What I read this year, part 2

•  Handbook of Poetic Forms ed. Ron Padgett 208 pp
• Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 580 pp
• The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness Husserl 126 pp (I didn't read the appendices)
• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life Jacques Barzun 802 pp
• From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays G. E. M. Anscombe 246 pp (only read 2/3)
• Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo Plato 154 pp
• The Bacchae Euripides (Kindle)
• The Iliad Homer trans. Fagles 614 pp
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke (abridged) 133 pp
• Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye 354 pp
• Explaining Postmodernism Stephen Hicks 266 pp
• A History of Philosophy volume V Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume Frederick Copleston S. J. 394 pp
• The Divine Comedy: Inferno and Purgatorio Dante 581 pp
• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years Bernard Lewis 408 pp

The last I am just finishing now. Not counting Kindle, a total of 4,866 pages. Total for the year: 13,513 pages. Take that, W. H. Auden! From the age of eleven when I discovered my first, tiny, municipal library, I have read several books a week--at a guess, between three and five. Nowadays I read more serious and longer books, so I might be down to one or two a week. Even less in the case of challenging reading such as The Iliad or Crime and Punishment. Philosophy is a special case as it has to be read much slower and often, several times.

Over the last year I have read, not counting light fiction, thirty-six books from 126 pages to over 1,200 pages. That's 260 pages a week or perhaps the equivalent of one book. Mind you, I'm not counting light fiction. I probably read a couple of those in a week.

What about comprehension? In the case of Sappho or Catullus it is probably around 90 to 100%. In the case of Anscombe, a leading pupil of Wittgenstein, around 20%.

Of the books above, the most difficult reads were certainly Anscombe and Husserl. Dante and Dostoevsky were no walk in the park and Copleston was pretty dense. The moderate reads were Homer, Lewis, Barzun and Frye. No what you might categorize as easy reads. The Platonic dialogues were not difficult, but I have read them several times.

Depending on your interests, I could recommend all of them with the exception of the book on poetic forms by Padgett. This was written as a handbook for teachers in the public education system which likely accounts for its lo-cal, thin gruel content. If you want to know stuff, read Frye.