Books I Read in September 2023

Despite all evidence I hope to wrap up the Greek philosophy project within the next couple of weeks.  A medical deadline approaches.  That will help.

As usual, I read good books.

 

PHILOSOPHY & SELF-HELP

Letters from a Stoic (c. 60), Seneca - good timing for some Stoicism.

 

FICTION & A PLAY

Collected Stories (from roughly 1930 into the 1960s, the second half of the book), Vladimir Nabokov

They Came Like Swallows (1937), William Maxwell

Joseph the Provider (1943), Thomas Mann, concluding a 1,500 page monster.  Evidence of graphomania.

Death of a Salesman (1948), Arthur Miller

The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (1978), Jorge Luis Borges, arranged and rearranged.  The genial New Yorker memoir that concludes the book is a great pleasure.

 

POETRY

The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1942-82)

Selected Poems (1944-73), Jean Garrigue

A Wall of Two (1947 / 2007), Henia & Ilona Karmel & frankly Fanny Howe too.  Please see Dorian Stuber’s 2021 review of this book and these poems, many of them literally written in the camps.  The story of how the poems, and the poets, survived is itself worth knowing.

The Kid (1947) &

Skylight One (1949), Conrad Aiken

Pisan Cantos (1948), Ezra Pound.  High level Modernist kitsch, I fear, including both Aiken and Pound.

 

CRITICISM

The Situation and the Story (2001), Vivian Gornick, generous insights into essays and memoirs, more relevant to our moment than to hers, even.

 

WHAT IS THIS?

Selected Writings (1913-48), Antonin Artaud, the 700 page Sontag selection, time well spent with an alien sensibility.

 

IN FRENCH

Journal, 1933-1939, André Gide

Notre-dame des fleurs (1944), Jean Genet, real French prison literature (although I read the less obscene 1951 revision) that with its rich French vocabulary that included but went well beyond slang was on the edge of my reading level.  It was so hard.  Between Genet and Artaud, it was French Weirdo Month for me.  That should be a regular event.