Finished reading: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle 💙📚
It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage. ★★★★☆
Reading
Finished reading: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 💙📚
A concise summary of the tactics used by totalitarian governments to suppress freedom and democracy. Clear examples from twentieth-century despots support each of the twenty lessons. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
I’m glad I read this hefty tome. I can put current events and government decisions into the context of what happened in Nazi Germany. I know better what to look for. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard 💙📚
A recent New Yorker article by Anthony Lane prompted me to read this one, my first Elmore Leonard book. I enjoyed the pacing and dialogue and colorful cast of characters, all set in languid south Florida.
★★★★☆
@amylouise on Madame Bovary:
I hope that when you pay attention to the world, see every flower on every oat-stalk and every bumbling country doctor, you find that you can look them into loveliness. I hope that even being bound to a dull community of foolish people could bring unexpected graces. I hope that reality has a richer romance than fantasy.
I loved every word of this review. 💙📚
Finished reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 💙📚
See my review for notes and favorite highlights. Still and always ★★★★★.
Finished reading: Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney 💙📚
McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. ★★★★★
See my full review for notes and favorite highlights.
Finished: Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★★☆ Not King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
Finished: London Rules by Mick Kerron 💙📚
★★★★☆ Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with his Slow Horses saving the day yet again from ineptitude of the intelligence service bosses. These are comfort books to savor.
Finished: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck 💙📚
★★★★☆ A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
Finished: Gerald’s Game by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★☆☆ Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.
Finished: Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 💙📚
★★★★☆ Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.
Finished: Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 💙📚
★★★★★ Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
Currently reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
Seems timely.
Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 💙📚
★★★★★ What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
★★★★☆ Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.
Currently reading: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 📚💙
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization
Friday, March 21, 2025 • 10 min read
This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.
Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.
Finished: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu 💙📚
★★★★★ This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must.
Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?
Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.
Currently reading: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Laozi 💙📚
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Finished: Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind 💙📚
★★★★☆ An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.
Finished: The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant 💙📚
★★★★☆ The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. — Napoleon
Finished: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 💙📚
★★★★★ Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.
Finished: Babel by R.F. Kuang 💙📚
★★☆☆☆ I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.
I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 →
Ah, Patrick O’Brian. He was truly one of a kind. If you haven’t discovered Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, there’s not a moment to lose. 💙📚
Finished reading: Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks 💙📚
An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. ★★★★☆
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/125484/2025/dd54e41e-b5b4-42ca-bc9a-83d3b708188c.png" width=“600” height=“337” alt=“Quote from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: “Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results."">
Finished reading: Fallen Leaves by Will Durant 💙📚
In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history. ★★★★★
Finished reading: Just After Sunset by Stephen King 📚
Read: 2025-01-27 | ★★★★☆ Horror
On a quest to read the few Stephen King books I missed along the way. I forgot how great of a short story writer King is. Probably some of his novels should have been short stories! Gingerbread Girl and N were my favorites in this collection.
Finished reading: The Godfather by Mario Puzo 📚
Read: 2025-01-13 | ★★★★☆ | Mystery-Suspense
I read the book during a recent visit to New York City and watched the movie on the plane ride home, which made for an immersive experience. The movie stayed very true to the book, though some big sections were left out. I loved reading the backstory of how young Vito Corleone eventually became the Don. Yes, some of it is dated, and yes, there were a few choppy parts that felt in need of editing, but I was pleasantly surprised by how really good this book was. If you loved the movie, you’ll enjoy the book.
Highlights
The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
a friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.
Finished reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen 📚
What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.
Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.
★★★★★