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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   407 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Shafi'i's The Epistle on Legal Theory. Backlog moving slowly.

I'm waiting on The Thrice-Bound Fool, sequel to Black-Tongue Thief

About 40% of the way through The Best Minds. I can already tell this book is going to make me feel sad when I finish it. Fresh out of college, Michael Laudor is offered a prestigious job in Bain Capital, but after a year finds he doesn't really like it, and decides to quit. And yet he's sure that, like the Mafia, Bain isn't an organisation one just leaves: he's convinced they're plotting some way to get him to come back to work for him, and thinks he spies agents of theirs following him. This passes largely without comment, until he accuses his own parents of being Nazis and threatens his mother with a knife, upon which he's committed to an institution. Knowing how the story ends makes it feel like I'm watching a car accident in slow motion.

I'm reminded of Scott's observation that paranoid schizophrenia adapts itself to whatever the sufferer considers evil. John Forbes Nash believed the Soviets were conspiring against him: of course Michael Laudor, a Jew whose family members were killed in the Holocaust, accuses his parents of being literal Nazis. I'm also impressed with how elegantly Rosen weaves in scholarship from various sources to demonstrate that, in the sixties and seventies, the question of whether there was even such a thing as "mental illness" was very much an open one, at least in certain corners of the progressive left. He cited people like Huxley, Zsasz and Foucault who forcefully argued to the contrary. (I was thitherto unaware that Foucault spent a lot of time in gay bathhouses in the US, rubbishing the threat posed by HIV by expressly pointing out how convenient it was that this disease just so happened to overwhelmingly affect gays, drug users and blacks. Uh, yeah dude.)

The Last Kings of Hollywood gifted to me by the same guy who gave me a few other film-related books. It follows the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg from the 60s to the 80s. It's a hardcover copy which I like but means I don't carry it on commutes, so may take a while.

I finished my re-read of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. I first read them 20ish years ago and didn't remember much about them aside from the Shrike and big group of travelers. Overall I was disappointed and perhaps there's a reason I didn't remember much about them. The writing style was far clunkier than I expected and Fall suffered from the problem where chapters from different characters' POVs slows a novel to a halt. Fall also felt like he was being paid by the word, such as paragraphs describing something in detail that had already been described in detail. I was invested in some of the characters, but once it became a galactic struggle of humanity against the AIs, I mostly lost interest. Like most books involving some time travel, I'm fairly certain it's not internally consistent, but I don't care enough to reread it again and find the contradictions.

Now reading some silly vampire books. First was Coffin Moon by Rosson, which sold me with its badass cover. Solidly B grade but that's all I expected. Now working on The Dracula Tape from 1975, which retells the Dracula story from his point of view and came out a year before Anne Rice's famous vampire POV novel. It's well-written and captures a good "I'm the poor misunderstood victim" tone without much whining. Next will be Stainless by Grimson, which is a noir vampire book from 1996 that was hard to find for a while until McNally Editions issued a reprint.

The writing style was far clunkier than I expected

It's been a few years, but I recall thinking that the prose in Hyperion was pretty good. It's not something most (many?) science fiction authors are very strong in, though, and it may have been a relative observation.

I'm currently reading David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Good Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's quite enjoyable, though I prefer his fiction a bit more. That said, now on my second DFW book, I can understand why his prose is considered a bit controversial. It's purpley at times and his word choice, while always apt and appropriate, does occasionally veer into the pointlessly obscure. Still, he's quite a remarkable author and I envy his ability to distill complex, nigh-indescribable emotions into a few sentences.

Does that collection include his account of going to a porn convention? Someone sent it to me and I started reading it, but found it so depressing that I had to stop. I believe the phrase "barely disguised gang rape" appeared in it.

I've read that collection and don't remember that particular essay so probably not

I love the title essay from that collection. I can only imagine how mortified the cruise director was catching the reporter who is supposed to be writing a puff piece thats as close to ad copy as possibe chumming the water off the back of the boat with au jus or trying to catch the housekeeper cleaning.

I once took a ride on the Zenith and couldn't help thinking of it as the Nadir.

I agree about his ability to distil emotions into a few sentences. The Kate Glompert description of depression, from Infinite Jest, is the one that made the concept real for me.

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