In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books.
So now that so many of my evenings seem to be consumed with reading about TrumpRussia here at DK and watching all of the requisite shows about TrumpRussia, my reading was pretty static as far as books are concerned...so I’ll list them and I have little else to say about the books on my reading list.
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- I.28- On affectionate relationships- This is the essay on Montaigne’s well-known friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. I am reading this essay and the La Boétie.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William Shirer.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
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I am beginning to feel guilty that I don’t have a subscription to The New Yorker because I enjoy reading it so much. Take, for example, Louis Menand’s review of Commentary editor Norman Podhoertz’s Making It which has (ironically enough, for reasons pointed out in Menand’s review) has just been issued in a reprint by New York Review of Books.
Menand’s review catapults you right into the middle of the 1960’s literary critics set in all of it’s seriousness, pretensions, and cattiness. Even if you despise Podhoertz’s politics (and I do) this review is worth reading; the book might be worth reading, as well.
And while stories of the rituals of other writers typically bore me, for some reason I liked reading this account by Hari Kunzru so much that I read it twice.
I don’t recall ever reading one of Mr. Kunzru’s novels, though...here comes that guilt feeling again…