Category: Book Notes
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Book Notes V
The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire by A. Wess Mitchell (B) – Pretty much exactly what it says in the title. An interesting book, though assuredly far, far more interesting for someone who was more into strategy in general or had more basic familiarity with 18th and 19th century European politics than I, who…
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Be Humble
We ought to judge the infinite power of Nature with more reverence and a greater recognition of our own ignorance and weakness. How many improbable things there are which have been testified to by people worth of our trust: if we cannot be convinced we should at least remain in suspense. To condemn them as…
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Book Notes IV
The Failure of Technology by Friedrich Georg Jünger (A) – An excellent and prescient critique of technology, or more accurately the technological mindset, but the less famous brother of the below-mentioned Ernst. I’m planning a series of posts exploring the ideas therein, for the near future. A Month in the Country by JL Carr (C)…
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Book Notes III
Having trouble keeping up with this, need to get better about jotting down thoughts on books as I complete them, rather than trying to retroactively write notes. The Knight and The Wizard by Gene Wolfe (A) Two books that, like most (all?) of Wolfe’s series, are really one long novel. Ranks among my favorites by…
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Book Notes II
Master Book List Confusion by Stefan Zweig (A) A novella. In it, a wayward young man, essentially banished to a provincial university, finds himself entranced by a brilliant teacher who conceals a dark secret. The secret itself is pretty obvious to the modern reader, perhaps not so much to a reader in Zweig’s own time…
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Book Notes I
I wrote one of these a long time ago, intending it to be a regular thing, and here I am again, trying to make it a regular thing, to fill the gaps when I’ve got nothing else to say and, hopefully, to help me think more deeply about what I’m reading. Recently Finished The Civil…
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2019 in Books
Prior years Compared to other years, 2019 was a bit odd. My reading was dominated by two long series, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, about which more below, and Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer books (which were good, but not truly excellent detective novels). Together, these accounted for more than 20% of all the books I read.…
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2018 in Books
Prior entries: 2015, 2016, 2017 An annual tradition. This year, I continuously told myself that I wouldn’t buy new books until I’d dramatically reduced my to-read list. I half-listened, getting the list to under a hundred for the first time in living memory. It (coupled with me figuring out how to check out books digitally…
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Power and the Modern Age
I find myself reading a lot of diagnoses of the modern world-picture.1 There are perhaps too many of these, they all generally arrive at the same conclusions, of the sort we’ve recently explored in Schumacher, and you wish they said more about the cure than the disease.2 In any case, I tend to believe that…
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Where to Begin
If someone should ask, “I would like to make progress in moral life; where shall I begin?” then we would probably answer, “Wherever you will. You can begin with a fault of which you have become conscious in your profession or occupation. Or else you can begin with the needs of the community, with family…