How embarrassing that I did not write a thing this month, but I promise I had a good excuse. Posts on Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism will appear this month, I swear, or at least hope. My eventual excuse this month will be, I am afraid, even better.
Still, I read.
PHILOSOPHY ADJACENT
The Way Things Are (1st c. BCE), Lucretius
Selected Satires &
Dialogues of the Dead (2nd c.), Lucian
FICTION
Little Novels of Sicily (1883), Giovanni Verga
Ulysses (1922), James Joyce – unlike thirty years
ago, I just more or less read the novel like a novel, not that there was not
plenty to look up.
The Death of the Heart (1938), Elizabeth Bowen
Ficciones (1944), Jorge Luis Borges
The Leopard (1958), Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Gee, these are good books.
POETRY
A little Holocaust poetry unit on the syllabus.
Selected Poems (1921-71), Jacob Glatstein
Poems of Paul Celan (1947-76), Paul Celan
Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995),
just the poetry section
The Tradition (2019), Jericho Brown
MEMOIR
The Periodic Table (1975), Primo Levi
IN FRENCH
La Pharisienne (1941), François Mauriac
Thomas l’obscur (1941/50), Maurice Blanchot, the
short version, perhaps the most abstract novel I have ever read.
Paysages et Portraits (1958), Colette – posthumous,
and Colette had some good stuff in the drawer.
No Portuguese study this month. See above for the reason. Perhaps it will resume in the fall.
