Thursday, October 8, 2026

What I'm reading now

I just finished this one yesterday. I first read the Tao Te Ching forty or fifty years ago and at least once more since then. But this relatively new edition is far superior to those plain translations. This edition has the original Chinese text, a new translation taking into account some new discoveries of different versions of the text, plus a selection of 2,000 years of Chinese commentary. Wonderful book.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, a collection of excerpts from John Ruskin's enormous output. His Modern Painters is in five volumes and he wrote about many, many subjects. Primarily an art critic he was a tireless advocate of Turner as the greatest landscape painter of all time. Lots of very detailed commentary on culture and society.


This is a mammoth undertaking--a thousand pages of rhyming iambic pentameter in archaic English. It is actually easier to read than James Joyce. I'm just a few cantos in, but really enjoying it. Never read anything like it. Hugely influential on all English poetry since it was first published in 1590.

Next up will be The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro and Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar.


 

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2 comments:

  1. PatrickOctober 21, 2026 at 8:26 PM

    Bryan - I would imagine you would agree with the premise of these volumes that J. Horowitz reviews, i.e. the supremacy of Western art, esp. music? https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/10/a-maverick-pedagogical-proposition.html

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  2. Bryan TownsendOctober 22, 2026 at 7:17 AM

    Yes, lots of interesting observations there. I'm about to do a post comparing the very different paths of music and literature in the 20th century in terms of their different versions of modernism and how they relate to the classical foundation.

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