kenny

What have I read, watched, listened to, and considered this week? Here's a selection:

Books (all currently in-progress):

• Tolstoy's War and Peace. I just finished the section on the Battle of Borodino. I intend to review some of the chapters where Tolstoy expounds his philosophy of history. One quote from this week's reading that grabbed my attention:

  It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or smaller unit as the subject of observation - as criticism has every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be arbitrarily selected. (p.882)

• Stephen King's 11/22/63. This is my first Stephen King novel, and I've been pleasantly surprised. The book looks thick, but it's a breeze compared to Tolstoy.

• Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. I first heard this one recommended on a podcast where the host called it "too literary to be sci-fi, too sci-fi to be literary." I threw it onto my to-read list, where it probably would'be lingered if I hadn't heard it praised by a friend over the weekend. Fifty pages in, I appreciate being thrown straight into an alien world and piecing together whatever clues I can to situate the plot in space and time.

A poem:

• The Twa Corbies. I stumbled on this one as I was skimming the first pages of The Apple and the Spectroscope. A simple and beautiful poem if you can get a handle on the Scots vocabulary. You can find the text here.