Booknotes 4.3

Medea, by Euripides (tr. Gilbert Murray), published 431 BC (tr. 1912), play. I picked this up because I’d started Glorious Exploits (see below) and wanted to get more out of it. Glad I did — Medea is good, with crisp, evocative writing throughout. Since I’m not (yet) well versed in Greek tragedy, I had to slow down and pay more attention while reading, and that lent itself to a delightfully intense reading experience. Also, the murders occurring offstage reminded me how powerful it can be for a play to leave some events to the audience’s imagination.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt, published 2024, nonfiction, book group read. Before reading this book, I hadn’t realized how highly concentrated social media is in showing both behavior and social reaction to said behavior (via likes and replies), where you can see hundreds if not thousands of sample cases in a short amount of time. Nor had I thought much about persistent interactions (online, texts, etc.) vs. ephemeral ones (face-to-face, phone calls). tl;dr Social media is unhealthy. Shocker.

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, 2024, fiction. Two potters in Syracuse (Sicily) put on a performance of Euripides’ Medea with Athenian prisoners as the cast. And it’s all in a contemporary Irish voice. Very sweary (my scrub script came in handy) but quite good. Enjoyed it.

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Gessen, published 2012, nonfiction. Seemed relevant given certain obligations a certain someone has. A chilling read, but worthwhile. (Let’s hope Putinism stops spreading.) I hadn’t realized that Hitler effectively created Putin, via the siege of Leningrad. Enjoyed the story about Ekaterina Podoltseva, the brass band, and the lemons.