Back in the before times, TPM’s office was conveniently located a few short blocks away from Barnes and Noble. A glorious thing! Floors upon floors of books. Before you knew it your lunch hour is done and you had to grab your spoils and go. It was both a blessing and a curse — for me at least.
Great reading here. One correction for @joeragazzo–it’s Jim Crace, not (the differently estimable) Jim Croce!
John Cleese would like to be buried with his unread books. At the rate I’m going, I could simply be buried under my unread books – no dirt needed. In any case, one book that had been sitting around for a while simply demanded to be read now: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight. It isn’t so much a page-turner as it is a page-engrosser. Beautifully written, deeply researched, diamonds on most pages, and absolutely timely.
Another one – an on-going project – is Lectures on Quantum Mechanics by Steven Weinberg, although a first reading is more of a working-through. Not for everyone of course, but for those for whom it is for, it is beautifully written and richly rewarding.
Leaving me wondering if that’s supposed to be an Italian or Iranian flag homage.
I would like to humbly request that people do not read a popularized mash-up of the logician Gödel, the graphic artist Escher, and the composer Bach, and come away thinking that they have read a serious representation of the profound thinking about the knowable versus the provable and the discoverable found in the writings of Kurt Gödel. For this, and for an equally thoughtful portrait of the man himself, I recommend Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, W. W. Norton & Company (2005).
Also, whatever you do, please do not read Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞, by David Foster Wallace (2003), the first title in the same Great Discoveries series. If you do, you will discover that it is infinitely bad. I do not say this in jest. It is as amateurish as my thoughts on Talking Points.
Currently stacked neatly in my “bought but not yet read” pile is
I’ve finally gotten to Jim Butcher’s “Battle Ground”, but halfway through, my library request for Comey’s latest, “Saving Justice”, came in and I’m currently burning through it. Really, I have read a record number of books this year…
I just finished The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg about gender and race in Appalachia and how unsolved murders can shape a couple of generations. Excellent!
― George R.R. Martin
And a character in George’s books is lucky to make it through an entire chapter.
So true!
I have always intended to read James Baldwin, so I might just try to do that soon. But also V. Woolf’s Orlando, and Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building. The theme being books I should have read in college, but just didn’t get to. Now, with pandemic, I’m able to get through some.
I liked the last set of suggestions, Covid Reading, and these look good as well. I liked ‘The Wake’ and ‘Normal People’, ow reading ‘Mostly Dead Things’. Ordered the rest of Paul Kingsnorth’s Trilogy. These will put me even further behind the fifty year list of not-yet-read books on the shelf.
Good recommendations. I would add James A. Morone, Republic of Wrath (September 2020). Very contemporary. Trumpism has its origins a couple of centuries ago. And from 2004 Hellfire Nation (still in print) if you really want the origins of “Christian Nationalism”. Unlike some academics, I find Morone very readable.
I would add that I believe Trumpism’s origins are found in the reactionism to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.