Sunday Morning Book Thread - 7-27-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

I'm a sucker for pictures of cats lying on or next to books. It's even more special when it's *my* cats. So today you get a picture of my dear cat Allie leaning against a few books on my desk. I don't know why they do it, but they seem to love being around books. Maybe because it also smells like me, since I had just finished the top book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle.

COMMUNITY-BASED STORYTELLING

There is a website called the SCP Foundation that documents the work of a secretive organisation that finds, catalogues, and if possible imprisons various kinds of cosmic horror and more innocuous but equally strange entities. It's a work of collaborative fiction organised as a wiki, and has been running for more than 15 years. -- Pixy Misa 7/20/2025 Daily Tech News

There are so many sites like SCP - CreepyPasta, Backrooms, MSNBC. Not surprising AI just regurgitates that as fact, but how far gone do you have to be to not think "Wait a minute, this can't be real."

Posted by: MaureenTheTemp at July 20, 2025 08:31 AM (HI5Mk)

The SCP Foundation is a fascinating form of long fiction. It's a true work of community-based storytelling where everyone involved can shape the story in unusual directions, though there are community guidelines in place so that no one strays too far outside the boundaries.

The premise is that there are people, places, and things in this world that defy explanation and shape the world according to unfathomable rules. The SCP Foundation was created to Secure, Contain, and Protect these objects, which in many cases are very, very dangerous not just to individuals but to the cosmos at large. There are over 9,000 such objects cataloged on the SCP Foundation website, each written as a short story of sorts and properly documented into categories of how dangerous they are. Even the items marked "Safe" can be quite hazardous, though, if their containment protocols are not followed to the strictest letter.

What's most fascinating about this website is that there IS an overarching narrative, as we can see glimpses of the fictional hierarchy of the SCP Foundation through letters and memos supposedly written by scientists, researchers, and administrators of the SCP Foundation. As one might expect at a highly secretive quasi-governmental organization dedicated to the paranormal, there's a lot of paranoia and suspicion among everyone who works there. Some want to use SCPs (the generic term for these objects) for the good of humanity, others for more personal gain, and others would destroy them all if that were remotely possible.

The idea of the SCP Foundation is not at all unique in fiction. The Bookburners franchise, for instance, has a similar organization within the context of the Vatican, where the titular "Bookburners" (they hate that term) round up magical objects and store them in secret archives beneath the Vatican. The television shows The Librarians and Warehouse 13 have similar premises as well.

Where this SCP Foundation stuff gets really interesting is how it may be affecting AI. Pixy linked to an article about an AI investor who posted a disturbing video of how he has been affected by AI. Apparently ChatGPT was influenced by the materials on the SCP Foundation website and used it in responses to the AI investor's queries. This is very much in keeping with how SCP entities tend to interact with humans. They can be very tricky and manipulative. Memes are among the most dangerous objects locked up at the SCP Foundation because of the effects they have on humans. Hence the extremely rigorous containment protocols required for each SCP within the Foundation's purview. It's a very weird example of life imitating art.

AI ADVENTURES IN STORYTELLING

I'm thinking there will be fewer writers and more AI because the reading public is getting lazier. There's always been a market for light breezy reading. AI will probably take that over and human writers will disappear from mainstream publishing. Why would the Big 5 pay a human when they can just write a couple of prompts? High literature will still exists, but the so-called paperback market will all be computer generated.

Posted by: OrangeEnt at July 18, 2025 12:12 AM (0eaVi)

Whether we like it or not, AI-generated storytelling is here. This just another aspect of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 that has come to fruition in our lifetimes. Everyone makes a big deal about the bookburning in the story, but the REAL enemy--as I see it--is the dehumanization of the people who live in that world. Part of that dehumanization is through the interactive entertainment provided to people on demand via their televisions. People are given scripts to read during a television show and they dutifully read the scripts, pretending like they are part of the action. Now we have AI-generated storytelling that can feed us entertainment on demand based on our personal preferences. The stories are going to be subpar, recycled material from other stories of course. How is that worse than the human-generated garbage we see on television these days? There's a reason why reruns of old televisions like Gunsmoke are increasingly popular--the writing is crisp, the characters are well-developed, and the stories themselves shed light on our common human experiences. Modern storytelling--at least in the visual media like movies and television--is devoid of those things. It's sad that an AI-generated story--as mediocre as it may be--can be better than a human-generated story.

Fortunately, we still have decades and centuries of quality stories out there for us to read. As long as they aren't eaten up by drugstore beetles...

RESPONDING TO MORON COMMENTS

Thanks to one of my other gigs, helping out at church on Sundays, I don't get to respond to the comments as much as I might like. Usually, I have about an hour or so on Sundays to read the comments before I go to church. But when I am "working" on the tech team, I have to get there early, so I post the Sunday Morning Book Thread and hurry on down there to get things set up for worship. I then come home and read the comments after church.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS

That's why I've avoided the Battlestar Galactica convo. Why bother raising anyone's ire by posting any dismissive takes on that waste of time.
Dang. I've done it now haven't I?

Posted by: Buzzy Krumhunger at July 20, 2025 10:18 AM (RKVk8)

Arguing over Battlestar Galactica trivia is fine. Arguing with the resident trolls who infest AoSHQ like drugstore beetles infesting a library is frowned upon. CBD has made that very, very clear if you have not been paying attention to his repeated admonitions about quoting or responding to trolls.

Remember, trolls are NOT here to debate their talking points in good faith. Their sole purpose is to stimulate a negative emotional response in you. They are sexually aroused by it. Do not take their bait. Do not feed into their warped egos.

I honestly pity the trolls who come here to stir up trouble. Their lives are so devoid of meaning and substance that they derive pleasure from causing misery in others. They need to find a genuine hobby that gives them inner peace and satisfaction.

Turning their lives over to Jesus would be a good start.

A few years ago I launched a major purge of books centering on history, warfare and firearms because I had come to realize that most of them were garbage. Essentially works of fiction.

You get authors who crib from other authors, who crib from older authors, and none of them has any first-hand knowledge of the topic, they're just regurgitating false information. This is particularly true with firearms guides or weapons (think tanks and aircraft) where no one has even so much as touched the actual thing, being content with just repeating numbers. Whole shelves got cleared to make way for accurate information.

Posted by: Ace-Endorsed Author A.H. Lloyd at July 20, 2025 09:50 AM (ZOv7s)

This is an interesting observation. I know we've seen this in academic circles, particularly when it comes to the various "Grievance Studies" departments. The academics in those departments are constantly plagiarizing each other, as we've seen time and time again. They don't see anything wrong with it (unless they get caught and lose their sinecures). The result is that there hasn't been any original scholarship in certain fields in DECADES. It's a constant repetition of the same tired themes over and over and over again.

Good morning book threadies. Here's a news:

The enemies of books are many. Water. Fire. Book-banners. Drugstore beetles...

Thousands of historic books are in jeopardy over a massive bug infestation that could annihilate centuries-long of historical records.

The Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary is a Benedictine monastery that is working to save books from drugstore beetles, according to The Associated Press (AP).

The beetles were found in a section of the UNESCO World Heritage Site that houses 400,000 volumes -- which makes up a quarter of the books in the library.

Posted by: mindful webworker - pro logue at July 20, 2025 10:46 AM (RviYc)

This is a reminder that the original "bookworm" consists of various insects and their larvae that feed on the wood pulp found in books. They LOVE the stuff. Silverfish, booklice, beetles, termites, cockroaches, and other vermin will destroy books in short order, given the chance. That's why it's best to keep all books in a vacuum chamber at all times. Take no chances. Or prisoners.

-- "There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it."

-----

Yeah, Mr. Squirrell? If you wanna toss around that kind of bald assertion, then I'm assigning you to read Not That Kind of Girl, by Lena Dunham, and attempt to substantiate it.

Posted by: Yudhishthira's Dice at July 20, 2025 11:14 AM (BI5O2)

A long forgotten translation of Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes expands on the ellipses in the quote above: "...except books by tubby wanna-be influencers like Lena Dunham..." Thanks to the rise of independent self-publishing now any idiot with a computer can write a "best seller." Also, a bad book can serve as an example of how NOT to write, so it does serve a purpose in that way.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

In 1980, presaging the idea of ecoterrorism, Alistair MacLean wrote Athabasca, a tale of potential sabotage of the Alaska pipeline. George Dermott and Donald MacKenzie work on a small team that specializes in industrial security, and they have been sent to Prudhoe Bay after a letter was sent to the pipeline manager, informing him that "you will be incurring a slight spillage of oil in the near future."

The job at hand for Dermott and MacKenzie is to determine the veracity and probability that the letter is not a hoax, and review the security procedures to ensure that the pipeline is not sabotaged. As they search for clues, suddenly people working along the line are turning up missing or dead. It is now a race against time to prevent a massive oil spill and the shut down of a ten billion dollar pipeline.

Having worked in the industry and spending time on the pipeline, it is obvious that MacLean did his homework before writing this novel. The remoteness, the cold, and the feeling that help is very far away is present throughout the story. MacLean is known for novels that grab the reader right away and never let up until the final chapter, and this story is no different.

Posted by: Thomas Paine at July 20, 2025 09:11 AM (Vfq+S)

Comment: I really, really don't like ecoterrorists. These people are so deluded about their vision of the world they pose a genuine threat to the rest of us by shutting down major improvements in technology and innovation that make civilization as we know it possible. If they had their way, they'd turn out the lights for ALL of us, including themselves. They are also deluded in thinking that they would survive the technological apocalypse. Once people find out who caused it, they'll be torn limb from limb in the most gruesome manner possible.

My first run through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I was sort of dragged against my will, compelled to keep reading by wanting to know what was going to happen to these characters, but somehow not willing to acknowledge that I was hooked by a series of books that does not seem like my type of thing (A giant rolling ball of trapped players with a floppy god penis sticking out of it? Really?).

Just wrapped up a second reading, and I have to admit, these books are really well done. The characters are very distinct and interesting, and the story just pulls you along. I can see why it is always at the top of the "Best LitRPG" lists. Hard act to follow.

As a reference point in a similar genre, I made it about halfway through Ready Player One before I got bored and abandoned it.

Posted by: Splunge at July 20, 2025 11:16 AM (N3mKE)

Comment: The Dungeon Crawler Carl books do tend to show up a lot at the top of readers' lists on BookTube, even if the BookTuber in question is not generally keen on the litRPG genre. It's not my favorite genre, though I have read a few of the proto-litRPG books like Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg. But it sounds like the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is genuinely entertaining, which is about 90% of what I want out of a book.

MORE MORON RECOMMENDATIONS CAN BE FOUND HERE: AoSHQ - Book Thread Recommendations

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

• The Forgotten Room by Lincoln Child -- This is a Moron Recommendation from Thomas Paine. Lincoln Child is the other half of Preston & Child, who write the Agent Pendergast books. It was OK, but also somewhat predictable. Very reminiscent of a Scooby Doo mystery, with fewer stoners and Scooby Snacks.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

Timeline by Michael Crichton

This is Crichton's time travel novel, though it's really about quantum teleportation to alternate dimensions. It just seems like time travel to an outside viewer. Even the people who developed the technology don't fully understand how it works. The premise is that people are deconstructed in our universe and reconstructed in an alternate universe according to multiverse theory. However, the reconstruction is initiated by a third universe that understands the technology better than we do. Naturally, the genius who developed it in the "real world" is an arrogant dick, in keeping with Crichton's general theme about corrupt CEOs throughout his books. The party that travels into the past is trying to recue a history professor who was trapped back in the 14th century, shortly before the Black Plague ravages southern France. It's a decent technothriller story, as one would expect from Michael Crichton. I did go see the movie version, but I honestly don't remember it much at all, so it's also a bit forgettable.

Legends of Ethshar Book 1 - The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans

The Legends of Ethhar series of novels are all stand-alone tales set within the same world. Each focuses on a single character caught up in events that push them to their limits. In the first book, The Misenchanted Sword, the scout Valder is caught behind enemy lines during the Great War that has raged for centuries between the Northern Empire and the Ethsharites. Valder encounters a wizard hermit who promises to enchant Valder's sword so that Valder will leave him alone and escape back to his Ethshar homelands. Unfortunately, the enchanting ritual goes wrong and Valder has a powerful magic sword with severe limitations. Now he has to figure out how to stay alive and escape the unintended curse of the sword.

The Legends of Ethshar Book 2 - With a Single Spell by Lawrence Watt-Evans

In the second book of the series, we follow young Tobas, an apprentice wizard who has only learned a single spell--Thrimbul's Combustion--before his master croaks. That one spell is great for starting fires under any condition, but it also has some drawbacks as Tobas discovers when he unintentionally burns down his master's hut, destroying his master's Great Book of Spells. Now Tobas must make his own way in the world. His goal is to learn more magic and become a full-fledged wizard. Along the way he becomes part of a dragon-hunting party and stumbles into an interdimensional castle inhabited by a lonely witch.

The Legends of Ethshar Book 3 - The Unwilling Warlord by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Sterren was an unusually lucky gambler, with just enough of a magical edge to keep him happy and comfortable in Ethshar of the Spices. Then one day a woman and her two goons kidnap him and force him to become the Ninth Warlord of the Small Kingdom of Semma, his legacy. Now war is coming and he has to find a way to use his position as Warlord to stop two armies from invading his tiny kingdom. Naturally, his solution unleashes even more problems, as this is a running theme in these books.

The Legends of Ethshar books are clearly influenced by the works of Jack Vance and L. Sprague DeCamp. Much of the entertainment comes from the farcical nature of the situations the protagonists find themselves in. Every story has a reasonably happy ending, but the situations often go from bad to much, much worse before the end. You can also see some influence of Dungeons and Dragons, which was itself inspired by Jack Vance, in how the magic systems are handled.

The Forgotten Room by Lincoln Child

This was a Thomas Paine recommendation from some time ago. It showed up in my Amazon feed, so I thought I'd give it a chance. I've read a few of Douglas Preston's independent books and enjoyed them. The Forgotten Room embraces quite a few of the haunted mystery tropes such as a huge, sprawling manor house hiding old secrets, mad scientists engaging in research man as not meant to know, and an impending storm that strikes during the climax of the story as the hero finally figures out the puzzle. It was an entertaining read, though it did seem a bit predictable at times.

A Trio for Lute by R. A. MacAvoy

I picked this up from a used book pile at my local gaming store recently. It's the tale of a young witch in 14th-century Italy who wants to save his town from being invaded by General Pardo. His best friends are a talking dog and the archangel Raphael, who teaches Domiano how to play the lute. Damiano also wants to win the love of of his life, though she does not return his feelings.

This is an omnibus edition of three separate books: Damiano, Damiano's Lute, and Raphael.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 7-13-2025 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

Tips, suggestions, recommendations, etc., can all be directed to perfessor -dot- squirrel -at- gmail -dot- com.

Huggy Squirrel flipped to the chapter on "Escaping Predators."

Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. Dungeon crawling is not for the faint of heart or those lacking an 11' pole.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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