Booknotes 5.19

Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, by Thomas Hardy, published 1872, fiction, 220 pages. Delightful and occasionally funny. (From what I’ve heard of later Hardy, that may not last.) Enjoyed the carolers, and the core story of Dick Dewy and Fanny Day, and the prose throughout. Still very much looking forward to reading the rest of Hardy’s works.

Classics: A Very Short Introduction, by Mary Beard & John Henderson, published 2000, history, 98 pages. It was good for its length and scope, with the temple at Bassae as the entry point for several of the topics. My favorite parts, I think, were those showing what types of discussions classicists often engage in. I also have not thought nearly enough about how slavery in Greece and Rome affected the ancient world.

Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, by Eric Foner, published 2002, essays, 249 pages. Foner is a historian of Reconstruction (or at least started as one) but these essays cover more ground — social Darwinism, South Africa, freedom in the U.S., originalism and the Supreme Court’s racism in recent decades, the historiographic weakness of the final episode of the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries, etc. I liked it. A couple passages that stuck with me:

We can forget the past, but the past, most assuredly, will not forget us. The experience of dead generations, Karl Marx once wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

And:

The price of maintaining freedom, as an Irish judge commented two centuries ago, is “eternal vigilance.”

Biography: A Very Short Introduction, by Hermione Lee, published 2009, nonfiction, 140 pages. Focused mostly on literary biography. I very much enjoyed it and emerged with many more books added onto my to-read list. (Though one that did not get added to my list was Boswell’s Johnson, because I’m already reading it. Around 10% of the way in and I’m loving it. It’s so good.) Also, I did not know that Henry James and Edith Wharton toured France together in 1907.