The Reading Room

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verbose

04:24

@Randal'Thor I don't follow. Since when is meta only about site-management questions? "When and how do you re-read" or "What was the best book you read in 2024" aren't site-management questions; they're discussions.

Meta isn't just for "how to run the site." The main site is for questions that solicit clear cut answers. Open-ended discussions with no "correct" answers belong on meta. As @GarethRees pointed out, there's already a question on there for finding texts of books. This seems like a corollary to that one focused on print rather than e-texts. — verbose 2 mins ago

bobble

04:42

@verbose both of those are asking for personal opinions/experiences. The main site Q is asking for a process/method to achieve a literature goal, which could be answered more or less definitively by an expert in book collecting.

[I voted to Leave Open in the CV queue]

verbose

@bobble Fair enough. I'm not entirely convinced but I take your point.

bobble

Recent books I listened to and enjoyed: Talking to Strangers (Malcolm Gladwell, sociology nonfiction) and Nice Dragons Finish Last (Rachel Aaron, urban fantasy). The first one comes wit a raft of content warnings: descriptions of sexual assault (including of children), torture, and police violence are the ones that I remember off the top of my head. The latter has minor amounts of violence, PG-13 level.

3 hours later…

Mithical

07:34

@verbose They're not what the system is meant for; meta isn't supposed to handle non-site-management questions related to the topic of the site that aren't good fits for main - we're bending the system to a certain degree and allowing some, but questions that can fit on main instead are better off not going to meta

verbose

@Mithical Ah. Thanks for the clarification!

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

09:51

@bobble Is this message a precursor to a couple more One-Minute Reviews? :-)

@verbose bobble and Mith expressed it better than I could, but you're certainly right in general that meta is much more lax on "on-topicness" rules than main. In the words of a then-CM:

This is the generic "What is meta" description, @Matt. Purpose #1 covers pretty much anything where y'all are talking to each other. What that means in practice is mostly up to you: if there are things you don't want to talk about, then they're off-topic. My point was simply that this was rather less controversial before the question was asked than it has become afterwards - hence encouragement to cite an actual problem rather than hand-waving at non-existent rules. — Shog9 Dec 30, 2016 at 2:47

2 hours later…

Bookworm

12:06

Q: What is meant by "visors" in "The Interpreter of Maladies"?

Jhumpa Lahiri's short story "The Interpreter of Maladies" (part of a collection available to borrow from the Internet Archive) is about the Das family from America, holidaying in India where their parents came from, and their driver Mr Kapasi. In it, there are a few mentions of "visors" and I don...