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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2838 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It has been on the backlog for years.

Paper I'm reading: Dombrink's The Touchables: Vice and Police Corruption in the 1980's.

Finished the Expanse series, started on Bosch.

For falling asleep, I've been listening to Andy Serkis read The Lord of the Rings for almost two years.

I just blew through The Big Short in a day and a half. It is, Peter Segal observed, a most unusual book because adapting it into a movie didn't mean making changes to make things more exciting or dramatic—but several things that really happen did have to be toned down!

Funny, I rewatched the film last week. This time round I found that the comedic parts of the film really did not work for me at all (surprising given the director's background) and the quirky editing choices were distracting more than anything. The dramatic parts are so much more effective than the comedic parts that the film probably would have been improved by making it a straightforward drama rather than attempting a quirky comedy-drama.

Which is better, the book or the film?

Both are good, but the book is better. You get a lot more detail on the finance side, if you are into that. It’s probably Michael Lewis’s best book, or at least the one I would recommend to introduce you to his writing style.

This time round I found that the comedic parts of the film really did not work for me at all (surprising given the director's background) and the quirky editing choices were distracting more than anything

This is how I felt about Vice, Adam McKays biopic about Dick Cheney. McKay took the quirky, “wink at the camera” directorial choices from The Big Short and ratcheted them up to ten. Not a fan.

Planning on continuing my Irish history reading with Ernie O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound. Unlike the other guys I've been reading - Dan Breen, Michael Collins, Tom Barry (I wrote my thoughts on the interesting parts of his book here) - this guy is far more well-known for his books than his war exploits which makes me think he'll be a better writer than the rest. I know one of the books, maybe this one, covers the Civil War and that's something only Collins has gone into depth on in my readings so far (though he died before it was over so O'Malley should still give a clearer picture of what it was all about).

Has anyone read In The Distance or Trust by Hernan Diaz? If so, how did you like them?

The Two Towers, by Tolkien.

It's comfy. I tend to look up https://tolkiengateway.net for landscape drawings and paintings relevant to the passages I read, and it makes for a very nice experience.

Neat. I'm halfway through a TT re-read. Fall is a perfect time to read this series.

I was looking for the source of my Silmarillion’s cover art. Through the Gateway, this led me to the absolute madness of Middle Earth calendars. Some of these are absolutely perfect examples of a certain 80s style. I ended up with a sweet Mount Doom for a phone background.

Finishing up King, Magician, Warrior, Lover. It's great.

I found Ted Chiang's most recent collection of short fiction Exhalation in a book sale the other day. I've never read anything by him, but I thoroughly enjoyed the film Arrival which was adapted from one of his short stories, so I thought I'd check it out.

The hype is warranted. The first story I read, on Tuesday afternoon, was "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", which does exactly what hard sci-fi is supposed to do: tells an engaging story and gets you thinking. I've mentioned this story to three people since reading it. It does something very clever by contrasting a fairly conventional Black Mirror-esque "imagine the impact this near-future technology will have on our society" story, with a parallel narrative about a nineteenth-century missionary in Nigeria introducing literacy to the natives, illustrating all the profound, non-trivial and non-obvious impacts that the written word had on their culture (and human culture in general). For me it did a wonderful job of puncturing the parochialism and small-mindedness of Black Mirror-style sci-fi: writers in this genre have no trouble speculating on the scary effects of near-future technologies (or real technologies invented since, say, 1995), but essentially take for granted every technology invented prior to 1995. Chiang is making the rhetorical point that "yes, near-future technologies will have profound impacts on our society and individual psychology - but also this has been going on forever."

I don't like to read an entire collection of short stories in one go, so after reading three stories in the Chiang collection, I started my second read of Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte. It's just as funny and engaging as I remembered, and I can't wait for his second book to be released.

It's worth getting Stories Of Your Life And Others too. There's quite a bit of overlap in the included stories but the variations are worth the duplications.

Did your collection include Hell is the Absence of God? I thought it was particularly good, especially in the context of books like Unsong.

Is this supposed to be a Christian fable or a cosmic horror story?

I have heard it was written because Chiang thought the book of Job was a cop-out. So…yes.

Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately not, but I'm going to read it now.

WWI poetry - especially Wilfred Owen. Gone too soon.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, pretty decent if you ask me.

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