all the books i read in september and what i thought of them

All of the books I read in September and what I thought of them

I read 5 books in September. There is nothing else new to report. 

The first book I read was We Computers, and I liked it a lot, and I think I might read it again. In this book there is a Frenchman who builds a computer to write poetry for him. His friend is named Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI). There are some women in his life, but they seem to be not real and also puns. I don't really believe that AI is real, either. He thinks that the life of the poet has no influence on the poem, and the purest poetry is not made by any person whose life experiences inform the poem, because the reader is supposed to project their own experiences and feelings onto the poem. This is why he writes AI poetry (here I mean artificial intelligence and not Abdulhamid Ismail). If this is how he feels about poetry, I don't really understand why he should be so interested in the lacunose/fictional life of the poet Hafez. I am so sorry for using the word lacunose; I am a parody of myself. The computer is writing a book and it is not clear what, canonically, is happening because the computer will tell multiple versions of the same story.

When I was a college freshman, I took a class about Russian literature and Roman history, and it was a great class and I learned so much and became a classics major. In the Russian literature hour, we read difficult books (such as Petersburg, which is nonsensical on purpose), and my professor was sort of insane in the way that academics sometimes are and made no sense (great person), so I would read the book in the middle of the night while my roommate was sleeping and feel like I was also asleep and dreaming a weird dream, and then I would go to class, and he would say nonsensical things about the nature of being and nonbeing, and I would understand maybe less than I did originally. I have no idea how I did so well in that class, and I think I might have lost the ability to understand how to read nonsensical books and understand nonsensical men (I've never met a nonsensical woman other than of course me Clara); a wise woman once said that one knows everything at eighteen and nothing at twenty-one. Ultimately I think the class was trying to make you understand that places mean things to people, and that places (the place in question was St. Petersburg) are symbols for lots of things not strictly inherent to the place itself. I knew at the time I learned the thing I was supposed to learn in the class because there was a Russian cafe in Newton Centre, and there were paintings of St. Petersburg landmarks on the back of the building (the building constituted one boundary of my favorite alley in the whole world), and when I first looked at the paintings, I saw the bronze horseman and the Alexander column and I felt astonished and delighted. I guess delight is probably not how you are supposed to feel about the bronze horseman (certainly not if you are Pushkin), but what I am trying to say is that the physical landscape of St. Petersburg developed into a symbol for me, too, even though I've never been, and even if the symbol inspires exactly the wrong feelings. 

This book also seems to be interested in the idea that symbols have some meaning that do not make logical sense and can't be explained, like tulips and poetry. I am unfortunately starting to feel that I have lost the race against my own memory to expand on this thought. I told my dad I couldn't tell him what I wanted to order from the Japanese restaurant until I wrote about the book I had just finished reading because I would forget what it was about, but he was not willing to accommodate this. It was perhaps a strategical error to write a paragraph about my experience in a strange, almost dreamlike Russian literature class before trying to remember the symbols in this book. Wow I am just throwing in this race against my memory. 

I would like to give this book to someone who hates LLMs with no nuance and great passion (that is actually me Clara) because I think it would make them blow up. This book was published in 2022, but it was serialized, so I imagine the author begun writing somewhat earlier and much before our current times and current AI events. So I guess it is probably not responding to current discussions about AI art and writing, but it's hard to feel like it's not saying anything about how the protagonist's ambivalence about the importance of human authors is essentially an erasure of humans altogether: the computer can write as many poems and as many versions of events as it wants, and it is obviously so much more efficient than a person. The disembodied voice asks the protagonist, if what you say about the irrelevance of the human author is true, then what's the point of your existence? If a computer might as well do anything a person can do, what is our point? Today at my job the (VERY NICE) computer guy told me my computer had a corrupted cookie, and the version of the computer software he wants my boss to upgrade to has Microsoft Copilot so completely integrated into everything that you will never write an email again because, he says, it's like a drug. He doesn't know why my computer has a corrupted cookie, but I do. It's because I was cursed by god for knitting a pair of socks with wool and cotton yarn, which violates maybe not the letter but certainly the spirit of Deuteronomy 22:11. I did this purposely to spite—well, not spite, because I have no malice towards God—make fun of God. I certainly learned my lesson about the continued relevance of the book of Deuteronomy in our times, but, as happens so often, I think I learned the wrong lesson. 

Some translations of this Bible verse just say, don't mix wool and linen in a garment. Others say, don't wear garments made of mixed materials such as wool and linen. Shamefully I can read essentially no Hebrew so I looked at the Septuagint, since I think those guys back in the day probably understood Biblical Hebrew better than most Bible translators these days. The Septuagint says (in Greek, obviously), don't wear adulterated [material], wool and linen, in the same [material]. This is what I think it says. Clearly the prohibition is of adulterated material, and wool and linen is just the obvious example of the adulterated material you might be tempted to wear. In any case, if it was unclear (the Septuagint could always be wrong), I have just done an experiment, and it seems that God does not want his people to wear adulterated garments in general, or, at the very least, to knit such garments with the express purpose of making fun of him. More trials may be needed to reach a definitive conclusion. 

Anyway, I felt that this book was almost like a religious experience because you can’t trust the computers telling the story (for one thing), and it is unclear at all times on what level something is fictional (whether it really is happening in the book, is not actually happening in the book, or actually happened in the author’s life or is a representation of the author). At the end of the book, it starts to feel like the world is ending. I thought this book was great. I really don’t understand why someone would find it boring or unenjoyable; the story is occurring on many levels, and it is always interesting to see in what nontraditional direction the author is going to take the book. You almost feel like the book is pointing at the ultimate truth or the ultimate story in which all other stories constitute merely a small part. I think once I have understood the ultimate story, I will still not be able to explain it very well to others. On a more concrete level, the book suggested to me that the ultimate story might be that me and my friend Tanya are the Jew and the Armenian inside the dream of an Uzbek. I am thinking that maybe the ultimate story is either in Uzbek or requires a knowledge of Uzbek to understand. Uzbek has at least six and maybe up to nine cases. If the ultimate story required knowledge of a certain language to understand, it would never be a language with fewer than four cases. 

Ancient Greek has only four cases (excluding vocative), but the way it uses them is so elegant that I think more would not be better (cf. Latin ablative case). I like that the poet addresses themself in the last couplet in a ghazal. Once, I read a Catullus poem riffing on the Sappho poem in which he adds four more lines, and one of the lines is, Catullus, free time is not good for you. I like this because it’s like a ghazal and because I’m not sure free time is good for me either. 

The next book I read was Glorious Exploits, which is a book about a bunch of losers—perhaps I should not call prisoners of war losers even if it was thousands of years ago—at least two losers and several Athenian prisoners of war from the Sicilian expedition (which went poorly) putting on Euripides plays. I liked it because no one has particularly jarring modern values, but I thought they were all still pretty charming. But in our time, they (especially the protagonist) would probably be moral monsters. I don't like when the Classics-inspired books make everyone a saint. 

In this book there were subplots that were maybe not fully resolved, so it should have been longer or more focused on just the play rehearsals. I think the protagonists' benefactor/producer is Dionysus, but if he were Irish. I think the authors of my Bacchae class English readings would have had a field day with this. The losers don't really overcome their failures or stop being losers, and I wished the book had a happy ending because I was so sad on the day I finished reading it, and the ending wasn't too happy either. But the book recognizes on that everything in the world is in some way about Euripides (everything proceeds from him and to him everything returns), and I like this because even though I don't feel that Euripides has saved my life, sometimes I feel like he saved my soul. 

The third book I read was An Odyssey by the Odyssey translator Daniel Mendelsohn. The author is very engaging when he talks about his life, and whenever I thought he was being uncharitable to his students, I didn't think that way any more by the end of the book. I was in Quebec (I wasn't anywhere terribly interesting in Quebec—everyone seemed to assume that I would be somewhere interesting in Quebec, but I was in a small town) for a family reunion. It wasn't my family reunion. It was my nemesis's family reunion, and I was there because my nemesis and my parents were talking about the family reunion at the wedding picnic, and my dad said, can we come? And my nemesis said, sure. And my mom said, what? And my dad said, great! So I was crashing my nemesis's family reunion, and I only enjoyed myself insofar as I was hanging out with my nemesis's family. I think they thought I was cooler than I am. I am very cool, but I am not cool by virtue of being able to recite a lot of poetry. My nemesis's cousin claims to be a character in this book because he was a student in the Odyssey class in the book. This is why I read it. He wouldn't tell me what his pseudonym was; he said it would be really obvious, but I read the whole book, and I still don't know. Froma Zeitlin is also a character in this book, and if I was mentioned in the same book as Froma Zeitlin, I would never shut up about that. 

Something that me and the author have in common is that we are both Straussians. I don't really know what it means to be a Straussian; I just know that Leo Strauss was my professor's professor Muhsin Mahdi's professor as well as Daniel Mendelsohn's professor's teacher (and father), and that my (Classics) thesis advisor wouldn't like our professor of ancient political philosophy anyway because he's a Straussian, as is apparently the rest of the august department of political science. I know I have been indoctrinated, I just don't know what it is I think that's a result of the Straussian indoctrination. 

I read a book about demanding witnesses because I am interested in the author's work, and I am a little afraid to say anything critical about it on the internet because I want to apply to her university's grad program and I don't know if, when you apply to this program, they check to see if you have ever said anything critical about a professor's book on a blog that is, if I'm honest with myself, probably possible to find if you stalk me on the internet with enough conviction. I WANT TO EXTEND MY RESPECTFUL REGARDS TO ANY DUKE CLASSICISTS WHO MAY HAVE FOUND MY BLOG AND READ PAST MY VERY LONG WE COMPUTERS REVIEW. I AM A FAN OF THIS BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR AND I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO BE ADMITTED TO YOUR PROGRAM PLEASE. THIS WOULD BE REALLY BIG FOR ME PLEASE I AM HUMBLY ASKING. My disagreement with this book is that the author is using very modern diagnostic criteria and standards of social justice to read ancient plays, and I don't really understand what is the point of this approach unless she thinks the playwrights are thinking in the same terms as we might today, and I don't think she does. But I think it is really interesting how she finds expressions of trauma in literary and rhetorical devices and the structure of the play. This is a level of Greek reading comprehension and attention to detail I wish I had. 

The last book I read was the new John Green book Hollywood Ending. There is ostensibly a comma in the title, but I hate the comma, and I almost didn't buy the book because I hated the comma so much. 

But I did buy the book because I had a gift card. I actually had four gift cards and three of them had very little money on them, so I bought it with four gift cards. It's a great book! I wish the male narrator sounded more like a character obviously written by John Green. I like when John Green books could not possibly have been written by anyone other than John Green and this is almost painfully obvious at all times. The female narrator was great because she always sounded like John Green, except when she sounded like Selin. The characters have very convincing sorrows. I just think John Green writes very engaging books that reflect the John Green worldview. I enjoy experiencing the John Green worldview.

That is all I have to say.