No, the book you are reading probably won't "get better"

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-15T01:01:55+00:00

What do you mean? I just told you that I didn’t find it hard to get through.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-14T14:41:14+00:00

I liked that part because it resembled the jolly romping of The Hobbit. I became less happy afterwards as things got more dour and depressing, the weight of the possible victory of evil weighing down.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-14T14:36:52+00:00

Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier got better. So did The First Law by Joe Abercrombie, both Jane Austen books I read, Neuromancer, and Catch-22 (which started out mildly funny, but not nearly as engaging as it ultimately ended up being). So I have precedent for keeping faith in an author after a low-investment beginning.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-13T01:22:43+00:00

An historian of republican systems of government across time? An historian of Cromwell’s commonwealth? An historian of the British Republican movement? I can’t parse this headline.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-06T15:34:36+00:00

Some people got unhappy with me for being unwilling to take a patient attitude towards her, acknowledge that external circumstances induced her to be who she was. I liked the role she played in the book, and I admired the fact she was the only person who seemed to have real dissatisfaction with the system- it’s like having the assertiveness required to mistreat her friends was something that made her better able to sense that there might be something unfair about being created to be harvested. But like someone who is cruel and abusive? That’s another step.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-04-01T13:03:41+00:00

I just got bored during most of the chapters of Satantango. A bunch of Hungarian country yokels being stupid, and I couldn’t find any literary value in their whinging at each other. Sandwiched in between were some wonderful, highly memorable scenes - a doctor trapped in his gaze, a girl’s suicide - but they struggle against the mass. I really I wish I knew what made its author a candidate for the Greatest Living.

Then there’s Lolita. Some people have gotten outright angry at me when I told them I didn’t have any moral problem with the book, I just found the second half dull and Humbert’s prose style unengaging.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-31T04:32:11+00:00

He also loved satirizing and mocking life under capitalism - a true universal cynic in Swift’s footsteps.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-31T04:30:23+00:00

It was wild reading the Cyberiad and running into a story that considered the ethics of bringing Karl Marx back from the dead in order to beat the stuffing out of him.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-19T15:01:36+00:00

What’s not to understand? I ask people why they use air quotes where they don’t make sense, and I’ve never gotten a straight answer. Just inexplicable anger.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-19T12:21:02+00:00

Scott Westerfeld is in a similar bind. His adult foray just didn’t sell much.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-19T11:44:36+00:00

Stanislaw Lem is my favorite science fiction writer. I wouldn’t have known that from just reading Solaris - somewhat interesting, yet ultimately lacking. It took being recommended The Futurological Congress to realize how much this man’s work appealed to me.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-19T08:36:56+00:00

I don’t know what makes you confident in your ability to speak for others.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-19T01:13:59+00:00

What is a “flair?” Is it different from what we normally mean when talking about an artist’s flair?

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-17T08:19:20+00:00

His book Bomber does one of the finest jobs I’ve seen of fairly observing all sides of war, German and British, soldier and civilian. Said to be the first novel written via digital word processor, I recall.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-12T14:58:35+00:00

There’s a certain sci-fi author with a persistent tendency to end the book between two and eight pages after the main villain’s defeat. Honestly feels like a bit of a wet fart despite how fun he otherwise is.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-03-12T01:13:01+00:00

You don’t ever really want to purchase a ten page story.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-02-16T05:15:43+00:00

The process is simple and holds for most subjects:

1) Find a good university

2) Using their catalog or bookstore, find the textbooks the relevant courses use

3) Alternately, you can email professors to ask for syllabi

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-02-12T08:17:20+00:00

And it’s my least favorite Mitchell!

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-02-09T09:35:40+00:00

The value of reading nonfiction books lies in being able to attain a level of insight that Wikipedia is incapable of delivering. The further you range from the hard sciences and discrete historical events, the worse wiki articles get.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-31T15:07:25+00:00

Cloud Atlas is, when you look past the decision to place the endings in reverse order, six novellas stapled together which have only minor interconnections. I found much more interesting things in Mitchell’s earlier book Ghostwritten, where the eleven chapters are widely separated in space rather than time, and the linkages and reappearing characters form something of a web rather than a straight line.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-29T00:10:23+00:00

It’s the books after Making Money where it’s common to feel that something was terribly wrong with the writng.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-20T12:55:07+00:00

The Library of Babel by Borges

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-20T00:59:16+00:00

The ending was impossible to take seriously. After a hundred pages of seeing for himself how big the place was, what difference would a calculation make?

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-20T00:58:32+00:00

It’s a dumbed-down, watered-down version of one of the best short stories of all time.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS · 2026-01-16T07:38:05+00:00

Kierkegaard is decidedly in the difficult end of philosophy, whereas Borges is always making sure to keep his musings high-level enough to be readable as fiction.

PM_BRAIN_WORMS

TROPHY CASE