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...worked long and extensive hours last week...I picked up several books but couldn’t focus on them...or dozed off while reading, one of the two.
Permanent reading list:
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- I.54- On vain cunning devices.- This essay begins as a somewhat disjointed and barely relatable set of sentences that comes together as a thesis on extreme opposites, how both sides of a spectrum of thoughts and actions can look similar, and the midpoint on that spectrum...it reads a lot like Aristotle’s ‘’Golden Mean’’ or a very very crude form of a thesis-antithesis-synthesis form of argument. M. considers his Essays to be a sort of Golden Mean...for better or worse.
I know that Nietzsche was an admirer of M. and was influenced by M. but Nietzsche could not have liked this essay.
...if these Essays were worthy of being judged, it could turn out in my opinion that they will hardly please common vulgar minds nor unique and outstanding ones: the former would never get enough of their meaning; the latter would understand them only too easily. These Essays might eke out an existence in the middle region.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-The Stockbroker’s Clerk- I will get to this next week.
I am reading:
An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas- I’m returning to this (I know that I always make this promise)
An Army of Ex-Gay Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News by Amy Hoffman— I did find myself picking this up and I am enjoying this story of how Ms. Hoffman was hired by GCN...and how there was even a more radical gay publication at that time...so much of what now passes for ‘’the gay press’’ is so maintream and has been so for about 25 years...(I recall those gay publications that you could often pick up for free that had some great content...at least it seemed that way then...)
I also picked up essay collections by Christopher HItchens, Salman Rushdie, and Ursula LeGuin but I have no idea if I am going to delve deeply into any of them...I know that Hitchens’ politics (esp. his anti-Clintonism and his support for the Iraq War) are loathsome for some people but his 2002 Atlantic essay on Winston Churchill reminds me of so many of the reasons that I love reading Hitchens...there’s also Rushdie’s essay on The Wizard of Oz (although I can’t help but to compare it to Gore Vidal’s treatment of the same subject).
I found myself excited to find an Ursula LeGuin book that the bookseller in one of my favorite used bookstores didn’t even know that he had...loved browsing through the book here and there and I think that ‘’A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be’’ ranks as one of the most intriguing titles of an essay that I have ever read...so much so that I’ve only read the first couple of paragraphs of the essay.
edited 2/12/18 1105pm CK