through the eye of a needle

I was going to start off by saying it's been a while since I read an academic history, but it hasn't, really. I read Tombstone last year and Bloodlands the year before that. Speaking of which, those are pretty grim  titles for extremely grim subjects. Comparing the Ukrainian and Chinese famines might be interesting for someone smarter and with more free time than me. But I digress.

Through the Eye of a Needle I read because Garry Wills said in his review something to the effect of, "It's a privilege to be alive when a book like this is published." It's hard to imagine higher praise than that. And indeed, TEN is an amazingly erudite, subtle, and fascinating book. The style is quite professory and even a little pedantic at times -- lots of, "Now let us see why this was so," and, "Let us examine this further" -- but it actually grew on me as the book went on. It's only 500-something pages but it felt much longer simply because it's so densely constructed. And boy do I ever know more about late Roman Christianity than I did before.

Long story short, kind of a hard book to recommend to someone unless that person is looking to challenge themself* more strongly than the average lay book reader. But it was very rewarding to finish, even though it may make me come up short on my 30 book target for the year. Now I've moved on to Discipline and Punish, which, though shorter, isn't going to help me reach that goal, either if the first 40 pages are any indication.

*Yes, "that person...themself" is an acceptable construction. Deal with it.

books books books too many

I'm coming to the end of Through the Eye of A Needle, which I am excited about. I don't often read academic books and it is gratifying to come across a new argument so richly researched and from a scholar so knowledgeable. I'm getting a bit giddy about the final chapter. Not Eichmann in Jerusalem-level giddy -- the last chapter of that book knocked my pants off completely -- but I have a sense that Brown's summation of his argument will register in power chords, even if the prose is careful and a bit fuddy-duddy.

However.

This means that once again I am facing the overwhelming task of choosing which books to read next. Keeping a reading list is important, but hewing to it without adding is ridiculous, and so here are some more.

1. On Immunity, by Eula Biss

2. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

3. Redeployment, by Phil Klay

4. On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius

5. A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman

6. The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi

7. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

8. The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

9. A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

10. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

11. Battle Cry of Freedom, by James Macpherson

12. That Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Adichie

13. Middelmarch, by George Eliot

14. I Hotel, by Karen Yamashita

15. Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

On top of all this business:

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, by David Grann
A Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein
Where I'm Calling from, by Raymond Carver
Crazy in Berlin, by Thomas Berger
The Death of Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory
Underworld, by Don Delillo
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle
Them, by Joyce Carol Oates
Between Past and Future, by Hannah Arendt
Psychological Types, by Carl Jung
Genet
Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebhur
What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe
Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters
Moth Smoke, by Mohsin Hamid
Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Quo Vadis? by Henry Sienkiewicz
The Translated Man and Other Stories, by Chris Braak
Levels of the Game, by John McPhee
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Great House, by Nicole Krauss
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Manto
Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills
The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O'Brien
The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, by Milan Kundera
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman
The Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro
The Shipwrecked, by Graham Greene
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Jerusalem, by Goncalo Tavares
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Hassan Manto
The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebhur
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell
On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sabato
History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The Nature of Things, by Lucretius
Confessions, by Augustine
Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, I Corinthians, Romans
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Meditations, by Rene Descartes
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Theologico-Political Treatise, by Baruch Spinoza
Discourse on Metaphysics, by Gottfried Liebniz
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Histories, by Herodotus
The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of Right, by GWF Hegel
Collected Short Stories - Isaac Babel
Labyrinths - Borges
Other Inquisitions - Borges
One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
Correction - Thomas Bernhard
Nog - Rudy Wurlitzer
Gimpel The Fool - Isaac B. Singer
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud
Entire - Samuel Beckett (In other words, everything!)
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
Man In The Holocene - Max Frisch
Seven Gothic Tales - Dineson
Gogol's Wife - Tommaso Landolfi
V - Thomas Pynchon
The Lime Twig - John Hawkes
Blood Oranges - John Hawkes
Little Disturbances Of Man - Grace Paley
I, Etc., - Susan Sontag
Tell Me A Riddle - Tillie Olson
Hero With A Thousand Faces - Campbell
The Paris Review Interviews - Various
How We Live - ed, Rust Hills
Superfiction - ed, Joe David Bellamy
Pushcart Prize Anthologies
Manifestos Of Surrealism - Andre Breton
Documents Of Modern Art - ed, Motherwell
Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
A Homemade World - Hugh Kenner
Letters - Flaubert
The Changeling - Joy Williams
Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
The Palm-Wine Drunkard - Amos Tutola
Searching For Caleb - Ann Tyler
Thank You - Kenneth Koch
Collected Poems - Frank O'Hara
Rivers And Mountains - John Ashbery
Tragic Magic - Wesley Brown
Mythologies - Roland Barthes
The Pleasure Of The Text - Barthes
For A New Novel - Robbe-Grillet
Falling In Place - Ann Beattie
In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country - William Gass
The World Within The Word - Gass
Journey To The End Of The Night - Celine
The Box Man - Kobo Abe
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke
Kaspar And Other Plays - Peter Handke
Nadja - Andre Breton
Chimera - John Barth
Lost In The Funhouse - John Barth
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Black Tickets - Jayne Anne Phillips
Collected Stories - Peter Taylor
The Pure And The Impure - Colette
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please - Carver
Collected Stories - John Cheever
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could - Leonard Michaels
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
The Oranging Of America - Max Apple
Mumbo Jumbo - Ishmael Reed
The Death Of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
The Rhetoric Of Fiction - Wayne C. Booth
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Faust, by Goethe
Go Down Moses, by William Faulkner
Three Tales, by Gustave Flaubert