finished reading

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman  | Jan 26, 2021

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties / Mike Davis & Jon Wiener

should resume reading Montaigne, Prescott and Historia Augusta

probably should resume reading Proust, too

affection trumps force

 et errat longe, mea quidem sententia,

 Qui imperium credat esse gravius aut stabilius

Vi quod fit, quam ilhud quod amicitia adjungitur.

if you ask my opinion, it is quite untrue that authority is firmer or more stable when it relies on force than when it is associated with affection.

- Terrence, Adelphi, I. i, 40-3

Now reading

 

• The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s / Richard Wolin
• Essays / Michel de Montaigne bk 2, finished bk 1 ages ago
• History of the Conquest of Mexico / William H. Prescott
• The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics / John Nichols
• Lives of the Later Caesars(Augustae Historiae)

Books to read this year

My goal basically is to read all the books I've bought, a herculean task in itself(bought SO MANY all those years).

First priority should be;

BN edition of William Prescott, Mexico and Peru

Cohen-Solal's bio of Sartre

Maxime Godinson's bio of Muhammad(Eaton Press) 

So many novels by USA/UK writers; 

Samuel Johnson & James Boswell(not novels here), Sterne, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Ford Maddox Ford, Waugh, Saki(Munro), Paul Scott, Burgess, C.P. Snow, Fowles, Derek Mahon(Singapore Grip)..

James, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Bellow, Gaddis, Wouk..

 

I'm going to keep reading French lit, should try to finish Montaigne, & Proust(from Captive), also should tackle

The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France 

French Decadent Tales 

Henry James's criticism of French writers is really whetting my appetite, wonder if I should actually learn French to read in the original(so many untranslatable authors, according to James). 

 

Read bio of Goethe, so should actually read Faust and Erotic Poems..

How about Arabian Nights, tr. by Burton.

Bought plenty of non-fictions too; Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Robert Burton, Henry Adams, Burke, Mill, Nietzsche, Bagehot, William James, Freud, Veblen, Sorel, Orwell..

Poetry; Virgil, Dante, Milton, Pope, Coleridge..

Will I actually be able to finish reading all those during a decade lol.

And of course should keep reading Latin and Ancient Greek, for example Tacitus and I have tons of Loeb editions..

Books I've read last year

2020 as yr of the French; Read Proust, Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, de Beauvoir, Camus.. Criticism of Sartre/de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Camus, etc. by Kolakowski & Judt. Bio of Marc Bloch.  Reading Henry James's criticisms of French writers(LOA)

Of UK/USA writers, finished Joyce's Ulysses, also read Robert Byron, Paul Fussell, Trollope, Compton-Burnett, Gaskell, Allingham(diary), George Eliot, Greene, C. V. Wedgwood, Tuchman, Hobsbawm, Vidal..finished Gibbon's vol.6, Steven Runciman, Mencken's 'Prejudices' 4-6th series, Gerard Brenan's 'Spanish Labyrinth', Mervyn Peake..

Of Big Tomes, read Murasaki Shikibu's 'Tale of Genji', Royall Tyler version

Of bios; Gibbon(only vol. 2 by Craddock), Goethe(vol. 2 by Boyle, read vol. 1 ages ago), Marc Bloch(Fink), Hobsbawm(Evans), Joseph Stilwell(Tuchman), John Ford(McBride), Jed Harris, Robert Evans(autobio)..

 

Books to read this Winter

Already 1 month into it, so gotta hurry up.

Should read Russian lit. during cold Winter, no? So

'Demons' by Dostoyevsky, but I have also Gogol Collected Tales

Also should read 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot(read her 'Adam Bede' this Summer/Fall)

Reading now

Going to record what I'm reading from now on. Can't borrow from the library due to COVID, but have TONS of books I bought before, but lazily didn't even read it lol.

Right now;

 

The Lady In the Lake / Raymond Chandler 

The Gallery / John Horne Burns 

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson 

Literary Criticism; French Writers / Henry James 

Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 (Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History) / Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla 

Also have tons of reading material saved on Kindle, the last one being one of them(Iberian...) 

 

Moderate's Fear of the Left

'Moderate opposition of the 1840s..were much more worried by the danger from their left than by the old regimes. From the moment the barricades went up in Paris, all moderate liberals(and, as Cavour observed, a fair proportion of radicals) were potential conservatives'

Eric Hobsbawm, p. 17

Fear of democracy, revolution and the labouring poor

 'If the social order were to be genuinely menaced, if the great principles on which rests were to be at serious risk, then many of the most determined oppositionists, the most enthusiastic republicans would be, we are convinced, the first to join the ranks of the conservative party'

- Count Cavour of Piedmont(1846), practically anticipating the universal failure of 1848 revolutions in Europe.

Anti-revolutionary peasants

 'Poland..its Russian and Austrian rulers succeeded in mobilizing the peasantry against the revolutionary gentry' 

- Hobsbawm, p. 11