Post #2867134

2026-02-21 09:50 UTC

@RadtkeJCJ@mastodon.scot @Furthering@convo.casa @zoy@merveilles.town Plus, maybe I'm a freak but sometimes I like to struggle a bit with a text. I have a notepad held onto my copy of Sacred Games with a rubber band, where I wrote notes on all the unfamiliar slang terms and references. It's taken me much longer than usual to read it, but so much atmosphere and tone would be lost without it! If all that was stripped out, it wouldn't be Mumbai noir anymore, it'd just be noir set in Mumbai, and not nearly as interesting or fun to read. (And clearly there's plenty of agreement that it's a good novel, since it got a Netflix series.)

Replies (1)

@Furthering@convo.casa 2026-02-21 10:21

@dartigen@aus.social @RadtkeJCJ@mastodon.scot @zoy@merveilles.town Doesn't sound freak-like to me at all. If a book doesn't challenge me and teach me new words, new ways of looking at the world, and various expressions, what's it for? This is one reason I have a hard time with many, many books published in the past few years. It's just so much literary pablum. I'm partial to this N+1 editorial, which asks us to learn to distinguish between LLM output and human writing: "Notice the poverty of the latter’s [LLM output's] style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing." https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/ Charm, surprise, and strangeness -- give me that a million times over. Charm, surprise, and strangeness. Please.

Open ##2867135