I’ll admit it: I fell off the log. I failed. I haven’t been keeping up on what I’ve been reading. But I have a good excuse (sort of)! For the first 6 months of 2006, I was busily putting together a catalog that usually takes two people two years. I finally finished it, and now I find that the rest of my life that I had to put on hold to do this needs catching up.
I’m not going to list everything I’ve read because, quite frankly, I’ve lost track, but here are some highlights:
- Very Short Introductions. This is a fascinating series being put out by Oxford University Press. (Web page here.) The series is about 200 volumes so far and consists of books written by ‘the experts’ about pretty much any subject you can think of, and many you never even considered. So far I’ve read four volumes and have thumbed through a number more. The series should be called the ‘Variable Short Introduction’ to be more truthful. Some of the books are incredibly concise overviews of a subject (e.g., the history of time), whereas others make you wonder if the authors, in their incredibly limited space (no volume more than 200 pages, most around 100-125) are ever going to get to introducing the subject (e.g., the classics). The volume on the Celts was one of the best I’ve read.
- An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. My brother-in-law (as well as Josh) have ben pestering me to read this. I did. It took me about 6 months and I was bored stiff. I appreciate what Pears was attempting to do — showing how reality and our perception of it can often vary quite a bit, while also carrying on a discussion about the reliability of narrators — but he could have at least created some characters that one would actually care about.
- Judgment of Paris by Ross King. My wife and I have been on a Ross King binge recently, having read Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. King writes a captivating non-fiction history whenever he puts his pen to it. He has that knack of not only getting his history right, but making it interesting and entertaining. Judgment of Paris is probably the weakest of his (so far) three history books, and it is quite entertaining. This time out, King is writing about the decade leading up to the first Impressionistic salon and the turmoil in France. He does it by following the lives and works of two artists: Eduoard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While he does a fair job at getting us inside Meissonier (and in the process, rehabilitating him from current opinions), he never gets around to doing the same for Manet, leaving us wondering what and why Manet was painting what he was. Instead, we read of Manet’s latest painting, it’s horrible reception, that’s it — no attempt to get us inside Manet’s head. Still, a fun read.
I’m currently working through A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin and loving it. This is a slow-moving, massive story, but there are very few chapters, pages, paragraphs that seem superfluous. Who cares if it’s a doorstop? It’s a well-written doorstop.