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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

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I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.

In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.

I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.

I read Chris Jesu Lee's review of Yellowface and thought it sounded like hot garbage.

He was absolutely correct and the hip bookstore employee who recommended it to my wife should get the other half of her hair shaved off in public for this.

Oof, I read through Kuang's Poppy War trilogy and had no desire to read more of her. The first half of the first book is Kung Fu Harry Potter, then it shifts hard into Chinese nationalist fever dream, complete with a few chapters dedicated to the rape of not-Nanking so you don't feel as bad when the main character commits genocide on the not-Japanese. Then she spends two books ping ponging between ruthless sociopathy and helplessness as the plot demands. People called the details of the setting (food, clothing, etc) really well researched, but then the author described the not-Mongols as using huge longbows on horseback and that kinda brought everything into question for me.

The whole book just felt like a thesis length version of "But I have already drawn you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad..."

And I've read Babel, so between us we've got the whole bibliography.

Spoiler: It was bad.

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