Deterioration reading list

by Yoyo • 02-21-2026 #literature

Measurements of Decay by K.K. Edin. Describes speedrun from pure philosophical abstraction to applied quantitative trading. From one person to global company, from unemployed to constantly hustling, from true neutral to neutral evil. Invariant: human misery.

The City Coat of Arms Describing a city-scale scope-creep lasting centuries long.

Journal of My Other Self Poetically written. Having chronic illness in Germany a writer is life goals!!! I had already written about this in previous note.

Recoltes et Semailles Scripts written by Grothendieck after voluntarily leaving the field of mathematics. This is interesting to read in comparison with Shape of a Life, Shing Tung Yau's biography where he builds differential geometry infrastructure for 20th century mathematics. Both people lead by intuition, and then rigour. Interestingly, the Recoltes et Semailles translations differ wildly, possibly presenting as feral academic journal...

Flowers for Algernon Peak application of stage psychology. I have already ranted about it on substack, "a direct manifestation of psychometrics and 1950 dominant stage psychology theories" with a hasty ending.

Lu, Reshaping by Madeleine Thien Have ranted about this on Twitter ~Sept 2025. Is one a reliable execution-first Asian, or seen as a compliant, passive person devoid of risk-taking? I think I share neural structures with the author.

Signs and Symbols Vladimir Nabokov Everything is a cipher, and he is the theme...The silhouette of his blood corpuscles, magnified flit over the vast plains...A colleague said he tried to fly. What he really wanted to do, is to tear a hole in his world and escape. I really just like unreliable narrators. Every time when I befriend a new individual, they're at the edge of what I could cognize. People would fall out of the circle, just like non-fiction unreliable narrators.

The Picture of Dorian Gray Craving beauty and youth transfers into relationships. See the turning point: "The beautiful passage— Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night—

was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution." This quote is showing:

Idealization-devaluation inflection point
The commonest thing in the education system where elegant physics and mathematics become boring to many

Description of Scents in the general category of "Superstimuli" in Dorian Gray: And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.

At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed—or feigned to charm—great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert’s grace, and Chopin’s beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to “Tannhauser” and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. When I was first prototyping with scents someone recommended me sensuous applications right away, followed by, as neutrally stated as possible, wine industry

Medea Greek Tragedy. I also wrote about this in substack

How to Lose the Time War A poetic book which shows a rare, healthy sapphic dynamic.

Sorrows of Young Werther Read in 2018, it's about unrequited love. If I was a historical period, I would claim late enlightenment to early industrialization/romantic era. This is very much like postrat, right? Alternative (unranked) choice would be the turn of the 20th century to early cybernetics. This is also like, disillusionment ages. Another... choice would be 1990s - the present for computer engineering ingenuity!

All Will Be Well, Yiyun Li. I could not make a romance out of Lily’s story. Could anyone cry for 3 days and 3 nights? What right did I have to tell the boy to express his heartbreak more poetically... So many tears, sorrow only dessicated me, tears came to an end, dessication persisted.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates I listened to the fantastic reading by Akhil Sharma. There are some people who think in terms of ethics, which I do not relate to, ingested in small amounts this is interesting.

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey Ultimate love, ultimate loneliness.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica Trolley problems as anime. One perspective: Attempting to understand human values from a purely statistical point of view, presenting obviously wrong scenarios and scrutinizing what exactly is wrong For all the happiness you wish somebody they could be granted with equal misery. Came across this because I was on lesswrong.

Needy Streamer Overload Translated from a Japanese blog post by the developer of the game: Maybe this feeling is just a moment of hormonal adolescence. In two or three years, she might be stable, working part-time at a café and aiming for vocational school. Maybe she’ll attend night school, surrounded by friends with similar sensibilities. By 18, she could be a perfectly ordinary woman, adapted to society. Her chest fuller, her bones harder, these toy-sized lolita clothes wouldn’t fit anymore. What we reject now might just be a passing confusion, and she may never wear frills again.

“They taught us only cute, beautiful things. But once my chest started to grow, everyone’s eyes changed. Suddenly sex and romance became normal topics, gross ones. No one thinks it’s strange. Girls are expected to accept crude words from boys, and if you get angry you’re told you’re no fun. Common sense gets rewritten into vulgarity and everyone accepts it. No one keeps dolls anymore. When they’re lonely, they talk to someone of the opposite sex through their phone.”

On the table: miso soup, salmon, rice. Her mother had made it. She really is human, after all, eating ordinary dinners like this. Repeating the ordinary, little by little, she’ll probably get closer to ordinary too.

Inside Mari MtF transition manga, highly depressing.

The Call of Cthulhu Read several chapters and found the horror unconvincing, so I stopped reading.

Eternal Hospital The idea is not novel, but the English translation is just like insane Chinese literature.

Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America Aside from how attention-seeking the title is, I read this in 2018 and find the temporal setting really interesting.

Haven't finished reading:

Permutation City
Dream of the Red Chamber. It's really long...
introductory Chinese History. Just getting into the topic.

Deterioration reading list

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