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.
2025-04-08
I finished The Carelton Library's Joseph Howe: Voice of Nova Scotia with an introduction and commentary from J. Murray Beck.
Some professor put out a whole bunch of these Carleton Library volumes on a table for people to steal and I stole 'em. That was over twenty years ago I guess. Anyway, I finally got around to reading this one.
Here's Joseph Howe's biography. It mentions how Howe's father, John Howe, was alone among his family members in taking the British side during the American Revolution. Howe, father and son, were very close and a deep love for their highly idealized view of the British Empire was imparted from the one to the other. The book is a series of editorials, speeches and letters from Howe's career. He was a remarkable man. He led the fight for Responsible Government in Nova Scotia. For the political equality of the Black population of the province. He desired a publicly financed and managed railroad and became the director of the building of Nova Scotia's rail network and managed to avoid the scandals that plagued other such projects in British North America. He opposed Confederation in 1867, fearing that Nova Scotia would be swamped by the greater population of Canada. He believed economic integration should precede political integration. He also pointed out that Ottawa was less accessible than London, England at that time. He tried to have Confederation overturned but when that failed decided to represent Nova Scotia within it as best he could.
Over the years his love and devotion to the British Empire faded as he encountered the reality of how it functioned and was managed in the British House of Commons and House of Lords. When I read about his devotion to the principles of democratic representation, I think of how lazily Canadians acquiesced to stephen harper's systematic desecration of the rights of our legislatures. Towards the end of his career he spoke of Britain abandoning British North America to its fate, indifferent to the contest between BNA and the USA. I couldn't help but reflect on our current crisis with Donald Trump's tariffs and worse.
I think all Canadians should know about Joseph Howe.
2025-04-14
I finished Yves Engler's [2010] Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid.
Engler’s book demonstrates that working in the background allows Canada to carry out a foreign policy without it actually having to be policy. Israel is, after all, the only other country besides the United States with whom Canada shares a “border management and security agreement.” Engler reveals the breadth of Canada’s relationship with Israel to be staggering: over 140 Canadian weapons makers export arms directly to Israel; Canada consistently blocks the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty from demanding accountability from Israel’s nuclear weapons industry; in 1997, Israel became Canada’s fourth free trade partner, after the U.S., Mexico and Chile; after the March and December 2008 incursions into Gaza, which claimed over 1,200 lives, Canada was the only country to oppose a un resolution accusing Israel of war crimes.
Engler goes refreshingly beyond the knee-jerk “Jewish lobby” theories as to why Canada is so supportive and intransigent, and explores some interesting avenues: Canada’s historical willingness to accept the mistreatment of indigenous peoples; the desire to have a “western outpost” in the Middle East; a belief in Israel rooted in a Christian literalist reading of the bible; the need to be aligned with an “Empire” (whether British or American or Israeli) and all that it entails. In 1948 Elizabeth MacCallum said Ottawa supported partition because “we didn’t give a hoot about democracy.”
Belying the author’s activist bent, Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid is a neat little book, something you want to mark up and tuck into your back pocket. But the haphazardness and errors in the footnotes and bibliography don’t help it graduate to serious scholarship. Engler should know better: given the contentiousness of the topic, it doesn’t take many factual errors or sloppy sourcing to decimate an argument.
I didn't look to the footnotes or anything. It's a handy book that establishes just how enmeshed Canada has been in the development of the zionist project. It's in the DNA of all these psychopaths. It will be very difficult to drive them away from this evil policy. Finally, I just want to provide another mention for the interesting character of Elizabeth MacCallum.
2025-05-15
I recently finished Stella Musulin's Vienna in the Age of Metternich (1975). I once started a biography of Metternich but I got no farther than reading that when news of the French Revolution arrived in (I can't remember if it was Strausbourg or Mainz) the local people responded by breaking into a wine cellar and getting drunk and rioting. The next day the authorities hanged some poor hungover working-class foreigner and that was the end of it.
Anyways, so I went to my local library branch and of the few books they had on Metternich I chose this one.
I'm glad that I read it. Musulin's a pretty nice writer and there were some interesting characters in early-19th Century Vienna. That's Franz I on the cover. The last Holy Roman Emperor and the first Emperor of Austria. He was a bit of a dullard and a sourpuss but his two brothers Karl and Johann were very sympathetic characters. I also got to know about Madame de Stael and Napoleon's son (by Franz I's daughter Maria Louise). I guess the whole thing is more of a soap opera but Musulin does talk about the general social-cultural-political climate of the times.
Towards the end I think she gets a little hurried introducing new people and forgetting to mention when someone died, but it's still a nice, informative read.
Since I'm hear I'll also mention that I'm almost finished the 2011 English Translation (by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier) of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
I'll write s'more later ...
2025-05-17
Last year I read Life and Death at the Existentialist Cafe and I was made to understand that existentialism was derived from an earlier philosophy of phenomenology which was about really understanding experience and how we experience experience. And that is what de Beauvoir does in The Second Sex.
She is certainly eloquent at doing so. The gist of the book is that the male side of the human species has created a world in which the female side is the objectified "other" and basically reduced to a parasitical existence. Women's psyches are deformed by being subjects who are not allowed to express and develop themselves fully.
I think de Beauvoir spends too much time using Freudianism and also trying to answer how this came to be. I don't think it's all that mysterious. Women have something that men want and men are stronger, overall, than women, and if women won't give men what they want, we dehumanize them so as to justify our taking it from them.
A lot of reading of the book is spent with women dealing with the reality that their lives don't turn out to live up to the promise they felt when they were little girls, before the reality of their female lives inside patriarchy is obvious. But de Beauvoir seems to think that men all start off as boys happily comparing their penises with each other (with none of us coming out the loser apparently) and then we grow up to become successful individuals building fulfilling careers in whatever interests us. It reads as if she bases the whole portrait of men on the academics and artists and other elites she circulated among. Most men's lives don't end up that way. They end up disappointed and in drudgery was well.
Obviously, women got the shittier end of the stick. Generally speaking, the poorest man can always abuse a woman who is weaker than he is.
She also writes as if sexual orientation is often a choice, or the result of certain life circumstances. I wouldn't say that it's IMPOSSIBLE for someone to be "turned gay" by experiences, but I mainly think that it's inherent. Most human beings are heterosexual (or mainly so) because that aids the perpetuation of the species. But occasionally an attraction to one's own sex develops and there's no "cause" or "choice" involved.
She writes in an overall objective, reasoned tone. Occasionally a twinge of justifiable anger at the most egregious examples of male stupidity and cruelty enters (such as male French politicians seeking to outlaw Anglo-American advances in reducing the pains of child birth since they felt that women are supposed to suffer) but mostly she lets the facts speak for themselves.
I think The Second Sex is a hugely important work though. Men and women have to learn to listen to each other.
I'm going to start a new 2025 readings page because I don't know how to fix the formatting problem that developed after writing about the Yves Engler book. Here it is.
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