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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2805 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 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 starting a reread of The Count of Monte Cristo after recent mentions here. I don't remember a lot of the details and perhaps it will seem more profound this time around. The political aspect of Danglars' accusation wouldn't have drawn my interest in the past.

Still on Hurewitz' The Struggle for Palestine.

What do you think Count's most morally questionable doings were?

So, what are you reading?

Medical textbooks. I can't remember the last time I had time to read anything else.

The worst of it is the GMC's Good Medical Practise, which expects a kind of simpering obsequiousness and self-sacrifice from doctors that would be uncalled for in a nun working under Mother Teresa. Then again, we're both about as exposed to TB or leprosy, so maybe I can learn from them.

I'm in the middle of From Third World to First on my tablet, still plugging away at The Dawn of Everything on my bedside table, and listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Overall, I guess it cashes out to a 3 credit college course on authoritarianism. All three are fantastic, well written, insightful works.

I enjoyed Rise and Fall, but also found it a bit…un-journalistic. If you have the chance, I really recommend Ian Kershaws one-volume Hitler Biography. I still maintain that is the best biography I’ve ever read. It focuses not just on Hitlers life, but the world context that allowed him to gain power. The parts on 1920s Germany and the power, influence, and independence of the German generals is particularly interesting.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized. So far, it's been a bit better than I expected (not that those expectations were all that high).

I finished Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution over the weekend.

I was broadly in agreement with her arguments. Anyone familiar with conservative(ish) complaints about the current sex/dating/marriage situation will find them familiar. But I agree with what Kvetch wrote in his review. The inescapable conclusion of her book is that women shouldn't or can't have full agency around their love lives, but she never actually says it explicitly.

Think it's similar to an argument against alcohol. It's obvious that some people simply can not make good decisions about alcohol and would be vastly better off if it were not available. But everyone knows prohibition was a "failure", so its inherently discrediting to advocate legal remedies. I don't that that means it is pointless to make an argument that society should voluntarily lower the status of alcohol consumption.

The inescapable conclusion of her book is that women shouldn't or can't have full agency around their love lives, but she never actually says it explicitly.

Most of these anti-"liberal consensus" books seem to have a lot of criticisms but stop short of proposing anything too alien to the normies or that can then be picked apart by the proponents of the beliefs they're criticizing. Lots of problems highlighted but you're often left wondering where you're expected to go from there.

I noticed the crazy woman in the comments. I can't imagine she convinced anyone of her position.

I think this is a great example of the fact that most of what you read on the internet is written by crazy people.

Four chapters into Moby-Dick (this is probably my fourth or fifth attempt at reading it, the last time when I was in my teens). The last chapter I read consists of "I woke up, my roommate woke up, I watched my roommate get dressed and shave". Aspiring novelists are rightfully advised to avoid morning routine scenes, as they do nothing to advance the plot or convey characterisation and are hence boring. Perhaps the only thing that's more boring and irrelevant is a chapter depicting the protagonist's roommate's morning routine.

Super late reply but I remember really loving a depiction of Watson getting ready in the morning in some Sherlock story I was listening to in audiobook form while working years ago. It has oddly stuck in my mind which is why I mentioned it here.

What struck me the hardest about MD is how modern the writing felt.

I found it funny in chapter 3 when Ishmael describes a set of wainscots as "old-fashioned".

Reminded me of this gag about Assassin's Creed Origins (a video game set in Egypt between 49-43 BC): "I remember feeling profoundly disappointed at the scene when Bayek's missus gives him a hidden blade and says, 'This is a weapon from ancient times.' Bitch, we're in ancient times!"

I really liked the setting of Origins, both because it correctly portrayed Bayek as religious (he's outraged that someone's making crocodile mummies by killing crocodiles not because it's animal cruelty, but because they are Sobek's sacred animals) and because we tend to forget that Ancient Egypt is so fucking ancient it was ancient history back in Cleopatra's times.

When someone told me that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landings than to the construction of the Great Pyramid, I felt like a trapdoor had just opened underneath me.

And yet, Moby Dick is rightfully seen as one of the best novels ever written.

Btw, there's also a pretty famous morning routine near the start of Ulysses.

Les Miserables is also considered one of the best novels ever written, but I don’t think the book would be materially harmed by removing the lengthy digressions on the Parisian sewer system and the Battle of Waterloo.

And yet, Moby Dick is rightfully seen as one of the best novels ever written.

I'm sure with good reason, I'll report back once I've finished it. I'll be immensely surprised if, upon completion, I come away thinking "yeah, the novel couldn't have done without the Queequeg shaving scene", but I'm open to the possibility.

The scene is pretty much unimportant to the story, but the point of the scene (and many others like it) is that instead of the story being linear from start to end, much like life it meanders this way and that, giving the reader a better sense of what it was like to actually be the characters in the text.

On its own the scene is meaningless, but together with other scenes like it it forms a part of the soul of what Moby Dick is, and the novel as a whole would be poorer without these scenes.

I just finished the Kyoshi novels which are official media in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. They're more at the 14-18yo maturity level, with sexual tension but not actually sex and people getting stabbed to death, compared to the show which was a more standard children's cartoon violence. I really enjoyed the first half of the first book, but after that it became a bit of a slog. I think I had two major issues with it. First, it felt like it was pretending to be a morally grey serious book akin to Game of Thrones where lots of the villains make good points and the heroes are forced to do bad deeds for the greater good. But the protagonist never really does anything that bad- she just kills a few extremely dangerous criminals/war lords in self-defense that she wouldn't have been able to bring in peacefully, and those criminals more than deserved death anyways. And the antagonists try to justify their actions claiming that they're just killing even worse bandits and are the only things upholding order, but they're far too needlessly cruel and violent for them to really have much moral justification.

The second issue I have with it is related and is that Kyoshi always felt incredibly guilty about having killed some of the antagonists and she'd always be beating herself up over it in the narration. But again, she really didn't do anything wrong, so the guilt just annoyed me instead of making me care more about her. I had a very similar issue with the web novel The Practical Guide to Evil as well. This stands opposed to the show Bojack Horseman, where the protagonist also is constantly feeling guilty over his past actions, but is also an actually shitty person, so it makes me sympathize with him instead of just rolling my eyes.

A third more more minor issue I had was that the spirit world never felt as mystical and otherworldly as it did in the original show. Instead it was more like a place that just contained some evil monsters and was travelled to with extreme adversity. It was similar to Legend of Korra in that way. As opposed to the original show, where spirits cared about their narrow interests like a forest, or the balance between moon and ocean, or protecting knowledge, or trying to steal people's faces, and didn't care about the rest of humanity beyond what they were the spirit of.

The original show was superb but I feel like that magic's never been recaptured in any media since, although I haven't read many of the comics.

Finished Brothers Karamazov.

After reading both that and Crime And Punishment this year I think I'm due for something much lighter. Does anyone have any recommendations for above average short story compilations?

Controversy around the inspiration for its most well-known story aside, I received Kristen Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This a few Christmases ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. Every story is short enough to be read in one sitting, her spare, terse style means that the stories never drag, and there were several stories I enjoyed quite a lot and none that I actively disliked. The stories are "dark" in the sense that they deal frankly with BDSM and weird sexual fetishes, but they're more like campfire stories or high-class /r/nosleep posts (made explicit in one story which veers into outright supernatural horror) - there's nothing here that's grounded or realistic enough to be truly disturbing or unsettling. As an understated slice-of-life examination of modern dating culture which is never really trying to shock or scare the reader, "Cat Person" is actually the outlier here.

Both Ted Chiang and Greg Egan have above-average short stories if you're into sci-fi. Try Chekhov and Turgenev as well, if you want to stick to Russians.

Not sure if this is up your alley, but Stephen Kings short stories are some of his finest work. His stuff from the 70s and 80s is great; he had a bite to his writing that sort of dissipated over time. Check out Skeleton Crew it has a few of Stephen Kings best short stories, The Raft and The Jaunt.

Murray's Human Diversity.

Was reading Albert Ellis' How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything again but couldn't actually do self-help at this point in the year. Hopefully I'll close it off after a palate cleanser.

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