In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution.

Also found this of note:

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.

Life of Johnson volume 1: 1709–1765, by James Boswell (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), published 1791, biography, 980 pages. I’ve long wanted to tackle this but the whole thing was daunting in its full length. (In print it’s 1,400 pages of what has to be a fairly tiny typeface, but in my ebook reader — a standard 1,200 characters per page — it’s 4,200 pages long.) Turns out it’s very readable and so good. I’m glad I’m going with the unabridged edition, by the way, because I find the letters add helpful flavor. And the footnotes sent me off with loads more books I want to read, mostly old memoirs and letters. Mmm. Can’t wait to read the remaining volumes.

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, published 2011, nonfiction, 355 pages. The core argument is that some degree of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) is actually desirable in leaders during times of crisis, with examples pulled from Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK, FDR, JFK, Hitler, and a few more. I’m not sure how fully I agree with the thesis, and I do know for sure that I disagree with the part of the argument that says that in our leaders maybe we need to accept the vices (hypersexuality, etc.) that accompany mental illness, but I still found the book biographically interesting, and I agree that continuing to destigmatize mental illness is worthwhile and important.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah, published 2016, memoir, 320 pages. I read this because my kid’s English class is reading it and the teacher asked us parents to read along. (Though I’ve had it on my list for a while and would have read it anyway, to be clear. This readindg was not under duress.) Some of the stories are deliciously bonkers. Overall, it’s a funny, occasionally harrowing, and eye-opening look at life in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. I liked it.

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Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, published 2018, history, 540 pages. Quite good. Compelling and well-written. There’s the titular murder as a frame story, but overall the book is much more about the Troubles, which I was grateful for (true crime makes me squirm too much these days). Reminded me a lot of Days of Rage, about the bombings in the U.S. in the 1970s. I feel like I have a better understanding of Ireland now. (Though this is admittedly just one sliver of what appears to have been centuries of tension and strife.)

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, published 1850, fiction, 1,470 pages. Loved it. Agnes! Little Emily! Dora! Peggotty! And Uriah Heep. And the Micawbers. So good. This was Dickens’ favorite novel, and I can see why. Great characters, poignant in places, delicious prose, funny throughout. Very much looking forward to continuing my grand tour of Dickensian literature.

The Blue Castle, by L. M. Montgomery, published 1926, fiction, 270 pages. One of Montgomery’s adult novels (which didn’t feel all that much like Anne of Green Gables to me, by the way), about a woman who decides she’s going to live life her own way and not let her family dictate everything any longer. I enjoyed it.

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Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, by John Green, published 2025, nonfiction, 215 pages. A quick read about an awful, awful thing. Fascinating and worthwhile. I wish the world were a fairer place.

The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898, by Evan Thomas, published 2010, history, 450 pages. Another step on my unofficial quest to learn more about the smaller American wars I don’t know much about, in this case the Spanish–American War. Quite good, recommended. I hadn’t realized Teddy Roosevelt was so war-hungry, which came as a bit of a disappointment but in hindsight clearly means I didn’t know much about him. (I need to read the Edmund Morris biography. And The Bully Pulpit.) Boo to warmongering.

Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by Stewart Brand, published 2026, nonfiction, 270 pages. The book doesn’t talk about actual maintenance as much as I would have hoped, and I struggled mightily with the Musk adoration at the end (given DOGE, his Epstein Island thing, turning Twitter into a cesspool, etc.), and Marcin Wichary’s review points out some other flaws, but there are still some interesting anecdotes, especially the sailing stories in the first chapter. Also, I had no idea there were electric cars way back in the early 1900s. Wow.

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At St John’s College there is a servitor named Shakston, a tall, thin, pale fellow, who eats spiders with as much greediness as nuts, saying they comfort his stomach.

You’re, uh, welcome.

The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn, published 2019, biography, 295 pages. A compelling account of Pliny the Elder, who died after Vesuvius erupted, and Pliny the Younger, who later became a senator and wrote a lot of letters. Quite liked it, lots of interesting things. In reading this I realized my Italian ancestors probably lived within 100 miles of Vesuvius. (I say probably because I’ve only traced those lines back to the 1700s; I don’t actually know where they were living 1,700 years before that. Maybe nowhere near.) It includes a quote from John Aubrey about the death of Francis Bacon, which was fun since I didn’t expect to see Aubrey again so soon.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, by Phyllis Rose, published 1983, biography, 280 pages. Compelling short biographical portraits of the marriages of Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. The author is fairly anti-marriage (and I am not), but in spite of that I really liked the book and the stories of these five writers. I’ve read books by four of them, by the way, which may have something to do with my level of interest; I don’t know whether this book would still be interesting to someone unfamiliar with them.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, published 2011, memoir, 140 pages. Alas, while I’ve really liked Didion’s essays, this memoir of grief after the loss of her daughter didn’t resonate with me as I was hoping it would.

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Hitler, by Joachim C. Fest (translated by Richard and Clara Winston), published 1973, biography, 1,500 pages. After spending that much time in that headspace I felt like I needed a mental shower, but it was still worthwhile to me (I’d never read anything in depth on Hitler himself). Tragic and disturbing, as expected. Interesting how obsessed he was with people not knowing who his family was, and his mania for beating architectural records, and his plans for introducing polygamy, and all the cake gobbling in the bunker at the very end. The insomnia and keeping court all night long reminded me of Stalin. “Though later on he was always involved in close social relationships, always surrounded by a host of people, his biography is eerily empty of other human beings.” What a toll isolation — and mental illness and drugs — can take on the world. “Hardly ever has a centering of all power in a single person ended in such total and blatant disorganization.” Which sounds familiar. (As did several other things in this book. One wonders if they’re consciously cribbing or if evil is just monotonously uncreative.)

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, published 2020, historical fiction, 390 pages. Whew. A harrowing and heavy meditation on grief, brutal knowing roughly what’s to come (the novel’s subtitle is “A Novel of the Plague”) and then stumbling through the aftermath. I cried a fair amount during the last third or so. Recommended for those in the mood. The choice not to ever mention the name Shakespeare (or even William) in the text reminded me of Wolf Hall and I felt it worked reasonably well here, too.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, by Lucy Worsley, published 2022, biography, 440 pages. Liked it but didn’t love it. I knew Christie had been married to an archaeologist later in life but didn’t realize what a big part of her life archaeology was during those years. It had also somehow escaped me that the person who adapted her novels into plays was Christie herself. Planning to read Laura Thompson’s 2007 biography of her at some point.

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The Marne, by Edith Wharton, published 1918, fiction, 70 pages. World War I from an American perspective, and as part of that, a meditation on war. Quite liked it — one of my favorites of Wharton’s, I think. This part amused me: “Her studies had probably been curtailed by the task of preparing a repertory, for she appeared to think that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary hero, who had been guillotined with Marie Antoinette for blowing up the Bastille; and her notions of French history did not extend beyond this striking episode.”

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, published c. 1400 (translation by Nevill Coghill published 1951), poetry, 520 pages. I didn’t love it, for the same reasons I didn’t really like The Decameron (whence several of Chaucer’s stories came from): too bawdy. Though, to his credit, Chaucer’s characterization work is much better, and the frame story has interesting detours where people interrupt and derail the order of tale telling. Even so, I’m beginning to suspect that medieval lit may not be my thing after all, which comes as a surprise to me.

Unto This Last, by John Ruskin, published 1862, essays, 100 pages. Interesting essays on political economy, touching on ethical, humane economics. Some interesting ideas, like equality of wages regardless of aptitude (which seems kind of crazy but was still interesting to think about). And then I got to the end of third essay where Ruskin drops this: “My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others.” Ugh. Plop goes Ruskin into the interesting-yet-problematic bucket. But other than that it was worth reading. Some passages that stood out to me:

Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.

And this:

And whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

And:

Consider whether, even, supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world.

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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.

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Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1841/1844 (in two volumes), nonfiction, 502 pages. Lots of interesting ideas. I’m glad I read it, but by the end his manner of stating things very confidently became grating and I was equally glad to be done. It might have been better if I’d spaced the essays out over time instead of gulping them down all at once. Still, worth reading.

Days of Shattered Faith, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2025, fantasy, 659 pages. Third in the Tyrant Philosophers series. Really liked it, as always. The world continues to be compelling and these books are among Tchaikovsky’s best, I think.

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr, published 2006, biography, 533 pages. As the subtitle indicates, this is a worthwhile look at the French Revolution by way of Robespierre. Before reading this (and I haven’t read much about the French Revolution, to be clear), my perception of Robespierre was heavily on the villain side of things, but the book provides a more three-dimensional view while also avoiding turning into an apologia for murder. For example, I hadn’t known that in his younger days Robespierre argued against the death penalty and defended the poor. I also hadn’t realized he was guillotined at only thirty-six years old. So young! Unwilling to admit he was wrong, unable to separate himself from the Revolution, it’s a sad story.

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Havana: A Subtropical Delirium, by Mark Kurlansky, published 2017, nonfiction, 202 pages. I went into this having liked Kurlansky’s Cod, but alas, this one didn’t work as well for me. (I stuck with it because one of my family lines is from Cuba and I want to know more about the history and culture there.) I did enjoy reading about Cuban post-embargo constraint-driven creativity and ingenuity, and I didn’t know the sloppy joe originated in Havana, nor that Habaneros apparently hate the sea, because loved ones leave by it and because new people (invaders, historically) arrive by it.

Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton, published 1916, fiction, 117 pages. About two sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina, and Mr. Ramy the clockmaker. Darker than I expected going in, with some unexpected choices by the characters. Liked it. My plan right now, by the way, is to finish up Wharton’s novellas first and then read her novels in chronological order.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, by Amy S. Greenberg, published 2013, history, 461 pages. Quite good. I read this because one of my ancestors fought in the war and I realized I knew almost nothing about it. It would, I think, do most Americans good to learn more about the war (whether through this book or elsewhere), to better understand some of the costs of manifest destiny and the annexations that led to the geography we have today. (Saying this as someone who lives in territory seized during the conflict.) I agree that it was a wicked, unjust war, and for me there were several echoes with our current war du jour — a war of aggression sparked by lies, for example, and weak-willed people in Congress mumbling that we simply have to support the president’s war if it’s already been started (balderdash). I have no strong feelings about this, clearly. In the book it was also fascinating to see how the Mexican–American War functioned as prologue to the Civil War, and Lincoln’s part in protesting it. Recommended.

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The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, published 1610, play, 66 pages. This was the Shakespeare play I’d been looking forward to the most, because I’d never read it before but had seen several references to it over the years. It did not disappoint. (Though Julius Caesar remains my favorite, I think.)

The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen, published 2024, history, 382 pages. Delighted to read that many/most of those involved in the Founding were voracious readers, though in hindsight I suppose it could be more surprising that any were not. Regardless, my main goal in reading this book was to come out with a list of older books and authors I want to read next, like Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, and I now have that list. But do I have sufficient time? Aye, there’s the rub.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis, published 2000, history, 418 pages. Fascinating detail into different parts of the Founding — the Hamilton v. Burr duel, the postponing of discussions about slavery, Washington’s farewell address, the troubled friendship between Jefferson and Adams, the split between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of government that still causes issues today, etc. This won the Pulitzer. Really liked it — on its own merits, not because of the award — and recommend it. And no, I didn’t read either of these last two books because of the 250th, though the timing certainly looks suspect.

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