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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   1909 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 10, 2024

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?

Still on Future Shock, Galactic Patrol and Crystallizing Public Opinion. Taking another stab at Freinacht’s 12 Commandments.

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya and rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for the first time. I was too young to pick up on it the first time, but the pre-incident life experiences of the latter’s protagonist is described from the start in upper middle class terms. It feels like she’d easily become fast friends with Rudy Huxtable from the Cosby Show.

Finished Pride & Prejudice yesterday. I was expecting crisp and refined writing but what I got, which certainly was not parallel to, indeed not sharing many aspects with, a style one could generously, or as befits opinion parsimoniously, describe using a range of terms, carefully chusen from the refracted, diffuse spectrum of all potential lexical motifs, as one of focus, indeed moreso not an under abundance of sidewards steps and circumlocution.

Better than Madame Bovary though.

I’ve never opened Pride & Prejudice, but I did attempt Sense & Sensibility and my impression was similarly unfavorable. Austen was indeed a keen observer of human psychology, but her elliptical prose style left me cold. (And I say this as someone whose writing style is not exactly a paragon of Hemingway-esque brevity itself.)

Yeah, I don’t know if it was a particular quirk of hers or just the writing style of the time. But the way she just summarizes entire conversations without putting any of the dialog feels weird.

Seemed to me that there were many more significant sections written almost entirely in dialogue. Easily one of the most dialogue heavy books I've read.

It was a welcome relief toward the second half to read something like "he continued explaining the reason for his frustration until they arrived at the house". Felt like Austen herself was starting to show signs of getting tired of listening to her characters by that point.

When I was in secondary school, I bought Charles Burns's comic book Black Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_(comics)), a wonderfully trippy and surreal fusion of body horror, coming-of-age story and 70s nostalgia. It's over 350 pages long, but I found it so absorbing that I read the entire thing in one sitting of maybe 3-4 hours. I read it again maybe two years ago and found it just as good the second time, if not better.

I recently happened across his latest book Final Cut in a bookshop and snapped it up. Last night I read the first chapter. Man's still got it. It revisits a lot of the same motifs as Black Hole: I think it's set in the seventies or possibly the eighties, it's very dreamy and surreal and there's some body horror. But this time it's in colour. I'm sure I'll have devoured the whole thing before the end of the week.

I finally finished The Night Land. Hodgson's imagination is certainly prodigious and it's easy to see why his ideas have been so influential, but The Night Land has very little to offer a casual reader. The patience is takes far outweighs the payoff. Doubtless I wouldn't have finished it if I wasn't determined to explore the full breadth of the dying earth genre. More than any other book I have read is it deserving of an abridged version. Such a version wouldn't abridge so much as it would jettison chapters whole, and the book would be better for it.

I've been reading Beware of Chicken and Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade, and Tax Evasion.

September saw the release of a fifth Bobiverse book an a seventeenth Expeditionary Force book. Both were good instalments.

Yahtzee Croshaw released a third Jacques McKeown audibook back in April that I missed, so listening to that now.

I decided to give John Scalzi a shot. Starter Villain was enjoyable but fell apart in the last third. Recommended if you like cats. Constituent Service: A Third District Story didn't grab me, I didn't get far. I'm a few chapters into Old Man's War but not feeling too excited about it yet.

The Freedom's Fire box set had some very good parts, but I think I would have preferred and abridged edition.

Starship's Mage, Book 14 Chimera's Star has them finally encountering the aliens they have been teasing since book 4. The series is fun but has a major problem where key people aren't as smart as they should be. The Mage King somehow doesn't have any bright military advisors and problems happened that you'd expect a jr officer to foresee.

Children of Time is broadly praised. I gave it a try but I can't sympathise with intelligent spiders.

I've been watching Yahtzee's video reviews for a decade and a half, he's put me on to so many great games, but I've never read any of his fiction. Is it any good?

I really liked the Jacques McKeown audiobooks (Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, Will Leave the Galaxy for Good). He reads them himself so you get his presentation skills.

I am particularly fond of spaceships, so it got points for that. It's a light and funny listen that's easy to follow. So it's great if you're doing chores or going for a walk where there may be some distractions.

I played it on a drive with my father and he asked me to turn it off because he liked it but it was too distracting. Usually he's fine with audiobooks on drives.

I had trouble getting into "Differently Morphous". I'm less familiar with some of the Lovecraftian & Harry Potterish material that the story involves. Plus there are POV jumps that make it harder to follow in while playing the background.

I'm planning to give it another try.

His books are not anything dense or deep, but I find them enjoyable.

Just got caught up on Path of Ascension, a progression fantasy story with an enormous scope. The lack of stakes still bothers me but whatever, it's popcorn anyways.

About to start Golden Son, the sequel to Red Rising. Red Rising was fairly enjoyable, it felt like a knock-off Ender's Game with much less creative tactics, strategy, and general ideas, but better stakes/plot. If the sequel is equivalent it'll be more than worth the time.

Life of Saint Louis by John of Joinville.

I finally finished The Culture series, ending on The Hydrogen Sonata. @roystgnr asked to hear what I thought of it when I was done:

I heard that Banks didn't want this to be the last culture novel, but I do think it fits in a way. The focus on Subliming (definitely the most hand-waved, mystical part of the series) was arguably a great topic to wrap up on. I think he did a good job peeling back the curtain just enough, but any more books about it afterward would have been too much.

There were elements of it that felt a bit disjointed and unrealistic. The murder of so many people just a few days before transcendence would be unbelievably abhorrent and arguably not something a civ "mature enough" to sublime would do, from my read. I am surprised the primary human protagonist survived since most of these books end in everyone dying. I do think the idea of the Sonata itself, music, was brought in only as an introduction and in the last few pages. The title suggested something beautiful and cohesive, when, in the end, it was just a romp around the galaxy.

In any case, I've moved on to other books. I discussed being recommended "Normal People" from a woman I have a bit of a complicated relationship with. I discussed it in the Friday Fun thread. To be frank, I don't think it will tickle the fancy of many people here. It's a modern romance novel with a little bit of woke dashed in. Great sex scenes, and refreshing in terms of how it treated an intense relationship. I haven't read a romance in many years. Many commit the sin making what's supposed to be a great love just... not very good. I much prefer the type of book that reminds me of what it felt like the few times it's happened.

I've also started on Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat. I'll wait to recommend it, but so far, it's been good.

Thanks for pinging me on this, and for the spoiler tags.

The focus on Subliming (definitely the most hand-waved, mystical part of the series) was arguably a great topic to wrap up on.

This is selling me on the book. Decades ago I was very skeptical of the then-common sci-fi trope of "Elder Races who were once Immensely Powerful until they Mysteriously Disappeared Up Their Own Asses", but I kind of want to see it again with fresh eyes now that my first reaction isn't "but that makes no sense" rather than "oh, sure, like Europe".

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