A lot of the stuff I’d like to read are texts I’m holding out to read in their original languages, something which might never happen.
One book I’m probably going to get is The World of Late Antiquity (1971), since it’s selling very cheaply on Amazon right now.
I’d like to find a good book on the subject of early Christian gnosticism and related movements like Manichaeism and Mandaeism, and also a very entry-level introduction to the history of Buddhism. But I don’t have much idea what’s a solid buy on that front.
I’ve had my eye on some Jackson Crawford Norse–English translations since last year, but they’re fairly expensive books and I don’t have the money.
I’ve probably mentioned in already, but one book I enjoyed a couple of years ago was The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives, an English translation from Plutarch’s (Greek) biographies of Pompey, Cicero, Brutus, Mark Antony and, of course, Caesar himself.
More recently, I read the two-volume Loeb edition of Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, the bilingual English translation of Apuleius’ Latin novel. Their editions of Pliny’s Natural History are also good, although they’re more of a “slow burn carbohydrate” with more value for thumbing through and referencing than for reading in one go.
As it happens, I just traded my father’s copy of The Gnostic Scriptures by Bentley Layton, a highly regarded scholarly book on the subject. It was mildewed and I don’t keep mildewed books. The Nag Hammadi texts, however, are online in PDF. You can google it.
I read that in 2019, and it was my favorite book of the year. It is hilarious, and it is a wonderful warehouse of ancient folklore. It has the oldest record I know of the “Watcher by the Dead” motif.
That is where someone stays up all night with a body, apparently to guard it from attempts by demons to take possession of it. Ambrose Bierce even wrote a story based on this theme. It appears now and then in various folklore collections.
For my research for the origin of Go, I dove into the ancient China history for months, and still haven’t finished a series of 10 books called the new perspective for China history (中國史新論). They are dense and read like textbooks, but very fascinating. (my understanding of the ancient maps came from these books)
I have read that story, which is just 2.5 pages, but don’t remember it. About 3 years ago I read all of Borges short stories in the Collected Fictions, a Penguin book that may still be in print. You would do better, I think, to get a copy of that. All of Borges is worth reading, and a handful of stories are super classics IMHO (such as “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The Library of Babel”).
I enjoyed the books mentioned in my last post (217). I decided to continue with the Strugatskys and read the last of their books that I have on hand: Noon:22nd Century, which contains short stories about colonization of the planets (admittedly a bit outdated scientifically). The Moses Hadas book has inspired me to reread one of my ancient favorites, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. This delightful, easy-to-read book is packed with wonderful stories and intriguing references to books that no longer exist. It is so rich it justifies many rereadings.
I’m reading Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff. It’s an incredibly thorough biography of the composer. Basically everything you would want to know about Bach, his extended family, and their neighbors.
I also just received How Much of These Hills is Gold from the library.
Does anyone remember a 1964 Japanese film called The Woman in the Dunes? If you enjoyed it you would probably like the novel by Kobo Abe. It’s a story that resists easy categorization. Certainly it has an element of suspense, but it’s also a very reflective novel and therefore unlikely to be read in two or three sittings, although you definitely could if you’re voracious that way.
The story concerns an amateur entomologist who travels to a remote region in search of an elusive species of beetle. He encounters an isolated village that wages an endless war against encroaching sand. Each individual dwelling sits at the bottom of a deep depression or pit so that when viewed from above, the village vaguely resembles a honeycomb. The buildings on the perimeter act as a buffer zone but have to be tended continuously, one bucket load at a time. The inhabitants of this zone lead a dreary existence of eating, sleeping and shoveling while the other villagers see to their basic needs. It’s this life into which the stranger is tricked and then imprisoned.
The woman with whom he shares a decrepit shack is stoic to a degree that infuriates him. But as he questions her and pleads his case, it becomes natural to wonder if it’s himself he’s trying to convince. His reflections on the city life he left behind range from work to sexual relations, artistic aspiration and the ultimate banality of events reported in the newspapers. If his new life is monotonous and insect-like, it might also be said that it’s not so very different in the essentials from what he’s known before. ( Readers of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis will have some familiarity with this theme.)
How he eventually deals with the situation is better left unsaid here. Again, as suspense stories go, this is hardly the sort of thing to get your pulse racing. But it’s a thoughtfully conceived and written novel, and if you set expectations aside and take things as they come you’re likely to find something rewarding.
I saw The Woman in the Dunes at a Japanese film festival at the American Film Institute in the early 1980s, and I liked it very much. I would characterize it as haunting, something that grows on you as it progresses. I finally found the book a few years ago and read it eagerly. It has much more detail and a deeper theme as you describe. I liked it tremendously. I also read his science fiction novel, Inter Ice Age 4, which was okay, but not good enough for me to retain in my collection (it seemed oddly truncated, making me wonder whether it was abridged in translation).
I recently finished The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating and it was quite thought provoking, filled with interesting facts about snails. It’s also about the author’s struggle with a mysterious chronic illness, and that part was affecting. It’s very short, readable in one sitting
Apparently it was made into a film which I just learned
I originally heard of the book from this talk by a computer scientist who suffered from RSI and couldn’t program
