all the books i read this winter/spring and what i thought of them

 All the books I read since I last updated the readers of my blog (this occurred in January)

I appreciate my blog readers' patience since I spent the last semester too busy with my thesis to update my blog, or, at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'm actually of half a mind to put my entire senior thesis in a blog post because I've been told it's really good and I love attention. When I say I am of half a mind, I mean I am going to do it when I get around to it. 

I have recently graduated, and I'm not happy about it at all, but the good people who read my blog might at least be pleased to know that I will certainly have more time for reading books and blogging about books. 

In January I read 5 books and then it all sort of went downhill from there. I reread The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which is my third favorite book of all time and makes me start thinking like the protagonist Selin. I feel when I read this book that I am seeing the world through Selin's eyes, much as Selin is, in a certain sense, seeing the world through Ivan's eyes. Selin has a strange obsession with Ivan. This would never happen to me. Then I read Babel by R.F. Kuang because Margaret Thatcher told me to read it, but, more importantly, Chaney also told me to read it, except Chaney told me to read it because she thought I wouldn't like it, and she was entirely correct. I hated Babel and it is my second least favorite book of all time, but I'm sort of sick of explaining why, so you can read my Goodreads review if you really care, and I will merely reassure you that I am NOT a Letty apologist (Letty is an idiot who sucks). 

The rest of the books I read in January were all fine. I read When the Angels Left the Old Country because my other Greek professor said it was really good, but she hates every book I love, so I don't really know why I should have believed her. I thought this book was sort of poorly written but probably a good time for someone who enjoys YA fantasy, which I don't really. I read The Twenty Years Crisis by E.H. Carr for school and it was less boring than I thought it would be. I made my book club read Passing Time by Michel Butor because Jack Winkler referenced it in Actor Auctor in the same sentence as he also referenced Pale Fire, and my book club didn't like it, but I don't really like the books they suggest (actually, this month we are reading The Frozen River which is a really good book that I have unfortunately already read), and, in any case, it is really Jack Winkler's fault that we read it, and they are never getting an apology out of him because he is not alive. I thought this book was okay, and if it was very oblique, the setting was very good, and I liked how the characters did the same things over and over again, and I liked the discussion of Cain and Abel. 

In February I read Native Son because it was referenced in The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket. This is a very good book that lives up to the hype and asks interesting questions about free will. This was the only book I read in February. 

In March I reread The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pnin which are the the fourth and second best book by Vladimir Nabokov respectively. The third best book by Vladimir Nabokov is Ada or Ardor. 

In April I read Bacchae (in Greek!!) and War and Change in World Politics by Robert Gilpin (in English) for school, and I read Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash for fun. Originally I wanted to read Electra in Greek and I made a bigger deal about this than previously thought possible. I made promotional posters and then said I didn't make them, Pete made them, and then I made ransom note themed posters and pretended to kidnap Pete and replace him with an exact replica (like as blackmail), and then he was out with a concussion (which he sustained from hitting himself on the head with an acoustic guitar) so I said that I had kidnapped the replica, and then he came back, and I sent myself a cease and desist order from the FBI. This is not the first time I have sent myself a cease and desist order from the government. This was all after I asked Sophia if I could haze the new grad students and she said no. Then Callie established a revolutionary tribunal and put Pete and his replica in the 10,000 year torment machine for 10,000 years (for making the posters, ostensibly). I am very pleased with the nonsense I originated last semester, but it didn't convince anyone else that we should read Electra, so we read Bacchae instead. In retrospect, I'm not exactly sure why I thought it would be convincing.

This most recent semester, I think the bit I undertook was pretending to be a prophet and then a false prophet. Strictly speaking, I don't have to pretend to be a false prophet because I am a false prophet. Last fall, my running joke was the jar (it was a collective), and last spring I guess it was pretending that I was in the Aphrodite class. 

Because I am very happy and well-adjusted, AND IF I MAINTAIN THAT I STILL AM I WILL BE, nevertheless I enjoyed Bacchae although I absolutely have the wrong perspective because I have no sympathy for Pentheus and I enjoyed when bad things happened to him. I was having at least as much fun as Dionysus. Last year in my mythology class, my professor assigned me to defend Dionysus in a class debate, and she shouldn't have assigned me to have an opinion if she didn't want me to have that opinion forever. So I am still a Dionysus apologist and a Pentheus hater. There is a messenger speech in this play and the messenger describes Dionysus bending a tree that he brings it to the ground and places Pentheus on it and lets go so it swings back up and he can spy on the maenads from the tree. This is exactly the opposite of what happens in the Robert Frost poem about the swinger of birches. This gave me a new appreciation for that poem because previously I didn't like it. But now I have a new appreciation for what it says about divinity and the boundaries between earth and heaven and having a certain respect for those boundaries, even when one is sort of upset about the passage of time on earth. And that's what sôphrosunê means to me. 

The book about international relations by Robert Gilpin was not really interesting, and I think his ideology is totally incoherent because he can't decide whether he actually wants to be a realist or just a constructivist in a trench coat. Out of the authors we read I thought Kenneth Waltz was the most correct but also the least readable—Gilpin is at least not as dense. But Gilpin is not my grand-professor like Kenneth Waltz. Kenneth Waltz wrote a book about how nuclear weapons make the world safer. I'm not exactly saying I agree with him, but I sure enjoy having that opinion. It's not my job to have the right opinion about nuclear proliferation. The book by Robert Gilpin was very red, but I didn't buy it (I'm always making the same mistake) (the mistake is not buying red books assigned for class), and it took a long time to get it from the library, so for a few classes I didn't have a physical copy of the book at all. I don't actually know if we were permitted to have laptops (in a certain administrative sense I don't know what was going on in that class), but I don't permit myself, so I read my PDF at home and remembered everything like a medieval university student. This class was a seminar and there was really a lot of participation. If you had been there, you would have thought I was impressive, or at the very least performative. 

I read Lost Lambs because I read an essay criticizing it for being apolitical or perhaps hostile to progressivism, I'm not sure which. I liked this book because it gave itself a lot of opportunities to have a political ideology and didn't take any of them. It seems really ambivalent towards any opinion it sets itself up to have. I don't really enjoy political novels except insofar as they have something else interesting going on, and this is sort of the opposite. I actually can't tell what the author's political affiliation is (I suspect she might be ideologically similar to my friend Jess, but I'm not going to tell you any more about my friend Jess, so this doesn't give you any helpful information unless you are Jess). Every significant issue in this book is played for laughs, including radical Islamic terrorism. I am at a time in my life that I find this refreshing. 

I will discuss the book(s) I read in May at some time in the future. 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman (rereread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Babel by R.F. Kuang ⭐

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb ⭐⭐⭐

The Twenty Years Crisis by E.H. Carr ⭐⭐⭐

Passing Time by Michel Butor ⭐⭐⭐

Native Son by Richard Wright ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (rereread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bacchae by Euripides (reread but in Greek) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

War and Change in World Politics by Robert Gilpin ⭐⭐

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash ⭐⭐⭐⭐