an eudæmonist › reading

2025

December

Stanley W. Jackson. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986. [211]*

A thorough yet approachable overview.

Jessica Pierce. Who’s a Good Dog? And How to Be a Better Human. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2023. [210]*

A delightful book on the ethics of living with dogs.

Omri Boehm. Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity. New York: NYRB, 2023. [209]

More engaging than Byung-Chul Han, but sitting in a similar spot on the shelf (with a focus on Kant rather than Hegel – there are no heroes here).

Julie McElwain. Echoes in Time. Seshat Books: 2025. [208.d]

A return to form for the series, if by form one means caramel-coated popcorn.

Benjamin Lee Whorf. Language, Thought and Reality. edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956. [207]

There is probably a good introductory set of essays by Whorf out there somewhere. This does not, from the perspective of the casual reader, seem to be it.

B.F. Skinner. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973 (1971). [206]

An interesting book, but definitely not in favor of the idea of free will. Alas.

Syou Ishida. We’ll Prescribe You a Cat trans. E. Madison Shimoda. New York: Berkley, 2024 (2023). [205.d]*

Cute. ’Tis the season for ghost stories.

Hyaesin Yoon. Prosthetic Memories. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2025. [204]

So busy ‘attending’ to its bits and bobs that it doesn’t attend to persuading the reader (instead talking down a bit). Interesting range of subjects (colonialism, body modification, robot love, cloning) that ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Wish it didn’t seem to be in hiding from itself – a fearful book.

Lawrence Durrell. Prospero’s Cell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 (1945). [203]

Lyrical travelogue, with an undercurrent of ickiness. Interesting to think of alongside Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy and the role of the British Council in Eastern Europe before WWII.

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2017. [202]

On the uses and abuses of reason(ing). An approachable book, and generally convincing, but perhaps simplifies things too much. Somehow.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. trans. Maxwell Staniforth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964 (2nd C. CE). [201]

A soothing book, although the author’s limitations become more obvious with each reading. There is something soothing in that, too.

Roy Porter. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. [200]

A readable account of mental illness and its treatment, mostly written against Foucault. More tightly argued and rigorously footnoted than Porter’s book on gout. Also more enjoyable, but that may be a result of the inherent interest of the topic.

November

Christopher Hill. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1975 (1972). [199]

Enjoyable and thought-provoking – makes one want to read more about the Ranters and Levellers.

Rūmī. The Masnavi, Book Three. trans. Jawid Mojaddedi. Oxford: OUP, 2013 (ca. 1262). [198]

I’m not sure I read this with sufficient attention, but the jingling of the verse was sometimes at odds with its doomier sentiments.

Nancy G. Siraisi. Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1990. [197]

A helpful overview and background to Burton.

E.F. Schumacher. A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977. [196]

Creeping around in the long shadow of Aristotle and the slightly smaller shadow of Gurdjieff. An odd book; not sure it adds much to Small Is Beautiful.

Hu Anyan. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. trans. Jack Hargreaves. New York: Astra House, 2025 (2022). [195.d]*

Huh. The marketing copy captures what is most interesting about the book. Blandly pop-journalistic; they should have published excerpts in The Atlantic.

Jenny Erpenbeck. Things that Disappear. trans. Kurt Beals. New York: New Directions, 2025 (2009). [194.d]*

‘…whenever a thing disappears from everyday life, much more has disappeared than the thing itself—the way of thinking that goes with it has disappeared, and the way of feeling, the sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what you can afford and what’s beyond your means’ (66%).

Lloyd Strickland, ed. and trans. Leibniz’s Monadology: A New Translation and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014 (1714). [193]

Oddly formatted, but very helpful edition of the Monadology.

Mary Ann Lund. Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [192]*

Reading Burton as therapeutic. Interesting, if slight.

Courtenay Raia. The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2019. [191]

An enjoyable (and neatly argued) romp through late Victorian woo. Calls for another go at William James’s essays on psychical research.

Kyle Smith. Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity. Berkeley, CA: Univ. California Press, 2022. [190]*

Approachable and informal; as such, not quite what I was hoping for (not enough footnotes, not dry enough), but a fairly friendly introduction, given its focus.

John Ruskin. The Elements of Drawing. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1971 (1857, 1904). [189]

Charming, but a bit patronizing.

October

Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan, trans. Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus De Niccolis. New York: Columbia UP, 1991 (15th C, 1974). [188]

Less thrilling than I hoped it would be. Quite a bit of ‘I hope this finds you well, I wish you had a sense of humor, write soon, and please send better parchment so my worthless copyist can copy this book I found before the Cardinal says I can’t have it any more’.

Marsha M. Linehan. Building a Life Worth Living. New York: Random House, 2020. [187]*

An interesting story and an interesting (circular) structure for a memoir. The use of quotations from informants was … odd.

Alex Mackenzie. The Time Trap. New York: Amacom, 1990 (1971). [186]

Surprisingly helpful, but also a bit of a museum piece.

Zhang Yingyu. The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection. trans. Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk. New York: Columbia UP, 2017 (ca. 17th C.). [185]

Amusing anecdotes about cheats, cons, and grifters (some of whom even get their comeuppance).

John Morrill. Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2000 (1984). [184]*

As it sounds and not much more.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. edited by Ian Shapiro. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009 (1787–1788). [183]

A fundamentally hopeful book that makes very depressing reading at the moment. Frankly picked it up because of this passage in a Harper’s article by Dorothy Thompson that has been doing the rounds: ‘He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free. […] He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power.’

Gilles Deleuze. Essays Critical and Clinical. trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1997 (1993). [182]*

A very enjoyable collection of essays, with very strong readings of Beckett’s ‘Film’, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, and Spinoza’s Ethics. There were, of course, several essays on things I don’t care much about (e.g., Kant, and a rather sentimental essay on T.E. Lawrence) or that were responding to arguments that I don’t care much about (Louis Wolfson, Alfred Jarry), but these were still interesting as essays, even if I felt no strong impetus to search out more on their topics. I do wish that the essays were available on JSTOR as individual PDFs, as there are several I would like to save for future reference (i.e., the sacred pair of Spinoza and Bartleby), but I suppose I will have to make do with copious notes, copying out too many quotations, and the sieve of my memory.

Henri Bergson. An Introduction to Metaphysics. trans. T.E. Hulme. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999 (1912). [181]

In favor of flux rather than stasis.

Angus Gowland. The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2006. [180]*

A very helpful contextualization of Burton, with a deeply annoying citation style (e.g. ‘Hippocrates 1991’).

Kat Duff. The Alchemy of Illness. New York: Pantheon, 1993. [179]*

An interesting collection of essays, but uneven in execution; it is a memoir but the author’s mentions of childhood abuse seemed like oversharing, rather than essential for the argument. But I am also an impatient reader, so the fault could be mine.

John R. Mulder. The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Pegasus, 1969. [178]

The field has probably moved on quite a bit (notably on class and gender), but there were some interesting readings of Herbert and Milton (i.e., the Pauline aspects of Paradise Lost).

bell hooks. All About Love. New York: William Morrow, 2018 (2000). [177]

Started off quite strong, but then succumbed to the impulse to swing from one middle-brow self-help book to another to carry its notions across; if I want to read Erich Fromm, I will read Erich Fromm, thank you very much. The question of effort – either too much or too little.

Betty Edwards. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2012. [176]

Ruskin for the late twentieth century.

Pierre Bayle. Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections. trans. & ed. Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1965 (1697). [175]

Paratextual by character and inclination.

September

Roger Chartier, ed. Passions of the Renaissance. trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 1989 (1986). [174]

A return to the form of the first volume – a much sharper set of essays overall, on a very interesting period in history. Some of the chapters on reading seemed a bit over-familiar from A History of Reading in the West (for which Chartier was co-editor), but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. trans. Maria Joles. New York: Penguin, 2014 (1958, 1964). [173]

I wanted (and expected) to like this, but found it a bit frothy. The foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, with his signature typographical banalities, perhaps made me oversensitive to self-indulgent frivolity. The Psychoanalysis of Fire was so good, though, that I might try to give this another chance at some future point when I feel less irritable (doesn’t sound likely, does it?).

Porscha Fermanis and John Regan, eds. Rethinking British Romantic History: 1770–1845. Oxford: OUP, 2014. [172]

Essay collections are always a bit hit-or-miss; this was a miss.

Yoko Tawada. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue. trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. New York: New Directions, 2025 (2003). [171]*

As always with Tawada’s writing, I wanted to like it more than I actually did. The essays contain interesting ideas, but they do not make essay writing look easy or enjoyable.

Nathaniel E. Dubin, trans. The Fabliaux. New York: Norton, 2013 (12th & 13th Cs CE). [170]

Ribald versifying, sometimes uncomfortably coarse. Seems like it was probably fun to translate, though.

Marsha M. Linehan. DBT Skills Training Manual. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2015. [169]*

Picked it up because it was mentioned in Things in Nature Merely Grow; continued reading it because in many ways it was more gripping than a novel, with better characterization and a clear sense of plot.

Michael Taussig. Law in a Lawless Land. New York: Free Press, 2003. [168]*

Anthropological observations in diary form from Colombia ca. 2001. Interesting but disheartening.

Karl Marx. Capital: Volume II. trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1992 (1884, 1978). [167]

Significantly less amusing than volume 1, which should not be surprising, because capital proper (the primary subject of this volume) is significantly less amusing than the workers who produce it.

Sinan Antoon. The Book of Collateral Damage. trans. Jonathan Wright. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2019 (2016). [166]

Beautiful and moving and melancholy.

William McIlvanney. Laidlaw. New York: Europa Editions, 2014 (1977). [165.d]*

‘…the most certain thing about Laidlaw was his doubt’ (96%).

Kelley Armstrong. Death at a Highland Wedding. New York: Minotaur, 2025. [164]*

Light reading.

Michelle de Kretser. Theory & Practice. New York: Catapult, 2025. [163]*

Manages to do a lot in not a lot of space; simultaneously a campus novel, historical novel, exploration of romantic fidelity, and critique of colonialism. More enjoyable than that précis would make it sound.

M.R. James, trans. The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses with Other Narratives and Fragments. rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953 (1st–?? C. CE, 1922). [162]

The infancy gospels are deeply creepy, and the whole thing is a bit of a trip.

Charles Lamb. Elia & The Last Essays of Elia. edited by Jonathan Bate. Oxford: OUP, 1987 (1823, 1833). [161]

‘We are both great readers in different directions’ (p. 86).

Zareh Vorpouni. The Candidate. trans. Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2016 (1967). [160]

A rather unpleasant book. See post.

August

Kate Zambreno. Animal Stories. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2025. [159]

A menagerie of ideas and images – some tame, some feral, and a few perhaps still wild. (This series has become very focused on motherhood, which is not a direction I was expecting it to go. Can’t really say it would be my editorial choice, but then I’m not publishing a series of undelivered lectures.)

James C. Scott. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009. [158]

A thought-provoking excursion on shatter zones and state-building. Also mentioned several books that I have been intending to read, including Michael Khodarkovsky’s Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, which can now be nudged a little closer to the top of the list of books to read.

David Braund. Greek Religion and Cults in the Black Sea Region: Goddesses in the Bosporan Kingdom from the Archaic Period to the Byzantine Era. Cambridge: CUP, 2019 (2018). [157]

An enjoyable (if slightly tetchy) ramble into the realms of Greek (and related) goddesses roaming Crimea and environs (other reviews may be more helpful). Ultimately rather melancholy.

Charlotte Beradt. The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. trans. Damion Searls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2025 (1966). [156]*

As it sounds. Would not work in a novel because it would seem too apt, and of course, it is terrifying as non-fiction.

William Flesch. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. [155]

The literary analysis (essentially structuralist) and conclusions are interesting, but the premise seems shaky. The Flesch is willing but the spirit is weak.

J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse. Rev. ed. N.R. Ker. Oxford: EETS, 1963 (13th C.). [154]

Perhaps starting with the diplomatic edition was not wise.

Jenny Erpenbeck. Visitation. trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2010 (2008). [153]

Kind of like Richard McGuire’s Here, except prose not comics and with more explicit socio-historical trauma.

Ha Seong-Nan. Wafers. trans. Janet Hong. Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2024 (2006). [152]

A bit shabbier (seedier?) than the stories collected in Flowers of Mold or Bluebeard’s First Wife. Probably not the best starting point, but it has some vivid moments

Ángel Bonomini. The Novices of Lerna. trans. Jordan Landsman. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2024 (2017). [151]

Really quite peculiar.

Maria Bowler. Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity. Grand Rapids, MI: BakerBooks, 2025. [150]

Sort of gentle affirmations on how to not always be working.

Anahid Nersessian. The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2020. [149]

A thought-provoking book; not sure it is the most helpful approach to Romantic poetry (and other art), but it is certainly an interesting one.

Jenny Erpenbeck. Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces. trans. Kurt Beals. New York: New Directions, 2020 (2019). [148]

An uneven assortment of memoir and essays; still, I liked it well enough when I borrowed it from the library to get a copy for myself.

Maylis de Kerangal. Eastbound. trans. Jessica Moore. New York: Archipelago, 2023 (2012). [147.d]*

The oddities and romance of train travel.

Helena de Bres. Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2021. [146]

Started off quite strong, but sort of loses its way in the sense of becoming more therapeutic than philosophical. Still an interesting book, but the type was quite small for such a large page.

Marguerite Yourcenar. The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays. trans. Richard Howard and Grace Frick with M.Y. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984 (1956, 1980). [145]

Insightful and interesting essays, although they generally seemed better if already interested in (or open to) the topic.

Peter H. Wilson. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2020 (2016). [144]

A historical romp; some odd structural choices that make it difficult for an uninformed reader to gain a comprehensive picture. The author’s conceit of providing an eagle’s eye view, soaring above the topic and then drawing closer, would perhaps have been better acknowledged as the vulture’s perspective, picking at history’s carrion – but that of course is less romantic. Very readable, though.

July

Brian Copenhaver, ed. and trans. The Penguin Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. New York: Penguin, 2015. [143]

A really fun anthology with a satisfactory (but not overwhelming) recommended reading list; a great starting point on the topic, and much better than the Penguin Book of Witches.

Maggie Smith. You Could Make This Place Beautiful. New York: Atria, 2023. [142]

Gulped it down in one sitting on the day that I got it. Like most lemonade, though, it was more refreshing than nourishing.

Olga Tokarczuk. The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Fitzcarraldo, 2024 (2022). [141]

A bit of a slow start, but all is revealed in the end. Amusing.

R.G. Collingwood. The Idea of History. Oxford: Galaxy Books, 1967 (1946). [140]

Took a while to get into, but once there, it offers a very persuasive perspective.

Martin P. Nilsson. A History of Greek Religion. 2nd ed. trans. F.J. Fielden. New York: Norton, 1964 (1925, 1949). [139]

A clear, concise overview of the topic; cites (somewhat disapprovingly) Jane Ellen Harrison.

Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo. An Ossuary of the North Lagoon and Other Stories. [nowhere]: Snuggly Books, 2017 (1897–1913). [138]

Perhaps I have outgrown this sort of puerile cleverness.

Tara Nummedal. Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007. [137]

Fun look at the personalities and practices of alchemy, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Apt author name.)

Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo. Amico di Sandro. [nowhere]: Snuggly Books, 2019 (ca. 1913). [136]

Rather wonder how he would have managed to explain the 400-odd-year-old narrator. Whimsically in character.

Cori Winrock. Alterations. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2025. [135]

Not sure the use of + throughout was worth it. Still, emotionally resonant, despite its typographical oddities (seems to be a typo [omitted +] on the final page, but it’s hard to tell what the intention was there).

T.E. Hulme. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. edited by Herbert Read. New York: Harvest, 1966 (1924). [134]

A mind thinking. Quite a bit of Bergson. Cinders of course the best part.

Antigone Kefala. The Island. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2025 (1984). [133]

Remote, yet proximate, mentally and physically.

Victoria Kielland. My Men. trans. Damion Searls. New York: Astra House, 2023 (2021). [132.d]*

Rather messy. Not my cup of tea. Though why I thought a short translated novel about a serial killer would be my cup of tea is not quite clear. That will teach me to search by translator in the library ebook app.

Yiyun Li. Things in Nature Merely Grow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. [131.d]*

Beautiful, raw, and wrenching.

Ariane Koch. Overstaying. trans. Damion Searls. St. Louis, MO: Dorothy Project, 2024 (2021). [130]

An odd book. Kind of reminded me of Wallcreeper but somewhat less annoying/arrogant. I did not particularly like it.

Samuel R. Delany. Of Solids and Surds. Why I Write/Windham-Campbell Lecture. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2021 (2019). [129]

A rather messy book, but charming in its messiness. The inclusion of some of the copyeditor’s comments was an interesting touch (and confirms my suspicions that copyeditors usually need to butt out).

John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, trans. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985 (1628–1649). [128]

Perhaps better taken in much smaller doses. The physiological discussions were rather annoying; one can only take so much high-falutin’ excursus on the pineal gland before one feels a bit soul-sick.

Sallust. Catalinae Coniuratio. 3rd ed. ed. A. Kurfess. Leipzig: Teubner, 1991 (c. 42 BCE; 1957). [127]

It’s all fun and games until someone loses a republic.

Noémi Lefebvre. Speak / Stop. trans. Sophie Lewis. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2024 (2021). [126]

Clever. Perhaps too clever. Less irritating than Poetics of Work, less normal than Blue Self-Portrait.

James Najarian. Minor Literature in Late Romanticism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. [125.d]

I never expected to want to read more by and about Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood, and yet here I am, wanting to read more about and by them. Pardon me while I run off to the library.

Daniel Mendelsohn. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Charlottesville, VA: Univ. Virginia Press, 2020 (2019). [124.d]*

An elegant, melancholy book.

Suzumi Suzuki. Gifted. trans. Allison Markin Powell. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2024 (2022). [123]

Sticks the landing, but not an exciting routine.

Donald Niedekker. Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost. trans. Jonathan Reeder. South Portland, ME: Sandorf Passage, 2025 (2022). [122]

Strange and magically imperfect.

Olga Tokarczuk. Primeval and Other Times. trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2010 (1992, 1996, 2000). [121]

A Jungian fantasia of the long twentieth century in a small Polish town.

J.L. Austin. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. edited by J.O. Urmson & Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975 (1955, 1962). [120]

A rhetorical hall of mirrors. Now I, too, will be insufferable about how people use the word ‘performative’.

Elias Canetti. The Book Against Death. trans. Peter Filkins. New York: New Directions, 2024 (1942–1994, 2014). [119]

A melancholy and slightly wearying book.

C.G. Jung. Answer to Job. trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011 (1951, 1958, 1969, 1973, 2002, 2010). [118]

Psychological analysis of the character of Yahweh … and humanity. More gnosticism than expected and somewhat less hubris.

June

Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. narrated by Christopher Brown. Portland, OR: Timber Press/New York: Hachette Audio, 2024. [117.a]*

Much that was sensible and thoughtful, and much that seemed like copy for an architecture or lifestyle magazine.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Notebooks, 1914–1916. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1969 (1913–1920, 1961). [116]

‘Art is a kind of expression. Good art is complete expression’ (p. 83e, 19.ix.1916).

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Private Notebooks: 1914–1916. trans. and edited by Marjorie Perloff. New York: Liveright, 2022 (1914–1917). [115]

‘But why not live a life that makes sense?’ (p. 113, 8.xii.2014).

Casey Johnston. A Physical Education. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2025. [114]*

While on the surface about weight lifting (and disordered eating, diet culture, and trauma, I guess), it is also an interesting (if oblique) look at the mind–body problem.

Julie Guthman. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley, CA: Univ. California Press, 2011. [113.d]*

Cogent and persuasive; the sensation while reading of an argument being built that is then stated with great clarity and power in the final chapter (before the conclusion). The most sensible thing I’ve read on obesity and public health in general.

Patrick Olivelle, trans. The Pañcatantra. Oxford: OUP, 2009 (4th C. CE, 1997). [112]

Although it picked up (in terms of interest) after Book 1, it never matched my expectations. Am willing to acknowledge that is my own fault, but I still didn’t like it (and dropped the translation in Penguin classics without finishing it).

Bernard Williams. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1978. [111]

A helpful book, but not particularly enjoyable. The creeping capitalization (Ontological Argument, Method of Doubt, etc.) is annoying, and many of Williams’s concerns with Descartes are not mine. His argument against the circularity of Descartes’s reasoning is also not convincing (i.e., just because the bridge Descartes uses to get back to his starting point [viz. God] has been, in Williams’s view, blown to smithereens does not mean that Descartes did not in fact use it), but it was comforting to see that I am not the only one to think that although the structure of Descartes’s argument is geometrically very fine, it is not entirely satisfactory.

Patti Smith. Devotion. Why I Write/Windham-Campbell Lecture. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018 (2016, 2017). [110]

The story in the middle rather ruined it for me. There is something to be said about monsters and opportunity, but … I am not in the humor to read it. The first part was very good though, as was the final section; yeah, yeah, see post for premature assessment.

Nick Sousanis. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. [109]*

Intricately entangled, but my attention stayed on the surface.

W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London: faber & faber, 2018 (1937, 1965). [108]

So strange, so good. Not really about Iceland in any meaningful way; see post for a few additional notes.

Alicia Kopf. Brother in Ice. trans. Mara Faye Lethem. London: & Other Stories, 2018 (2015). [107]

Somehow this, too, ended up in Iceland. Not quite the book I wanted it to be, but that is my fault, I suppose; see post for a few additional notes.

Charles Yu. Interior Chinatown. New York: Vintage, 2020. [106]

The ending of this hits differently that it would have a year ago; also, see post.

Claudio Magris. Snapshots. trans. Anne Milano Appel. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2019 (2016). [105]

Short essays. The tattered image of the cultured dude.

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Foolsburg: The History of a Town. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 2024 (1869–1871). [104]

Occasionally clever, but most of the allusions were lost on me (and the notes were not particularly illuminating).

Paul Radin. Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York: NYRB Classics, 2017 (1927). [103]

Reminded me of The Varieties of Religious Experience, but that might just be its quasi-anthological character.

David Gordon White. Dæmons Are Forever: Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2021. [102]

An entertaining romp chasing daimones from Ireland to China and back again. Haunted by the shadow of the Scythians (who are not mentioned). Has the best blurb (from Wendy Doniger) that I have ever seen.

Seneca. Hardship & Hapiness. trans. Elaine Fantham, Harry M. Hine, James Ker, & Gareth D. Williams. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2016 (2014). [101]

A solid collection, but I think I need to accept that the moral essays are less to my taste than the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium.

May

Dan Davies. The Unaccountability Machine. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2025 (2024). [100]

Somewhere halfway between business and academic writing, which I guess is as good a description of a modern economist’s prose as one is likely to get. Not enough footnotes. A book that cannot decide if it would rather explain Stafford Beer or kick Milton Friedman in the shins. Reminded me, strangely, of Getting Things Done, in its assumption of the necessity of the phenomenon described.

Mário de Andrade. The Apprentice Tourist. trans. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. narrated by André Santana. New York: Penguin, 2023 (1927, 1977). [99.a]*

An odd book that I never really go into; too many ‘young’uns’ and ‘critters’ and faux-folksiness. Mark Twain without the mean.

Antonia Hodgson. The Raven Scholar. New York: Orbit, 2025. [98.d]*

Entertaining, but probably wouldn’t have picked it up if I had noticed that it is the first volume of a projected trilogy. Somewhere between She Who Became the Sun and a book the title of which I’ve quite helpfully forgotten.

E.F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010 (1973). [97]

Melancholy in its optimism, as unfortunately people don’t appear to matter.

Juan Mascaró, trans. The Upanishads. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 (approx. 800–400 BCE). [96]

A charming selection that makes a nice introduction/gateway to further reading.

Shunmyo Masuno. How to Let Things Go. trans. Allison Markin Powell. New York: Penguin Life, 2024 (2021). [95]*

Definitely targets the corporate set, which seems rather unZen, but I suppose salarymen are people too.

Laleh Khalili. Sinews of War and Trade. London: Verso, 2021 (2020). [94]

I didn’t know what to expect from this; given the publisher, I was anticipating some very strident politics, but it was a very approachable overview of politics and shipping around the Arabian Peninsula (in the spirit of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz). Both authors would probably be insulted by the comparison, but it reminded me of Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between (i.e. engaged outsider trying to understand a situation/place).

Marjane Satrapi. Chicken with Plums. trans. Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006 (2004). [93]*

Melancholy; interesting use of narrative disjunction.

Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. trans. Richard N. Schwab with Walter E. Rex. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995 (1751, 1963). [92]

Picked this up at a local thrift shop and expected precisely nothing from it. Indeed, I expected a few hours of tedium, but it is one of the wittiest, most amusing overviews of the systematization of human understanding/knowledge that I have yet encountered. In addition to the overall hopefulness regarding human endeavor, the notes on the contributors to the Encyclopedia and the crankiness about Chambers’s Cyclopedia were particularly delightful.

Simon Critchley. Mysticism. New York: NYRB, 2024. [91]

Usually I am a bit ambivalent about Critchley’s work, which often seems like a more intellectually astute variation on Geoff Dyer, but this was a very nice overview of mysticism and, more interesting, its implications for the non-believer. Quite enjoyable.

Robert C. Ellickson. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. [90]

The books I have read on this subject tended to be either practical guidance for the common reader, historical accounts, or sociological excursus, so it was interesting to consider the household (and its appurtenances) from a legal perspective (albeit one dumbed down a bit for the poor dim general reader).

Eunice Hong. Memento Mori. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2024. [89]*

Took a while to get into the fragmented rhythm of it, but a melancholy, tender novel.

Connie Willis. Doomsday Book. New York: Bantam, 1992. [88]

Rather like my (fairly) recent reread of Civilization and Its Discontents, I did not realize how much my reading of this as a teenager had become part of my mental furniture. Strange that I seem to have entirely no memory of the ‘contemporary’ portion, though. Still, the scene with Rosemund and her apple gets me every time.

Byung-Chul Han. The Burnout Society. trans. Erik Butler. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015 (2010). [87]*

An irritating book, facile and unimaginative. Thrice-cooked Heidegger served with warmed-over Agamben. Manages to make Melville boring and seems to take no pleasure and have no personal interest in anything. The notion that, for example, ADHD is something one does to oneself through an excess of energy seems stupid at best, but may be, taking a dimmer view, neo-eugenicist perversity. The supposed topics of his books are interesting, but the books themselves so seldom deliver. I suppose I could take a Jungian view and ask what elements of my shadow I dislike seeing in this book, but I am expending too much energy preventing myself from throwing it across the room. My own fault, clearly.

O.R. Gurney. The Hittites. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972 (1954). [86]

Doubtless much has been discovered since this was written, but it was still an enjoyable overview.

Darmaid MacCulloch. The Reformation: A History. London: Penguin, 2004 (2003). [85]

A very helpful look at the big picture of the Reformation(s), historical and ongoing that helped to illuminate some of the murkier corners of, among others, Spinoza and Hamann. If some of the analogies with (then-)contemporary events fall a bit flat (or, rather, now require more detail to flesh them out), it does not detract from the power of the whole.

Marjane Satrapi. Embroideries. trans. Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon, 2005 (2003). [84]*

PF borrowed it from the library and read it and said it was enjoyable and that I should read it. So I read it, and it was enjoyable.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958 (1945–1949; 1953). [83]

Read slowly, about a page week, out loud. The thread of the argument worn thin, but the style endures.

Hildur Knútsdóttir. The Night Guest. trans. Mary Robinette Kowal. New York: Tor, 2024 (2021). [82.d]*

An odd little book, rather fragmentary, apparently content to remain ambiguous and somewhat unpleasant.

Mahmoud Darwish. In the Presence of Absence. trans. Sinan Antoon. New York: Archipelago, 2011 (2006). [81.d]*

‘You read without understanding what you read, so you read more and more, relishing the ability of words to diverge from the ordinary’ (17%).

Danilo Kiš. Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews. trans. Ralph Manhei, Francis Jones, Michael Henry Heim, et al. New York: FSG, 1995 (1973–1989). [80]

Moving and thought-provoking. Also confirms that interviewers tend to be pretty dull dogs, particularly when they imagine they are being clever.

Tezer Özlü. Journey to the Edge of Life. trans. Maureen Freely. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2025 (1984). [79]

Much more approachable than Cold Nights of Childhood. I particularly enjoyed the sections about meeting Italo Svevo’s daughter Letizia.

Titus Burckhardt. Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. trans. William Stoddart. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 (1960). [78]

Cranky at Jungians, and yet – unsurprisingly – very Jungian.

Elizabeth Janeway. Powers of the Weak. New York: Morrow Quill, 1981 (1980). [77]

Unexpectedly interesting look at modalities of activism.

Alexis Shotwell. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2016. [76]*

I really wanted to like this book, but my primary response was impatience: too much hedging and situating of the author’s position relative to other scholars (it is, yes, a tic of academic writing of a certain type, but I am not convinced it is a happy one, if done obviously), as though still trying to convince a dissertation advisor of worthiness. Also, referring to a colleague as a ‘littermate’ is cute, but not perhaps appropriate in this context (or at least without contextualization). In short, I wanted a book about the ways in which people are implicated and imbricated in the natural order of things and how the concept of ‘purity’ (blood, body, etc.) is not appropriate in the way it is often used and instead got essentially an annotated reading list that centered the author in every assertion. If I want that, I’ll go back through my own reading lists, thank you very much.

April

Sophus Helle, trans. The Complete Poems of Enheduana: The World’s First Author. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2023 (ca. 3rd C BCE). [75]

I did not think it was possible for a translator to be more enthusiastic about a source than Helle was about Gilgamesh. This volume of rather charming poems (and helpful supporting essays) suggests that I was wrong about that. An enjoyable if rather light reading experience.

J.L. Mackie. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977. [74]

A rather clear-sighted overview of a topic that has been too little considered by people who ought to know better. Perhaps a bit too clear-sighted, stating as positives things that are, like, only your opinion, man.

Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Always Remember Your Name. trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Astra Books, 2022 (2019). [73.d]*

Absolutely wrenching in terms of content (and for the plasticity with which children can endure the unendurable), and fascinating in how it presents the sisters as dual narrators, not in sequence, but chorus.

Christian Vandendorpe. From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. trans. Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott. Urbana, IL: Univ. Illinois Press, 2009 (1999). [72]

There is a sort of charm to the naïveté of hope about the future affordances of technology. It is a bit melancholy, too, to see what was overlooked – but that of course is merely an unfortunate side effect of hindsight.

Robert Bly. A Little Book on the Human Shadow. edited by William Booth. New York: HarperOne, 1988. [71]

Although slight, it casts a sufficient shadow. Perhaps a bit guru-tinged, but that seems rather a characteristic of the pop-Jungian (is there any other type of Jungian?) than a particular failing of the book itself.

Seneca. On Benefits. trans. Miriam Griffin & Brad Inwood. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2014 (1st C. CE; 2011). [70]

Works really well with Spinoza. Both of the volumes in Chicago’s translations of Seneca that I have read have been a pleasure, with good supporting textual notes and commentary. There is much to disagree with in Stoicism (and with Seneca, personally, I suppose), but I found this enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Silvia Federici. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. 2nd ed. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2014 (2004). [69]

Polemical. Believes in ‘burning times’ and appears to ignore (or gloss over) evidence that does not suit the tone. Suggestive rather than persuasive, unfortunately.

Susanna Clarke. The Wood at Midwinter. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024. [68.d]*

This was really too tiny to include here, but it was cute, if slight.

Michael Walzer. Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics. New York: NYRB Classics, 2019 (1971). [67.d]*

Certainly more wholesome than Saul Alinsky.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2015. [66]

‘What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss’ (p. 31).

Anne Atik. How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. New York: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005 (2001). [65]*

Charming, but occasionally irritating. Relationships at the periphery of day-to-day being that are nonetheless important. Lots of interesting little details.

Connie Willis. The Road to Roswell. New York: Del Rey, 2023. [64.d]*

Amusing.

Maria Demoût. The Ten Thousand Things. trans. Hans Koning. New York: NYRB Classics, 2002 (1958). [63]

Melancholy and tender, at all scales of attention.

Amy J. Schneider. The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2023. [62]

Helpful, but perhaps a bit too helpful. Would be an interesting supplement to a writing class.

Peter Miller. How to Wash the Dishes. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2020. [61.d]*

Some people clearly have more elaborate meals than the ones that occur in this household.

Robin Wall Kimmerer. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. read by the author. New York: Scribner/Simon & Schuster Audio, 2024. [60.a]*

Although intended to be uplifting and inspiring, it was melancholy to listen to, as a sort of path not currently taken. The ideas a bit simplified, like an expanded magazine article rather than, say, a treatise.

Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 2005 (1985). [59]

Another of those books I read in high school (like Civilization and Its Discontents) that I did not recall the particulars of, but that seem to have become a part of my mental furniture.

Dino Buzzati. The Bewitched Bourgeois. trans. Lawrence Venuti. New York: NYRB Classics, 2025 (1936–1985). [58]

Each story in itself follows a fairly clear pattern, and thus reading too many at one go can provoke irritation; the stories are good, but best taken at intervals.

Robin Briggs. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: Penguin, 1996. [57]

A very sensible book on witchcraft and social responses to witches within very clearly defined parameters; reminded me of Christie-Murray’s book on heresy. More incisive than Hutton’s The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, it also covers significantly less ground. Builds off Ginzburg’s The Night Battles, but is far more sensible (and coherent), but as such less, well, magical.

Tony Medawar, ed. Ghosts from the Library: Lost Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. London: Collins Crime Club, 2022. [56.d]*

Contains the only M.R. James story that hasn’t given me nightmares (might have been a reason that it was ‘lost’).

Vivian Gornick. Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time. London: Verso, 2022 (1978–2014). [55]

Very humane, but not an intersectional feminism (which is not a fault, just an observation). Mostly of interest for tone rather than ideas; captures a moment that probably occurred at least forty years before this volume was published. It is perhaps a bit of snarkiness to put it that way, as similar comments about how a work ‘captured a certain moment in time’ appeared in several of the essays (and clearly annoyed me).

James Hollis. Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2025. [54.d]*

On the present predicament: ‘Only fear can account for such a reflexive blindness and moral contradiction’ (53%).

March

Giambattista Vico. The Autobiography. trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP (Great Seal Books), 1963 (1725–1731, 1818, 1944). [53]

The things one thinks of as important in one’s life are seldom the same things valued by others. (Interesting that he omitted any mention of his wife and children, although that probably has more to do with the context for which the piece was written than anything else.)

David Christie-Murray. A History of Heresy. Oxford: OUP, 1989 (1976). [52]

A very clear, enjoyable survey.

Charles Poncé. The Game of Wizards: Psyche, Science, and Symbol in the Occult. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. [51]

Jungian interpretations of things are sometimes very silly.

Ayşe Papatya Bucak. The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019. [50]*

I had forgotten that short stories can actually be enjoyable.

Amy Lin. Here After. New York: Zibby Books, 2024. [49.d]*

‘Yet you can love someone in this capacious way and still fail to really see them’ (23%). Moving but still in need of development. One feels rather sorry for the puppy.

Octavia F. Raheem. Rest Is Sacred. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2024. [48.d]*

Is it though? Is it not possible that it is just another marketing gimmick targeting folks who know they work too hard but need an excuse to go on a retreat so they can spend money to have someone tell them what they ignore when their common sense says the same thing? Helpful for others, but coming on the heels of the other volume (of essentially the same matter), it rang false. Not wrong, precisely, but not quite what it says on the tin.

Kelley Armstrong. Rockton Novels. 7 vols. New York: Minotaur, 2016–2022. [47]*

A diversion. The overarching narrative (spread over the seven volumes) was fairly well done, if a bit too tidy.

Meg Bogin. The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of 12th-Century Provence and a Collection of Their Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. [46]

Really fun collection and overview; glad that I randomly picked it up at the bookstore. The delights of happenstance in one’s reading.

Dubravka Ugrešić. The Culture of Lies. trans. Celia Hawkesworth. Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2024 (1998). [45]

Unfortunately timely. ‘Nationalism is the ideology of the stupid. There is no more stupid and tedious ideology than nationalism. Nationalism as a religious and therapeutic refuge is the option of those who have nothing else. Blood is only somewhat thicker water’ (p. 328).

V. Propp. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. trans. Laurence Scott. edited by Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson and Louis A. Wagner. Austin, TX: Univ. Texas Press, 1968 (1927, 1958). [44]

Propp’s approach to the folktale (or fairy tale) appears rather like that of a benefactor confronted with a phalanx of unruly orphans, whom he clothes in drab smocks so he can observe that they are all very much alike. It does not seem quite fair to the stories, the reader, or the author, though doubtless it is very convenient for washing up.

M.F.K. Fisher. A Cordiall Water: A Garland of Odd and Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man & Beast. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981 (1961). [43]

Conceals while appearing to reveal; there is a facility to the language that is very pleasant, but occasionally leaves one a bit uncertain about what one has just confused – very like a meringue.

Brigid Brophy. Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Review. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. [42]

Trenchant and humane and often humorous; even when I did not agree with her views, I had to admire how she expressed them.

Octavia F. Raheem. Pause, Rest, Be. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2022. [41.d]*

Mostly commonplaces and common sense, but told in such a way that I felt I was intruding upon a space that was not meant for me. Not that there is no value in it, but that it not something to which I should lay claim.

Mirabai Starr. Caravan of No Despair. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2015. [40.d]*

An interesting contrast with Helmuth’s memoir, which shared too little, as this one shared a bit too much (necessarily, perhaps, but still a lot). Powerful and wrenching and generationally remote; adequate use of name-dropping for contextualization. The solipsism of the therapeutic.

Ken Liu, trans. & ed. Laozi’s Dao De Jing. New York: Scribner, 2024 (ca. 4th C BCE). [39.d]

‘The faithless will be trusted by no one’ (43%).

Tony Medawar, ed. Bodies from the Library. London: Collins Crime Club, 2018. [38.d]*

Fun stuff.

Diana Helmuth. The Witching Year. New York: Simon Element, 2023. [37.d]*

A sort of witchery for TikTok clout (or because it sounded promising in the book proposal) kind of memoir. Visibly constructed, each chapter a magazine piece of somewhat insipid interviews or authorities studded with descriptive verbs of parallel activity (i.e., if the author and interviewee are eating dinner together, the dinner will at times intrude, as though foreshadowing indigestion). Weak on the magickal front.

Jonathan I. Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998 (1995). [36]

Had been meaning to read this for a very long time; it was worth the wait and the effort to find a copy. Magisterial – and fascinating.

Elizabeth David. Italian Food. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 (1954). [35]

Less assured than French Country Cooking, but equally food for fantasizing.

D.W. Winnicott. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1991 (1971). [34]

Somewhat stilted because stripped of details. Notable is the desire to be the ‘good-enough’ analyst/therapist, rather than the ideal one – the sense that it is work and one can (and likely will) fail at times. Or perhaps ‘fail’ is too strong, when the sense is rather not being ‘good-enough’ than active failing to provide care. An interesting counterpoint to pop-Jungian books.

Christopher P. Atwood, trans. The Secret History of the Mongols. London: Penguin, 2023 (13th C.). [33]

The substantial introduction and notes are very helpful; the translation itself sounds like it would be fun in grammar-translation class, but has an odd combination of stiffness and silliness that doesn’t quite work on the page (and that does not, from the notes, seem to be characteristic of the original) – perhaps slightly overworked.

Mark Cucuzzella. Run for Your Life. New York: Knopf, 2018. [32.d]

A bit too much focus on the value of running ‘barefoot’; also makes some interesting assumptions about his reader (i.e., that that they are middle-aged, male, and athletic, probably wanting to train for something), as indicated by the separate chapters on ‘special’ populations: children, the aged, and … women.

Georgette Heyer. The Reluctant Widow. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2008 (1946). [31.d]

One must keep occupied on the treadmill.

Betty Neels. The ‘Best of’…. ca. 111 vols. Toronto: Harlequin, 2010s (1969–2001). [30.d]*

Reading in bulk, the experience is reduced to patterns, which are simple and consistent, although the surface details (the war, telephones in cars) vary. Despite their immature heroines and emotionally stunted (or horribly manipulative) heroes, they present an odd but somewhat comforting picture of the world. They are like jigsaw puzzles in that way, rather than literature; one wants things to fit, even if the result is rather banal.

February

Julien Benda. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. trans. Richard Aldington. Boston: Beacon, 1955 (1927, 1928, 1930). [29]

I had thought that I had read this in high school, but I did not find any particular passage familiar. The overall ideas – the contempt for nationalist sentiment, the need for a ‘clerks’ disinterested in practicalities – were familiar, as was the urgency of the tone, but the work itself sparked no memory. The introduction by Herbert Read to this edition was, however, very interesting.

James Belich. The World the Plague Made. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022. [28]*

Ambitious but unwise. A case study might have been more appropriate (and persuasive) than ‘intensive global history’. The overall editing was also peculiar, and the use of endnotes without a bibliography should be deprecated.

Frieda Fordham. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. 3rd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 (1953). [27]

A helpful introduction to the key points, with a useful glossary and overview of the division of works in the Bollingen edition.

Elizabeth David. French Country Cooking. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 (1951). [26]

‘Yet the potato can be a lovable vegetable’ (p. 150).

Lynne Segal. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London: Verso, 2013. [25.d]

A clear-headed sort of excursion on the topic, but there was a bit too much name-dropping. Perhaps I no longer know how to read cultural criticism, though, because it was much the same irritation I felt with Cruel Optimism – that the book was right without being itself good.

C.V. Wedgwood. The Thirty Years War. New York: NYRB Classics, 2005 (1938). [24]

A vivid overview of a busy period, somewhat snarky about personalities. Like Syme’s Roman Revolution, as much about the period in which it was written as its ostensible topic.

Steven Nadler. Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction. Camridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. [23]*

A clear, concise overview both of fairly current scholarship on the Ethics and of the tangled bits of the Ethics. Perhaps smooths things over too much, but still a helfpul vade mecum for the novice Spinozist.

Mariane Brooker. Intervals. London: Fitzcarraldo, 2024. [22.d]*

About grief and social/medical justice, using a collage-like approach to honor her subject. Interesting, but also irritating in that the books referenced and quoted seemed so commonplace (i.e., exactly the sort of books someone who is extremely online about ‘literature’ would be reading) that there was less of a chance for personality to come through.

Giordano Bruno. Cause, Principle and Unity, and Essays on Magic. trans. Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998 (1584, 1588, 1590). [21]

Not at all what I was expecting; not quite as odd, not quite as interesting. But still odd, still interesting.

Philip Wheelwright. Heraclitus. New York: Atheneum, 1968. [20]

A nice little overview, although superseded by Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus as an introduction and commentary. Occasionally snarky.

Carlo Ginzburg. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983 (1966). [19]

A bit loosey-goosey on an interesting topic; for the sake of the argument, a greater focus on chronology as such would have been helpful. But much food for thought.

Lauren Markham. Immemorial. Berkeley, CA: Transit Books, 2025. [18]

A vague gesture towards memorializing the climate crisis.

Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner, 1958 (1904–1905, 1920). [17]

More about spiritual parsimony than capitalism.

Benedict Spinoza. Theological–Political Treatise. trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel; edited by Jonathan Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007 (1970). [16]

‘The more one strives to deprive people of freedom of speech, the more obstinately they resist. I do not mean greedy, fawning people who have no moral character – their greatest comfort is to think about the money they have in the bank and fill their fat stomachs – but those whom a good upbringing, moral integrity and virtue have rendered freer’ (Ch. 20, ¶10; p. 255).

Sarah Moss. Ghost Wall. New York: FSG, 2018. [15.d]*

Chilling (timely and prescient).

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2017. [14.d]*

This book could have been timely and prescient, but it wasn’t (although the key issues highlighted haven’t gone away as such). The first two chapters and the final one were promising, but the remainder of the book was pap for the Atlantic Monthly set – lazily thought and poorly edited, with envy-tinged ‘local color’ (e.g., on yoga pants and high-end coffee) that detracted from the thesis of the book (that is, the author did not rise above her own aspirational stance). It needs no scholar come from the towers of academe to cry that ‘The ostensible democratization of consumerism obfuscated inequality and essentially lulled society into thinking everyone had a slice of the pie and would mask real issues of wealth disparity’ (11%) – not least because it is not particularly true (who, exactly, was ‘lulled’ by such nonsense?).

Lavinia Greenlaw. The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further. London: Faber & Faber, 2024. [13]

An interesting, interconnected excursion. Had a good deal of overlap with Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap, such that I wish I had read them with more of a buffer between them. Greenlaw’s book is broader (more expansive), but doubtless I will end up confusing their details.

Sarah Moss. My Good Bright Wolf. New York: FSG, 2024. [12]*

An actually interesting memoir about eating disorders (and negative self-talk). The second half assumes that the reader will have certain views on the author’s characteristics (i.e. will already have a sense of the author’s character/traits and how they should be ‘read’) and as such is weaker, but it is also stronger because more troubling. An imbalanced book that uses its imbalances to great effect.

January

Federico Falco. The Plains. trans. Jennifer Croft. London: Charco Press, 2024 (2020). [11]

Literary romance novel about a breakup; emphasis on the literary, although the psychological sophistication is fairly low. Has a sort of dreary cosmopolitanism to it that I found rather dull; I don’t go to Argentinian fiction to get recommendations to read Annie Dillard (by which I mean, I suppose, that I am clearly not the audience for this book).

Goce Smilevski. Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel trans. Filip Korženski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2006 (2002). [10]

Interesting to reread this after having read some Spinoza (which I had not done the first time I read it).

René Descartes. A Discourse on the Method. trans. Ian Maclean. Oxford: OUP, 2006 (ca. 1633). [9]

Descartes writes such cute books, but the limits of his view of the world can be a bit grating. One wants to urge him to check his privilege, but one senses that he wouldn’t listen anyway.

Steven Nadler. A Book Forged in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. [8]

An approachable introduction to Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and its philosophical and historical context; Nadler is able to break down complex issues into comprehensible terms, and if he sometimes over-simplifies, it is usually apparent when that is happening. A solid and helpful bibliography.

Thomas Hobbes. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. ed. J.C.A. Gaskin. Oxford: OUP, 1994 (ca. 1640). [7]

‘For he that perceives that he hath perceived, remembers’ (p. 213).

Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer. New York: Dover, 1982 (1939–1945, 1953). [6]

The chapters on archaic Greek thought are the most memorable, while in pretty much everything thereafter 19th-century German thought crouches in any handy corner, ready to leap out and astonish the unwary reader. More concerned, ultimately, with legacies than with discovery, like most heirs.

C.G. Jung. The Undiscovered Self. trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011 (1950, 1957, 1970, 1990). [5]

The first essay is a sort of Civilization and Its Discontents for Jungians, while the second essay is a nice, clear cut overview of Jungian analysis; rather wish I had found this volume earlier.

Laura Cumming. Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death. New York: Scribner, 2023. [4]*

The impression is one of placidity, but with rather a lot going on beneath the surface. It was always a pleasure to see what the next plate would be.

Stanislaw Lem. The Cyberiad. trans. Michael Kandel. London: Penguin, 2014 (1965, 1972, 1974). [3]

I think I started this two years ago and found it very slow going, perhaps because I expected it to be very serious. It is not (primarily) very serious. It savored of the past rather than the future; the sort of eighteenth-century feel to it – the mechanistic universe – was not something I had expected and took some getting used to.

R.G. Collingwood. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: OUP, 1970 (1945). [2]

Collingwood thinks far more clearly and writes more cogently than I could hope to, but it is peculiar that he takes god as a given, even when advocating a return to first principles.

Torquato Tasso. Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection. trans. and edited by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton. Berkeley, CA: Univ. California Press, 1982 (1580–1594). [1]

An unexpectedly charming selection of dialogues, mostly on social matters. Goes some way to redeeming the dialogue as a form.