John Grisham - The Street Lawyer
Yay, Sheldrake!
Plutarch’s Lives
So sweet. Highly recommend it to anyone.
Just finished a book on the life and times of Machiavelli (Paul Stathern). Quite a good overview.
I read The Prince eons ago – they make you read war and strategy books in business school – but I didn’t know much about the background to writing the book.
It was a tumultuous time in Italy and Machiavelli was at the heart of it. City states, the Medici and the Papal armies battled it out over and over again. It was the Renaissance and the religious and intellectual landscape was also at war.
I’ve never thought of Machiavelli as being evil. He was simply attempting to develop a ‘science’ of politics without sentimentality. Like all good science he stripped it of any sentimentality, moral, ethics or ideology. Something either worked or it didn’t.
I’ve come to realize that his ‘science’ is particularly cruel and amoral because of the time it was written. I’m sure it would have been less harsh if it was written in a modern era.
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Just finished “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” by W.Y. Evans-Wentz.
Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”. Nietzsche called Sterne (1713-1768) a ‘free spirit’.
value free science : ideals and illusions
Hugh Allone - Sailor; by John Marshall Doggett
THE WAY OF RESPONSE: Martin Buber
Selections from his Writings
I’m working on The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, FREE: The future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley.
I just finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson and look forward to The Skin Game by Jim Butcher next month.
Words of Radiance is a sequel, a thousand page sequel to a thousand page book, but Brandon Sanderson once again amazes me with his writing. If you’ve ever attempted to created any sort of art in your life, The Emperors Soul just might be the best book you’ve ever read, and it’s a novelette… Took like three hours to read the last time I read it, which was for the fifth or sixth time. Anytime I want to feel inspired, I pick it up.
I’ve been reading The Barbed Coil by J.V. Jones, who is a brilliant writer. Gonna be reading her ‘The Book of Words’ Trilogy again, next.
I couldn’t make it through the first of that trilogy. To many points of view change.
HEINRICH HEINE: “Florentine nights”
Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon
Georg Steiner “On Difficulty” here referencing Ezra Pounds’s Canto LXXXI,
But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Aristoteles “De Anima” re-read
It’s a shame that Kosta no longer trains or has any involvement with Mo Pai.
Nietzsche, Antichrist re-read
re-read Camus, ‘The Stranger’
Colin Wilson ‘The Outsider’
Herman Hesse’Steppenwolf’
2666, Bolano.