What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[Хahar 🤔]

My impression is that Houellebecq believes in the Great Replacement but has no strong position about whether it's a bad thing.

[Хahar 🤔]

"Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico" by Hugh Thomas

I'm not familiar with this one, but I did read Hugh Thomas's history of Cuba when I was in high school. It was an exceptionally long book, probably the longest single-volume book in the history section of the Cupertino library, and its length was such that "the Cuba book" remains a running joke among my friends. I learned a great deal about the country.

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Joan Didion - South and West

I read this late last year and found that it was exactly what I expected, which is to say that I liked it. At least in the e-book version I got from the library, the book had a preface that was written in December 2016 and it was painfully obvious that it was written in late 2016. I'm really glad that I was taking a very long break from the forum then so I don't have to see anything I wrote at that time.

William Cronon - Changes in the Land

I've had many people recommend this to me, so I don't really have any excuse not to have read it.

[Хahar 🤔]

Books that I finished in the last year:

'Bandit Country': The IRA and South Armagh by Toby Harnden
An Area of Darkness by V. S. Naipaul
Sikh Identity: An Exploration of Groups among Sikhs by Opinderjit Kaur Takhar
Imperial China, 900–1800 by F. W. Mote
Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 by Richard White
The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was by Chantal Hébert
Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island by Steven Roger Fischer
Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System by Barry Eichengreen
Revolutionaries by Eric Hobsbawm
The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics by Maurice Cowling
The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach
The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Books I'm currently in the process of reading and hope to finish:

Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100–400 by Ramsay MacMullen
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter
Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 by Chris Wickham
Empires, Nations & Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 by Anne F. Hyde
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell
Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 by Barry Eichengreen
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach

[Хahar 🤔]

Just read The Moviegoer. Excellent and very existential book, and one I think forum dwellers might especially like. Binx Bolling's narrative voice reminded me of Xahar lol.

Well, I can't think of a more pleasing way to have a book recommended to me than this.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, but a little while back I was at the library and sitting near the short story section and my eyes alighted on a nondescript volume: the collected short stories of Elizabeth Bowen. I didn't know who she was, but I kept thinking about that and so I took it out when I was at the library yesterday.

Bowen was a modernist with conservative politics, which is surely the best combination for coming up with prose that I care for. That she was a member of the Irish Ascendancy doesn't seem all that important, at least from what I've read: the characters are rich enough to have domestic servants and the action takes place somewhere in Britain or Ireland, but identity is not really the important thing here. What are important are the psychological insights: this is a book full of stories where nothing really happens in terms of plot and passages that you have to read back over to understand, but the emotional insights are so clear and feel so meaningful to my own existence. I woke up this morning eager to read more.

[Хahar 🤔]

Just read The Moviegoer. Excellent and very existential book, and one I think forum dwellers might especially like. Binx Bolling's narrative voice reminded me of Xahar lol.

Well, I can't think of a more pleasing way to have a book recommended to me than this.

Trigger warning: In a book which is otherwise highly specific geographically, Percy has many of his characters come from an unspecified "Feliciana Parish."

That didn't particularly bother me, but I looked up where Bayou des Allemandes is and it would be impossible for that to be on the way when driving from Bay St. Louis to New Orleans. I've never been to New Orleans (the sum total of my life experience in Louisiana is a weekend at a wedding in Baton Rouge five years ago), so the city I pictured in my mind was St. Louis, which is probably close enough.

I did read the whole book. The comparison to me isn't entirely flattering—the narrator comes off as peevish, although I suppose I am too—but I can see the resemblance, and not just because I see four movies a week at the theater. I was struck by how many names the book tosses off that I've mentioned in conversation just in the last week: Rupert Brooke, Dick Powell, Audie Murphy. All it would really need would be some contemporary ballplayers. I won't be thirty for another month and I have religion and I don't like girls, but those are all insignificant differences. Already I can feel my own internal monologue working in the staccato rhythms of the book. I liked it a great deal.