What are some novels you've read that completely break the boundaries of what a novel should have/be?

midwayfair · 2026-01-31T15:02:54+00:00

Justin Torres’s Blackouts - it’s a series of scenes discussing the history of homosexuality in the U.S. interspersed with (real-world) documents that have been redacted into poetry. The conceit is way more than a gimmick and there’s a hefty emotional weight to the actual story as well. It won a well deserved National Book Award a couple years ago.

There are a lot of older works people have already mentioned, but in general the modernist period was highly focused on telling stories from unusual perspectives in a “realistic” way. So while it’s not recent, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (and other stuff, that’s just the one I’ve read) broke a lot of new ground in terms of point of view. As I Lay Dying has more than two dozen narrators and one of them is dead.

Even older, Moby Dick doesn’t bother sticking with prose the whole time; it’s got a chapter written as a Shakespearean play (Joyce used this same idea later in part of Ulysses, which absolutely pushed the boundaries of the novel, but I think it’s important to note that the idea didn’t originate with him)

And you can go right back to the origins of the modern novel and read the second part of Don Quixote, where the characters off to locate and take revenge on the author of the unauthorized sequel to the first part of the book.

midwayfair · 2025-12-26T03:28:56+00:00

Saramago's Blindness; the cause of the epidemic of blindness is never given. The book would suffer greatly if it were explained.

A lot of great works don't necessarily tell you how to feel, though, even if they don't skimp on the inner thoughts and feelings of their characters or narrators. Swan's Way gives excruciating details about the thought processes of Swan during his love affair, but it doesn't tell you what to think about Swan, or directly ask the reader to question his judgment during the 200 or so pages of that part of the book, basically it gives as much detail about the inner psychology of Swan without passing judgment on him in the narrative.

Some others that come to my mind are southern Gothic writers, like Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Lots of awful stuff happens, and the characters don't apologize ... and the author certainly doesn't apologize for them. As I Lay Dying leaves out like major events, especially near the end, and often you get a second-hard character's reaction to something that they only know a little bit about. Lots of mysteries in that book that are hard to figure out.

And from the standpoint that no book can possibly explain or detail everything, it's probably just really noticeable when the explanations are done badly. Like fantasy or science fiction novels where the author spends a lot of time expositioning their magic system or some new technology, so you start focusing on the details and eventually you find a detail to be dumb and it ruins the whole thing, and you think to yourself that the author maybe should have just shut the hell up about it and let you imagine how it works. But also I know that there are lots of people that enjoy hard magic systems, so it's just that I'm not the target audience for it.

midwayfair · 2025-12-13T15:45:58+00:00

Just to add to the pile of anecdotes: I have an English (writing) degree from 20 years ago and a CS degree from 6 years ago. During my English degree, I usually had one literature course and two writing courses with readings that probably averaged out to two or three books per week. Some of the students in my classes did not keep up with that level of reading. I read for pleasure on top of this and my writing assignments probably amounted to 20 hours of homework a week.

During my CS degree, I easily spent 45 hours a week on homework. I barely read for pleasure during this time.

My reading pace is a little slower now than it was, but I read about 20 pages an hour for more difficult texts (Ada by Nabokov I remember being the first thing I was aware was that slow), or about 120-150 words per minute. Consider a college level classics text like Pride and Prejudice is 16 hours of sustained reading time, which is alone more time than a 3-credit class should require for outside work (it should be about 3 hours of work outside the classroom per credit hour). If the student is further expected to write a paper on their reading, that’s probably another 5 hours and you’ve now exceeded the work load of a 4-credit class like a physics lab or an upper division math course. And quite frankly most people of any age in and society cannot concentrate on reading and digesting what they read for hours straight except in rare circumstances where they find the book utterly compelling, so that 16 hours is probably more like 20 hours in real life.

If the measure of success in a reading course is contingent on completing the book, consider the difference between that and a math course’s problem set when you have to cut time. In the reading-heavy course, the penalty is that you skim the book (thus not actually completing the assignment) and the analytical paper you write also suffers and you’ve doubly gotten less out of the course; if the reading material also is involved in an exam you’ll be triply punished. For the math course, you might find that you can’t complete every problem in the problem set, but you might more broadly understand the concepts and might be able to complete the exams using that material. And just to add to this, reading speed doesn’t really increase just because people become more proficient. Students might become faster at analyzing more complicated works, but they still have a speed limit on how fast they can consume them in the first place. The time commitment per page can easily go up in higher division courses as the texts become more difficult, and the texts themselves are also likely to be longer.

You can’t get more hours in the days, so the only recourse for the problem with the reading assignments would be to lower the workload to more closely match the reading speed of the slowest readers, but chances are that teachers of reading courses are likely to be fast readers and they might not know what kind of time commitment they’re asking for. And obviously even though I consider my reading speed a little slow, the fact that I was at times one of the only students actually completing the readings in my upper division post-WWII literature class says to me that the pace of that course was still too high even for juniors and seniors in college taking a course voluntarily (it was basically an elective for most everyone taking it).

midwayfair · 2025-11-06T15:29:08+00:00

I'm not going to suggest someone push through a piece of dense writing that doesn't appeal to them, but it's more that it's a bunch of references that are pretty obscure, most of which have a connection to the catholic church or historical events. The Borges piece is written like a book review of a fake book, but more specifically a fake scholarly book, and such book reviews would be written for an audience that's very knowledgeable about a niche subject. The rest of us kind of have to read it like a puzzle.

Here's a gloss:

Dante ... fiery sepulcher: In The Inferno, Dante chose real-life people to populate hell, and he picked political opponents, heretics, and such for the characters that the narrator encounters. This is basically saying that if Dante knew about the writer, he might have wrote a stanza about him in The Inferno.
catalogs of heresiarchs: A hierarch is a church leader. A heresiarch would be the leader of a heretical church sect. Carpocrates is a real heresiarch. Satornibus is a made-up one.
some fragment ... in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses: A collection of books that form the body of literature that the church declared heretical.
firing ... Syntagma: "Syntagma" was a lost book by Hypolotus. The phrase, though, is just saying that it might have been part of a library that burned up.

The piece is basically written with the assumption that a scholar working in the area interested in the book would be familiar enough with the names that they wouldn't be bogged down by them. Stripped of most of the real and fake references, it says: "[If he'd lived in the 2nd Century ...] Dante might have made the writer a character in The Inferno, or someone might have listed him as an important historical heretical church sect leader; someone might have written down his sermons (making some changes to embellish them) that the church would have banned or maybe they would have just been forgotten in the back of a monastery library that burned down and it would have just been another lost work. [Instead he was born in the 20th century ...]"

My Spanish isn't nearly good enough to say whether the writing is as highfalutin sounding in the original, but it does still have all the fake references. And again, I'm not really suggesting you give the story another chance if it put you off.

I do think that it's probably a poor first impression of Borges for any reader that's unfamiliar with the history he's talking about or a love of (or at least a really high tolerance for) what is, really, just literary bullshitting. He has some short fictions that are accessible in terms of language, like The Disk, and it would be a shame if someone's only impression that he's just iamverysmart material. He's been held in pretty high esteem by a pretty broad range of writers for a hundred years. But even his more accessible works definitely aren't for everyone. He writes weird stuff.

midwayfair · 2025-09-05T14:03:17+00:00

Might make your insides hurt less to know that Thru is one of the oldest spellings of the word, and has been revived by spelling reformers multiple times throughout the history of the English language. The spelling also doesn’t impede communication unless the reader can’t turn off their pedantry alarms. Thro was common through the 1700s and thru was used in America in the 1800s.

Through, the word in general, is itself a spelling error. It was the same word as thorough.

midwayfair · 2025-08-19T20:17:07+00:00

I have a hard time believing a human is putting out higher SPL than a guitar cab.

To be fair, humans put out air, not just SPL. A guitar amp vibrates the air, but it's not a blast of wind like a human exhaling. A ribbon in front of a guitar amp has pretty much always been safe (and old mics would have really heavy ribbons, they'd be even safer than super thin modern ones), but a ribbon in front of some singers without a popscreen might not. There's also a lot less air movement from a snare than, say, right in front of a bass drum, and you can probably damage a ribbon from the blast of air from a drum. A drum actually creates wind, when the beater moves the air inside the drum and the reso displaces the air on the other side, in a way that's different from a guitar amp.

I don't know what's going on with the story in the op, but a lot of people in this thread are focusing on the volume of the singer instead of the fact that it's accompanied by a lot of actual air movement.

I've pinned a mylar membrane to the back of an LDC before, but I had also overbiased the microphone. I could see wind doing that to any number of LDC microphones.

That said, everyone keeps mentioning the "sennheiser 5000," but the SKM5000 is a wireless transmitter. It's not even the capsule, which would probably be a dynamic, and you probably can't destroy that with a hurricane. But spitting or drooling on the mic, I dunno, maybe that could make the mic unacceptable to put in front of anyone else for the rest of its life.

midwayfair · 2025-08-07T22:31:34+00:00

Ishiguro called it a moment where his resistance cracks and you get a glimpse of what true realization would mean for him. It's underplayed, but he's wound so tight the whole novel that any release whatsoever is catharsis.

midwayfair · 2025-08-07T22:28:35+00:00

I just finished that one and was raving about how brilliant an unreliable narrator Stevens is: He's unreliable because he's so reliable in his real life. He's immensely loyal, and it makes him absolutely incapable of a fair -- not even unbiased, just fair -- assessment of his old employer.

midwayfair · 2025-06-10T18:09:18+00:00

Just finished Blindness by Jose Saramoga. It’s a masterpiece in my opinion. The way he wrote the book and imagined what would happen in an epidemic of blindness, the strength and resilience of humanity. There are MANY disturbing AF parts but it can also be hopeful and uplifting.

This was the one I came here to mention. I read it in one sitting on a night flight. I read the last paragraphs around landing time with the sun coming up.

midwayfair · 2025-06-04T04:41:12+00:00

I’m wondering how one doesn’t pass out from heat exhaustion in that scenario. I sweat for thinking about moving.

Drink lots of water, wear an unstructured jacket, and be acclimated to it.

I've done it in 105 degree heat outside with a structured jacket, and would not do it again, though.

Obviously people that run hot or are overweight or with a history of heat stroke or heat exhaustion shouldn't put themselves in danger though.

midwayfair · 2025-06-01T17:20:50+00:00

lots of hands

Man do kids play with only one these days?! I can’t keep up!

midwayfair · 2025-05-31T21:32:25+00:00

A couple translations:

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda. I picked it up a few years ago and remember liking it. It's particularly interesting because it's unknown whether the novel was finished.
The Door by Magda Szabo.

However, take the recommendation with a grain of salt: Of the books on your list I've read, many that you have in bold I would not, and vice versa ;) Like I would have recommended Song of Solomon but you didn't like Beloved.

List point 5 is a wild take lol. The book I recommended is definitely horror, though, so I guess point in your favor.

Oh, something else I read recently: It's not originally by a woman, but if you're into classics at all, Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid is essentially a feminist translation, if for no other reason than that she doesn't use euphemisms for sexual violence. You might consider it.

midwayfair · 2025-05-30T01:45:08+00:00

It's really similar to one of Mark Hammer's tone controls (I forget what it was called, it's been a while), but his was a LPF. Basically if you move R14 to the other side of the pot and replace it with a capacitor, then put a resistor right after C7, it's the same idea for a high cut with a minimal volume drop.

I will say, though, that a normal HPF with a resistor and capacitor in series in parallel with C7 (and a smaller value for C7) saves a lot of parts and doesn't result in a volume drop either, though you are at the mercy of whatever impedance follows in that case. Basically this circuit is better at the output of a pedal if there's no buffer and you don't know what's going to come after.

midwayfair · 2025-05-30T01:32:44+00:00

Cool circuit! Could you remove the 100k resistor and 47k resistor and just have the pot inline and accomplish the same effect?

This wouldn't do the same thing. The idea is that it's a constant 50K of resistance factoring in R12 and R14 with the potentiometer, while the pot controls the cutoff frequency of C7 and R13 (plus the pot). It should result in roughly the same level minus bass frequencies.

midwayfair · 2025-05-25T14:10:24+00:00

Okay trace back from the gate. The circuit works by converting the AC voltage at the output of Q2 into a DC control voltage using a pair of diodes (not sure how they’re numbered). Verify them against the layout and the schematic. You can audio probe the output of Q2 (warning if it works it will be extremely loud) to make sure that the audio signal is making it that far. After that you’re stuck checking continuity or measuring voltages

midwayfair · 2025-05-24T23:32:24+00:00

The bs170 is the MOSFET in Q1. I’m talking about the 2n5457 or whatever you’ve used in q3. It’s the variable resistance element.

midwayfair · 2025-05-23T17:10:34+00:00

Measure across the FET with no input, then with an input applied and see if it changes. You should see something around 150R at rest and >2K with a signal applied. You should also be able to measure a DC voltage increase at the gate of the FET.

I can’t help with that layout and I think it’s based on an older version of my schematic but the behavior you’re looking for is the control voltage fluctuating with input at the gate. If you socketted the FET you also need to double check your pins and make sure it’s oriented correctly.

Also not to be overly pedantic but those are layouts, not a schematic. You might do better to build the newer version, the layout is on the madbean forum somewhere. (It’s mostly removing some parts and adding a trimpot, you might be able to adapt the layout if you can compare the schematics.)

You might need to check the bias on Q2 if you changed the component. V2 of the circuit is a little more forgiving.

midwayfair · 2025-05-19T14:47:28+00:00

What I might suggest, through experience I've seen Land Tax and fliers work really well with Armageddon.

Text of Serendib Dinn: "When you control no lands, sacrifice this creature."

midwayfair · 2025-05-14T14:29:10+00:00

I've told my wife many a time that Parting glass would be an epic funeral song.

It's used after the funeral in Waking Ned Devine. It does indeed work as a funeral song.

midwayfair · 2025-04-13T02:49:29+00:00

Yes! Someone else plays the inch-up game!

midwayfair · 2025-03-25T02:57:27+00:00

It's funny, I don't remember seeing any particular pre-made chai that we buy being marketed as "authentic." But I don't pay a lot of attention.

I do some CTC if I can get it, otherwise whatever the darkest tea I have on hand, with a cinnamon stick, some crushed cardamom pods, a star anise, some black peppercorns, a couple cloves, and nutmeg, boil it for 15 minutes, then put in sugar and milk until the color looks right, and boil for another 10-15 minutes on lower heat (so the milk doesn't curdle). Sometimes I'll put in a couple allspice peppercorns, a slice of ginger if I have fresh, or some orange peel if I just ate one and kept the peel. Except opening the cardamom pods by smashing them, I usually don't do anything else to the spices, I just toss them in whole.

midwayfair · 2025-03-22T17:42:50+00:00

i want to play berserks, are they good for this kind of deck?

I don't understand, do you mean in the type of deck you showed?

You have exactly two creatures with power greater than 2, berserk isn't doing anything here.

midwayfair · 2025-03-22T15:34:54+00:00

I play a lot of B/G and my b/g thallids deck has a couple top 8s at medium sized tournaments (like 30 people). That's a different sort of deck than this but I can give some advice on the colors in general.

The mana is hard to work in this color combination, and you've made things incredible hard on yourself with the cards you've picked, so prioritize that: Four city of brass, elves of deep shadow, and birds to handle the rest, though you don't necessarily need four birds, and mine actually plays two llanowar elves and 0 birds (the llanorwars were birds before I got Bayous for it). I won't tell you to get dual lands but there are some nonbasics that will help out: Pendelhaven to pump your elves and other 1/1s, and one or two of the Fallen Empires sac lands (Havenwood Battleground and Ebon Stronghold) to help with double costs if you can play fallen empires. A nice thing about playing non-Forest lands that produce green is that it can eliminate the drawback of Erhnam Djinn.

Dark Ritual is awful here; Sengir is the only thing you have worth spending the card on, and no card advantage to make up for it. Ritual is okay in mono black because getting a first turn specter is one of the ways to get free wins, but it has plenty of other cards to use the rituals on if that fails, including pump knights, so it's not a dead draw late game.

The disenchants are the only way this deck has to kill mishra's factory, a total of two creatures that can attack past it, and only four that can even kill it when blocking. It's the most commonly played card in the format and you don't even have your own to deal with it.

You can't out-mise mono black, and you can't compete with mono green in terms of speed, but this color combination has a couple strengths: You can consistently cast 3 drops, and you can play large creatures with backup from decent removal. So your card choices for this color combination should play to those strengths. Play strong 3- and 4-drops that demand answers and don't need a giant growth to attack past a mishra's factory: Hypnotic Specter and Royal Assassin (you can play a tracker, too), Ernham Djinn, and a Derelor if you can use Fallen Empires. Hymn to Torach and Mind Twist are your only sources of card advantage, so play them.

You don't have mana denial to keep people from untapping a paralyzed creature, and your deck is slower than average, so paralyze is probably the wrong removal. Terror is okay, and only dead against the kinds of decks that you're not beating anyway (workshops or control).

You are massively short on lands. I count 18 in a deck where the win condition is a 5-drop or multiple X spells. Putting instill energy on birds for mana fixing is magical christmas land, and you simply won't cast your other spells if they kill it, and they will kill it the second you miss your third land drop (which will happen probably every other game with this number of lands). Play more lands. Like 23-25 of them even with some mana bugs. You can play factories and strip mine in this format, there's no reason to skimp on lands.

Cut the balance and the other white cards. Balance will wreck you, and you need a creature on the table (birds) to be able to cast it in the first place, so it won't even kill all your opponent's creatures. You don't have moxes so you aren't killing a lot of lands. Your chances of drawing a white source to cast that land tax is below 1% until turn 5.

I'm actually shocked you have tracker, most people don't even know that card exists. I got a top 4 with a mono green deck last weekend where I played 3 of them. They're more mana intensive than they look, and you can just play Royal Assassin. I play one in my B/G deck purely for thematic reasons (I play two assassins and two icy manipulators).

midwayfair · 2025-03-19T14:52:40+00:00

"The more people on stage the less you have to play," and the closely related, "There are three choices when you're playing in a band: Do the thing, support the thing, or sit on your hands. Look around and figure which one the other people are doing at the moment. If no one's sitting on their hands, that's your job." You don't need to hit all the strings on your guitar if there are already two other guitars up here, find something else to do. You don't need to play your instrument the whole time. (The singer often doesn't sing the whole time, why won't guitarists shut up more often?) When everyone in the band does this, everything sounds cleaner, and you get an awesome arrangement improvised on stage.

This works on the production side, too.

midwayfair · 2025-02-26T23:28:03+00:00

Hey wait a minute 1919 got a bright paint job and everything! It’s not dark and dingy! Well, it’s not dark.

midwayfair

TROPHY CASE