposal.

I wonder if he was a fan of Jules Verne.

ETA: According to AI inquiry, he was indeed well documented to be a massive fan, and considered Verne to be a foundational influence on his life.

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