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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3107 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 11, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I’m still on This Star of England, and picking up Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

Currently going through Will Durant's The Study of Philosophy, in which he explores and explains the ideas of great philosophers from Plato through to the 20th century. If I stick with it and read it all the way, I can gain exposure to the ideas of thinkers like Spinoza and Spencer, who never came up in philosophy intro classes in college. In general it's of course not as intensive as reading the primary sources, but I think it can give me an idea of which ones interest me the most to pursue later.

Still reading The Devil's Chessboard. It's mostly a tour through all of the dirty deeds that the CIA did and/or was accused of doing during the Dulles regime during the Cold War.

It's interesting, but it's sufficiently preachy that I feel a little dubious about it's takes on many of these events. I wonder what other takes are out there on these events, if they were really as bad or as unjustified as portrayed.

I perceive a good amount of what I see as two-facedness about the Cold War. During it, it was claimed that the Soviet Union was impossible to beat, we had to learn to live with them, many were quite justifiably worried about the influence they wielded around the world and took broad measures to counter them. Then suddenly they just collapsed one day. After that, magically, everybody always knew they were a house of cards, all the stuff we did to counter them was totally unnecessary and unjustified, and we're a bunch of big stupid jerks for doing it.

I think the truth is more like, yes they absolutely were a grave threat to liberty around the world. We were correct to counter them at every turn. Maybe not every single thing we did in service of that goal contributed to their downfall, but a lot of it did, and there was no way to know for sure at the time what would and what wouldn't. In the grand scheme of things, it was all justified and it did in fact work, and the world is a better place without their regime, even if the process of getting there wasn't the prettiest thing around.

Read the second Locke Lamora book, Red Seas under Red Skies. Lot of fun. I really get the feeling this was the author's tabletop RPG setting or something, because he loves dropping in these...icebergs. Plot details are rarely filled by something tidy; instead, he'll add a new detail that implies a whole adventure of its own.

Made for incredible whiplash to read Authority, Jeff Vandermeer's sequel to Annihilation. That's much more economical in prose and plot. You're not in the setting, you're in the characters' heads as they deal with that setting. And what a mess, a beautiful, anti-rational mess, it is! This is a book which managed to convincingly portray the old Lovecraftian trope of knowledge which would drive someone to suicide. I have to highly recommend the first one.

Just restarting Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul. It's good.

Finished the books I was reading about Augustus and the Peloponnesian War. Now I'm reading The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham (he co-wrote The Expanse). Finished the first part and was pleasantly surprised. Enjoying it quite a bit.

I had a bunch of unexpected time to read recently, and finally finished Hyperion. It's pretty long, but I thought the prose was really well-written. I found each of the tales to be pretty interesting. If I had to pick a favorite, the Scholar's tale was pretty poignant as a parent. I was expecting a bit more of a, well, conclusion to the primary story line, but I wasn't unsatisfied. Not sure if I'll pick up its sequel: my general experience has been that sequels (in both movies and books) tend to not be quite as great about world building, and I have a long list of classic books to read already.

Then I started and got about halfway through The Diamond Age, after reading Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash a while back. Interesting concepts in The Diamond Age, and I see why it's so frequently referenced.

Agreed the sequels are not worth your time. I found Hyperion to be excellent and the sequels quite mediocre, surprisingly so.

Is it still worth reading? I've read the first book, but heard elsewhere also that the sequel isn't very good.

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are only two novels because publishers forced it. They're essentially one rather than a book and its sequel. That being said I didn't like Fall nearly as much.

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