The first book depository is here. 2024 is here. I forgot I didn't start in 2023.
And welcome to the post wherein I'll list and maybe say a few words about the books I'm reading this year.
I finished both of these a week or so ago but I've been so busy with work that I haven't had the time or energy to get down to it until now.
The Last Days of Socrates
Here's someone else's summary:
Plato's account of Socrates' trial and death (399 BC) is a significant moment in Classical literature and the life of Classical Athens. In these four dialogues, Plato develops the Socratic belief in responsibility for one's self and shows Socrates living and dying under his philosophy. In Euthyphro, Socrates debates goodness outside the courthouse; Apology sees him in court, rebutting all charges of impiety; in Crito, he refuses an entreaty to escape from prison; and in Phaedo, Socrates faces his impending death with calmness and skilful discussion of immortality. Christopher Rowe's introduction to his powerful new translation examines the book's themes of identity and confrontation, and explores how its content is less historical fact than a promotion of Plato's Socratic philosophy.
I was interested in this story but I knew that I probably wouldn't enjoy Plato/Socrates' arguments. The character of Socrates makes a better case for us humans not really knowing what we're talking about when we say what we believe. He doesn't do so well advocating for something positively. Maybe there's an immortal soul that is permanent and which either goes to hell or some blessed higher realm (or somewhere inbetween) and the philosopher who seeks the truth is the sort who has the soul that goes to the latter place. But that conclusion isn't argued as convincingly as Plato thinks it is.
Still, I think it's wild that there was a guy like Socrates. A squat stone mason who didn't get drunk when he drank. Who saved Alcibiades during a battle (against Thebes I believe) and who said that his punishment for being found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens should be an annual stipend. And who died very bravely for being who he thought he had to be.
I also read Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791 by Volkmar Braunbehrens.
It is a myth that Mozart died in poverty, forgotten by the people who used to cheer the child prodigy. Mozart had some financial problems during his last year or two because a war between Austria and the Ottoman Empire had raised the prices of everything and taken the majority of his audience and patrons from the nobility out of Vienna, either to the battle front or to their estates. As well, his wife (who loved him as he loved her, and who collaborated with him musically) suffered a lengthy illness that required expensive medical care. But at the very end, before some mysterious illness took him, Mozart had paid off his main creditor, and had some new revenue streams coming in.
That's how Braunbehrens addresses the romantic myth of the discarded artist.
Also, Mozart was not a silly man. Braunbehrens argues that his last two operas were not well received (at first) because they were not understood. Braunbehrens writes a great deal about the influence of RATIONALISM on all levels of society. Think of Voltaire and the Encylopėdistes puncturing the claims of feudalism and religious dogma. Much of what Mozart wrote in his operas (in partnership with the lyricists who are called "librettists") was in advocacy of this new thinking.
It's a good examination of Mozart's Europe, it's thinking, it's economy and all sorts of things.
2025-01-06
Last week I finished Q & A by [?] Adrian Tomine. If you didn't check out any of those links, Tomine is a cartoonist. He makes his living as such. My cartoonist friend David loaned it to me. He thought I might get something out of it. And I did.
The book is Tomine answering some questions that a lot of people have asked him over the years. Like how to pronounce his last name. How to get work with The New Yorker. What kinds of pens n' stuff he uses. What is his creative process. I already have my own creative process but it was helpful to read about Tomine's. I'm doing stuff without really trying to sell it. He tries to get into a similar mindset. But he also thought he could make money from it. (Tomine is astounded at his youthful brash/ignorant self. And well he should be. But such hubris is necessary to get ahead I guess. And some brash youngsters have the talent and some don't.)
Today I finished Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.
This a 2010 edition. It's after the Great Recession of 2008 (which Nikiforuk blames partially on the very high price of oil at the time) and, like this old David Suzuki book I read about once, it's depressing because all of the horrible stuff being described has continued and all of the alternatives to be pursued is as far from being implemented 15 years later.
It's kind of a political-economic argument against the Tar Sands. And the way Alberta has been developing them.
Here's from the review.
Calgary-based journalist and Governor General’s Award-winning author Andrew Nikiforuk covers the resultant fallout in detail, from the massive and irreparable destruction of the natural environment – turning a good chunk of northern Alberta, including the world’s third-largest watershed, into a toxic moonscape – to the political transformation of Canada into a modern petrostate. What he exposes most of all, however, is the mind-boggling short-sightedness and stupidity of the entire enterprise.
Nikiforuk does overdo the figurative comparisons a bit. While volume may be handily imagined in units of Olympic-size swimming pools, it’s less helpful to know that the area covered by open-pit mining could end up being three times larger than the ancient city of Angkor Wat. But this is a minor point. Overall, Tar Sands provides an excellent guide to all of the environmental repercussions of our oil dependency.
...
Nikiforuk concludes with “Twelve Steps to Energy Sanity,” an oil-addiction recovery program. And surprisingly, many of his recommendations seem doable. We can’t avert a disaster that is already under way, but we might be able to prevent things from getting horribly worse.
More soon ...
2025-02-19
I read Kitty Ferguson's Tycho & Kepler: The unlikely partnership that forever changed our understanding of the heavens.
I was listening to a YouTube documentary about Johannes Kepler and I decided that I wanted to know more. I had a hazy awareness that Tycho Brahe was a nobleman with a passion for astronomy who had been given an island off the coast of Denmark to study the stars and that Kepler was an ordinary man with an extraordinary mind who worked with Brahe in order to gain access to the many years of painstaking, unprecedentedly accurate plotting of the stars in order to develop his own theories.
This book was quite good:
All science writing should be this good.
Ferguson's book is ostensibly a biography of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. That itself warrants applause: whereas previous authors have focused on one or the other (often exaggerating their personalities or surroundings), there are fewer accounts of the interaction between the two. Their interaction is strangely coincidental (two of the greatest astronomers also happened to be at the peak of their powers during rare visible supernovae), fraught (the much-older Brahe was deeply concerned by a foolish supplication by Kepler to Brahe's competitor), dangerous (as deeply-religious Protestants caught amidst some of the worst religious turmoil), symbiotic (Brahe the brilliant “experimentalist” and Kepler the phenomenal theoretician each critically depended on the other), and ultimately foundational in shaping our views of the cosmos.
Had Ferguson done just that, it would suffice to make this book valuable. But she does three more things. First, she does not shy away from a little geometry; this book is illustrated with numerous drawings and appendices that explain basic astronomical concepts as well as you could possibly imagine without mathematics (or, perhaps, better than you could with only a little math). Second, she plunges Brahe and Kepler into the social turmoil of their times, so this is also a sliver of an account of the late Reformation and early Counter-Reformation; her sympathies are obviously with her long-suffering heroes, leaving us with a sense of just how arbitrary life was in those times. The heavy irony of two men who studied the stars out of a profoundly religious conviction, even as society surged and seethed around equally strongly-held religious convictions, can't be lost on many readers (but to Ferguson's credit, she leaves each reader to form their own views of such matters).
I'll add that while I'm somewhat of a dunderhead when it comes to the hard sciences (or anything requiring precision at all) I was able to grasp the originality of Brahe's and Kepler's achievements.
2025-03-07
Last week I finished Among the Hedges by Sara Mesa (Mega McDowell, trans.).
It's a short little novel about a thirteen year-old girl playing hooky from school sitting in a secret space among the hedges in a large city park. (The story takes place in Spain.) A strange, older man discovers her hiding place but they end up becoming something like friends. The man has a tragic past and it's unclear whether he has mental health issues or is just scarred by life. Mesa is a very economical writer. She has her protaganists express profound thoughts in very few words. Her descriptions of places and events tell you just what you need to know. It's not a gigantic epic. But it does convey real human emotions.
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