What I've Been Reading

 

Dramatic clouds

No, that's not what I've been reading! My usual assumption is that photos never really capture clouds, but that image yesterday was so dramatic I thought I would give it a try. Not bad. Ok, now to the books.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is one of the funniest books I have ever read, though perhaps you would have to have spent some time on a college campus to fully appreciate it.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are on the list of books that "everyone should read" but my feeling is that while the private thoughts of one of the great Roman Emperors are certainly of historic interest and also interesting to people studying Stoicism, this is not a really important book. Much of it is just mundane stream of consciousness.

The Laurence Sterne however, while not to everyone's taste, is certainly one of the great comic novels. I have to admit, I enjoy a great comic novel more than one of those Russian tragic doorstops. Mind you, you will encounter footnotes in classical Greek, the author's preface on page 172, innumerable digressions along with a chapter that attempts to map out the digressions, an entire exorcism in Latin, chapters on whiskers and noses that are really not about whiskers and noses and a lot of discussion of hobby-horses.

Let's attempt to find a suitable envoi. One of the funniest pieces of Baroque music is "The Kidney Stone Operation" by Marin Marais. Here is a performance with narration:

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.

What I Read This Year: part 1

 Over the last year I have drifted from doing a lot of listening to instead doing a lot of reading. A couple of years ago I read a lot of poetry and philosophy. Since then my interests have broadened out. Consulting my journals I come up with the following list, in rough chronological order, of books I have read from June 2024 to November 2025.

• Art in Theory 1900 - 2000 eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood 1,200 pp.
• "S" J. J. Abrams & Doug Durst 450 pp.
• The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin - Ken Hirschkop 180 pp.
• House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski just the first 340 pages.
• The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn abridged 500 pp.
• Dictionary of the Khazars -Milorad Parić 335 pp.
• The Mexico Reader - eds. Joseph & Henderson 736 pp.
• The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner ed. John Williamson 260 pp.
• The Unknown Masterpiece -Honoré de Balzac 44 pp.
• The Poems - Catullus trans. Peter Whigham 228 pp.
• Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments - Sappho trans. Aaron Poochigian 93 pp.
• Metamorphoses - Ovid trans. David Raeburn 636 pp.
• Essays on Music -Theodor Adorno 679 pp.
• Frank Lloyd Wright text 100 pp. the rest photos
• Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Rosen 105 pp.
• Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire - Jonathan Dunsby 75 pp.
• Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques - Albert Giraud 117 pp.
• The Human Comedy: Selected Stories - Honoré de Balzac 415 pp.
• Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais trans. M. A. Screech 1,041 pp.
• Selected Writings - William Hazlitt 358 pp.
• Fables - Alexander Theroux 411 pp.
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert trans. Lydia Davis 311 pp.

One of the most feared at the time and later renowned courses in English Literature was that offered by W. H. Auden in 1941 at an American university. It had a reading list of thirty-two books for a total of some 6,000 pages. Here is the list. Lots of challenging stuff on that list. But if you add up the books I have read in the last six months it comes to 8,647 pages. And I think it is certainly as challenging as Auden's. The year previous I read large volumes of Chinese and French poetry (in translation), the Iliad, and eleven books by and on Ludwig Wittgenstein. This year I read Dante's Inferno and Paradiso--second half of the year so it's not on the list yet.

In the above list, the hardest reads were the Art in Theory collection, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Adorno and Fables by Theroux. The easiest reads were Solzhenitsyn, Sappho and Flaubert. The most enjoyable were Dictionary of the Khazars, Sappho, Catullus and Rosen's book on Schoenberg. The poorest quality book, in my opinion, was Dunsby's book on Pierrot Lunaire. Several of the books (Solzhenitsyn, Flaubert, Balzac) would tie for the best quality.

I will list the books in the second half of the year in a separate post.

Now what I am reading

There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:

This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.

I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:

Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:

Slam ice, dynamic.

A bad loch: Cold abaci.

Many decimals....

Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:

An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.

AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:

There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.

And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:

Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.