The Great Books Of The Western World

Finished WALDEN and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.

Debating what to read now, I have TREASURE ISLAND.

MOBY DICK is a bit delayed.

I'm still reading CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain Banks, taking a little longer than expected to finish.

I had bought the 3 LORD OF THE RINGS audiobooks a while ago with Audible credits, so I'm listening to THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING now. This is the gold standard of audiobooks ... Great narration... Sound quality a tiny bit dated but it still whisks you away to Middle Earth.

I've really slowed down on my reading unfortunately. A bit of a log jam with busy work schedule, increased gym training, chucking in 20 minutes of yoga a night and ... Well, not much time to delve into MOBY DICK at the moment sadly.

It'll all shake out.

Still asail with MOBY DICK. Some of the whaling scenes make me really nauseous, just reading them. Blowholes spouting out arterial gore, clots of blood described by Melville as like the dregs from a red wine bottle. It reminded me of the whaling scene from "The North Water" BBC tv show that I saw on Googlebox. Colin Farrell stuck his harpoon directly down into the whale's blowhole. Disgusting really.

Completed MOBY DICK, in a bit of a final rush.

I'm not sure what I thought about the ending... I feel like everyone knows that Ahab's monomania and ego lead to him coming to a bad end, although I found his final conversation with Starbuck oddly touching, almost regretful. I feel like if this was a more modern novel Melville would have made more of Ishmael's survival and the aftermath, but maybe the book didn't need it.

I read, very briefly, that some have considered that Melville partly wrote MOBY DICK as an attack on the kind of muscular American transcendentalism of Emerson and others, concerned that it could lead to Ahab-like beliefs that a man could master nature rather than inevitably it being the other way around.

I guess for a long time we had our way with nature, for all of the 20th century, and maybe now we're starting to see our own 'white whale' in the spectre of a global temperature rise or whatever shape climate disaster will ultimately take.

In literary terms I would have to say that MOBY DICK is genuinely a beautiful novel, some of the best prose of any I've read so far in this process.

I'm more than halfway at this point. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT remains very contemporary and "cat and mouse" in its feel. Compelling characters. This is perhaps one of the strongest novels I've read in this entire series.

I must say that although the lyrical writing of MOBY DICK appealed at the time, it compares very unfavourably with CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in the cold light of day. This is tight, fine writing in comparison with MOBY DICK now feeling a little contrived and overly styled.

Finished CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. It stood my expectations on their head, this was incredibly contemporary and readable. Maybe not all Russian literature is like this (I thought it would be depressing and inaccessible), but I'd certainly consider reading more from him.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT has a curiously uplifting ending. I knew that the protagonist is redeemed, but I didn't think that it would occur through embracing suffering and then the realisation of love. I suppose, what else does it ever occur by, though!!

Now I'm reading Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, which is different but... Interestingly I couldn't help but notice the thread of poverty that runs through both books.

When Tom meets a boy new to town, it's his fine clothes that irritate him and are the most remarkable thing about him. He was wearing shoes, "on a Friday", no less!

First hand experience of what we would undoubtedly consider poverty and suffering was a feature of the lives of practically every author I have read in this thread. Even the Emperor Marcus Aurelius would have been considered to be no more than middling well off by contemporary standards, in respect of some of the things he would have had to put up with (in terms of the childhood mortality of his offspring, perhaps).

I have to believe that this experience informed at least some of the greatness of the works they produced.

As I was driving into work today I got to thinking, in contrast, of our contemporary literary superstars, people like Sally Rooney. I don't think Sally Rooney is a bad author, but I have known many like her, who lived comfortable middle or upper middle class lives and seem to have decided as far as as their university days that they were going to be writers. It's interesting to me that Rooney is one of the more self aware authors out there, she has written / meditated on the fact that there's a lot of bullshit in her industry, she talks about dinner parties full of authors, millionaires and publishing moguls and how there's a dissonance between that and her personal / political outlooks on life.

Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS now.

Straight away, we're hit with the argument that Freud makes ... All dreams are wish fulfilment, even the painful nightmares. How can this be?

He may be wrong about a lot of things, but hard to underestimate his importance nonetheless. It's been 20+ years since I read his INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYSIS, but he remains readable.

Rushed my way to an early finish of INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.

I started to find Freud's prose very grating towards the end. He writes clearly, but there's something really pedantic about him as well, unsurprising considering all the time he spent around neurotics.

Essentially, his findings remain that dreams are wish fulfilment and any element that is contrary to that probably arises from tension between the unconscious and precociousness and our tendency to censor the unacceptable from ourselves.

Dewey describes the traditional model of education:-

That there is an accumulated wisdom of the past, in books and customs/standards/practices, which the young learner must master. The teacher's role is to skilfully bring the learner into connection with this body of knowledge and to facilitate learning it.

I thought there was something almost spiritual about this idea of the teacher as connecting the learner with a higher body of knowledge.

Almost finished with Dewey on EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE.

It's probably a testament to him that I'm not completely clear where he comes down on progressive education versus traditional education, he critiques both very effectively.

I like that he says that child-centred education, with no structure or guidance, on the pretext that it is about personal freedom is a silly idea. He notes that if you swap a traditional teacher, who tells the child what to do, with a vaccum i.e no teacer, and the child decides themselves, they are really no freer, because they have the illusion of choice but actually have such low quality experiences and ability to control their fate that it means they are actually in less control of their outcomes, not greater.

On the other hand he does a good job of warning against the risks of children turned off by authoritarian traditional models of education, and the unnaturalness of the silence and stillness usually required according to a very traditional model. He notes that the teacher in that system is the "keeper of order" whereas in a progressive situation in theory the greater involvment and buy-in of the children can mean that there is a shared understanding of the need for 'rules' to the game / the system.

Finished Sartre's EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM.

A strange experience to read a book I read in the late 1990s and enjoyed, and think it was **** this time around... It's almost nothing like I remember. I recall Sartre being one of the few post-1920s philosophers that I could easily understand, and perhaps that was why I liked it.

Reading it now, it's classic after-dinner French intellectual navel-gazing masquerading as profundity, I should have read Kierkegaard instead maybe.

The idea that man creates his own values, and Sartre's insistence that this is a logical conclusion of considering that there is no God, appealed to me as an undergraduate.

Not a set of ideas that is actually very useful outside of a dinner party or an undergraduate philosophy society. Even in terms of the 'robustness' of the philosophy in the real world, it melts away because actually - in practical as well as theoretical terms - most of us are sure, if we are sure of nothing else, that there is indeed such a thing as absolute right or wrong. And the people who claim they're not are either are usually only affecting to believe it, or if they do (and act upon it), have genuine neurological or psychological issues.

Struggling with Kafka a bit. I just don't get that he is this modernist genius. Perhaps if I read him in the original language, but this comes across as neurotic but otherwise surprisingly banal. I still maintain that reading it back to back with GULAG has undermined THE TRIAL for me significantly. It's hard to get any sense of disorientation or weirdness considering this is a case where the truth is far worse than Kafka's imaginings.

Enjoying FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. It's quite readable, and actually marries reasonably well with GULAG as a read.

In the book the protagonist is on the Republican side and his commander is 'General Golz', a Soviet general who is present in Spain to organise the Republic's military operations. Golz talks about having 'chosen' his nom de guerre before his arrival and wishes he picked a different one.

On the other side of the conflict I guess the fascists receive their assistance from the Nazis.

Although in Ireland we very lionise foreign fighters who took the anti-fascist side in Spain, and I wouldn't necessarily cast aspersions on the intentions of Americans and Europeans who fought, after reading GULAG it's hard not to look at the Soviet assistance and recognise that ultimately if they had their way they would have imposed as repressive a regime as the Nazis / Franco would have. If Spain was a closer satellite of Russia I don't think it's unreasonable to say actually they would have created a more repressive regime, which is what happened elsewhere.

After reading GULAG it's pretty clear that the Soviet Union was just as bad as the Nazis, which is not something I thought I would ever write confidently, considering the Nazi genocide of jews, roma, homosexuals and political prisoners. I know it was a repressive, authoritarian regime, but we're used to putting the Nazis on a pedestal of evil and considering them uniquely reprehensible. But reading about the presence of concentration camps in Soviet Russia from before 1918, and the utter depravity and evil of the regime's system of internal repression and mass murder, you would have to say that the Soviets were as bad as the Nazis in absolute terms, and in terms of the number of people exterminated they surpassed the Nazis, and there's something galling about the fact that regime members succeeded, in the follow decades, in largely shutting down much acknowledgement of exactly how horrendous their acts were. I guess in the West there remains a committed core of people with a reluctance, that is ideologically based, to fully recognising that the Soviet project's survival and economic model was based on forced penal labour.

I also find it interesting that there is a clear thread of thought in relation to the value of forced labour for prisoners. Stalin inherited it from Lenin, and maybe he had it from Marx (Who never swung a pick axe in his life). In GULAG they discuss how the idea very much took hold that to incarcerate a prisoner and let him read and think was of far less moral and practical value than making him work for 12-14 hours a day. Stalin had the 'genius' idea that he would transition the Soviet Union to post-capitalism not by eliminating systems of control like the prison system, but by actively strengthening them. As is noted in GULAG, it's a funny idea, isn't it... You strengthen massively the thing you are claiming will wither away and die if you can just make it strong and effective enough.

In FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, the old man, Anselmo, hates fascists and he talks about wishing not to kill them, but just to put them to work, and to have them understand what it is to work hard as he has. It's a bit chilling after you've read GULAG...

Completed GULAG. When I do my review I've no doubt I'll put this near the top of my recommendation of "must reads".

Technically that means my last "official" read from my list is FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. I'm more than halfway through that now and expect to be done by the end of the weekend, if not before, it's moving along fairly rapidly.

I started Victor Frankl's MANS' SEARCH FOR MEANING, which is a classic recommendation and often tops peoples' lists of their most profound reads ever. It's very hard not to compare this to GULAG and find it slightly wanting. It's a special book, it's a good book, but GULAG was exceptional for me. Solzhenitsyn spent years and years reviewing and crafting it into his life's work / magnum opus, he says at the conclusion that he only stopped working on it because he had to move on with his life. Aside from the detail and quality of GULAG as a historical document, there's also a kind of irreverent humour and free-flowing prose style that makes it very readable and ejoyable, I think a lot of people will be expecting a "misery" read, and it's actually not like that. Shocking, yes, but always enjoyable and engaging. Solzhenitsyn is optimistic and never self-pitying. You do suspect at times all the GULAG's occupants were permanently driven slightly out of kilter emotionally and psychologically, but Solzhenitsyn would probably have agreed with that enthusiastically and with a grin on his face. In contrast, Frankl wrote his book in a relatively short space of time (9 days), it's not really fair to expect it to have the same depth as GULAG, in terms of being a memoir / historical account. I feel like Frankl tossed this off in a creative fit and feels very urgent. However, Frankl's tone is drier, more careful and less humorous. He's also an optimist, I think, but to be honest of the two I would put GULAG well above so far. Isn't it typical though, of what seems to have happened - the erasure of the experiences of Soviet concentration camp victims from public memory (Largely, anyway)? Frankl says at one point that "World War 2 gave us the concentration camp". Poor Solzhenitsyn notes that the British invented them during the Boer war, and there were concentration camps in Russia pre 1918. But it's the Nazi camps that people remember.

I debated closing this thread and starting a new log, but for the moment I'm inclined to just keep rolling even though strictly speaking after post #232 I am outside the scope of what would be considered a 'Great books' reading list in the sense of being focused on the Western canon in an organised manner, and as associated with C20 educationalists.

Had to do a substantial amount of driving since yesterday, and have been listening to both THE TWO TOWERS and Jordan Peterson's BEYOND ORDER (12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE).

First, THE TWO TOWERS. I'm several chapters in. It always is the book in the trilogy that reminds me that Tolkien never wrote THE LORD OF THE RINGS as a trilogy, strictly speaking, I think it was simply a publishing issue. At any rate, THE TWO TOWERS begins in a slightly jarring way, taking up immediately the cliffhanger end of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.

However, I'm well back into it now and this time around I'm enjoying things that, as a teenager or a college student reading it, I don't think I dwelled on. I like the interplay of politics between the orcs who have captured the hobbits. This obviously made it into the movie adaptations, and in the books it's a well-drawn scene. Tolkien sketches quite effectively the differences between Sauruman's new breed of orc and the more conventional goblins of Moria and Mordor, even down to the differences in voice, physical phenotype and behaviours.

Also enjoying the Ents quite a bit, I don't think I realised how funny these scenes involving them are, when I was younger. And wow, Robert Jordan really drew on the Ents extensively for his Ogiers, didnt he? Right down to the Ogier concern with hasty actions and their pitfalls.

As for BEYOND ORDER:-

I'll hold my hands up and say at the outset I was an early fan of Peterson, having listened to the first podcasts he did that played a large part in catapulting him to fame. I remain convinced that those were great podcasts, that he had relevant things to say there and in his biblical YouTube series, and for what it's worth I also think he was right about the warnings he made about the dangers of attempts to police speech in Canada (On that particular issue I think recent years have shown that to at least some degree he was the canary in the coalmine when he warned that controls around speech would have real outcomes for people who dissented, in their professional and public lives, if not in criminal prosecutions).

At a certain point though I felt he began to recycle talking points, and I regret that he became vastly, vastly over-exposed. He did a lot of interviews, and too often, and ended up, at times, no longer on top of his brief. I've seen ones from just before he wrote BEYOND ORDER, in particular, where he looked out of his depth, a bit intellectually shallow, and clearly inappropriately emotional on occasion as well (This bit makes a lot more sense now).

It was frustrating, because I believed - still believe... - that he was a really positive figure in most ways, and offered a compelling amalgamation of clinical psychology, current affairs analysis and a smattering of esoteric bits from other disciplines. He's quirky, flawed but yeah I do think he's insightful and there's a reason why he had the surge of popularity that he did ... It's wasn't just a fluke, nothing that big is.

I also still reject the idea that he is the malign figure that is, by now, a default position for much of the left or centre when it comes to him. He remains one of the most misrepresented people I can think of.

Before I downloaded BEYOND ORDER I actually hesitated because several of the reviews I read were negative, even from outlets that would be broadly pro Peterson! It seemed to me though that all the reviews, whether they were for or against, were all more talking about him than talking about BEYOND ORDER.

I'm several chapters in and all I can say is that if this is the type of work he does in the grip of a benzo addiction then ... I guess the addiction wasn't all bad, because this is the best thing he's done in years. Better than the first book, easily.

One way I can immediately tell that very few of his reviewers actually read this book in any depth is that they completely miss that this is a kind of unusual book for Peterson. The titles of the 'rules' remain eye-catching and bombastic, but so far this isn't even the "obvious self evident self help" stuff that is occasionally it is claimed to be. He's talking about clinical cases from his practice, and the strong theme so far is that a person must engage in several meaningful ways with the community around them in order to remain well-adjusted and happy. He talks about cultivating creative outlets. Talks about making peace with being in a low-status job and waiting for opportunities to progress. To be honest, it's actually all pretty wholesome stuff.

Revisiting one of the review I read, there is a mention that it felt to the reviewer that Peterson was "addressing a Dungeons & Dragons convention". I just can't understand how that was the takeaway, but I guess the point was not to present an insight into an actual reading of the book, but to let the reader of the interview know that the reviewer is 'on the right side' of the debate on Peterson, and to feed them the kind of lazy tropes about his readership they expect.

(Never played D&D in my life, btw, although I wouldn't have minded the opportunity back in the day!)

Finished STATION ELEVEN. I would really recommend this as an excellent literary science fiction novel.

It has a genuine page-turning quality about it, and something I liked about it is that the author didn't descend into the misery-porn that the post-apocalypse novel can sometimes become.

There is a phrase - "cosy catastrophe" - which was used to describe the end of the world novels of John Wyndham. Despite elements of terror, generally Wyndham avoided on-page violence and there were a lot of warm cottages and cups of tea drank, no matter what else was going on outside. There are elements of this in STATION ELEVEN. We're spared the worst.

Going to take a trip back to the 1990s now and re-read THE MAGIC OF RECLUCE, a fantasy novel about a young man exiled from his quasi-utopian island home, and sent into exile to a dangerous mainland continent.

Wow, the Jordan Peterson podcast with Joe Rogan got too weird towards the end, even for me. His wife and daughter only eat Lamb? Weird.

Now on SS-GB by Len Deighton.

Very readable, excellent atmosphere.

Finished SS-GB.

As an alternate history, I would highly recommend it. Also quite effective in evoking the period in question, the wartime food shortages, the bad clothes, the class relations and so on.

Next up Robert Kaplan's WARRIOR POLITICS: WHY LEADERSHIP DEMANDS A PAGAN ETHOS.

I enjoyed Kaplan's SOLDIERS OF GOD: WITH ISLAMIC SOLDIERS IN PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN a few years ago. It's on the U.S State Department's recommended reading list for employees, and basically it was written by Kaplan in that twillight period where the U.S was in support of the Mujahudeen in Afghanistan and along the border with Pakistan, who were fighting the Soviets, but was beginning to become aware of the threat from foreign fighter jihadis among them. Kaplan, a journalist turned public intellectual / analyst, was early in identifying troubles coming down the line. SOLDIERS OF GOD was interesting because Kaplan was able to do a relatively objective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the fighters concerned, this was obviously before 9/11, when afterwards it seemed like any attempt at rational analysis of the qualities, good or bad, of the mujahudeen and their allies went out the window.

I'm a little more sceptical of WARRIOR POLITICS, it looks like the kind of "secondary literature" that I hate. Each chapter is relating foreign policy realpolitik to the thinkers of the ancient world. As long term readers of this thread will know, my firm belief is that rather than reading what a contemporary person has to say about Machiavelli or Sun Tzu or whoever, you should simply read the primary texts...

Finished Kaplan's WARRIOR POLITICS.

An interesting and brief read. Very much a defence of realpolitik. A summary of key points:-

• Kaplan argues that self interested foreign policy is the only moral foreign policy. He basically argues that it's only possible to be moral or adhere to a moral code if you have the luxury of being able to implement it safely, draws on Machiavelli and others to justify this
• He is a sceptic when it comes to international law and the notion of international human rights as something very durable outside of the context of a country like the United States acting as a global underwriter of it. I wonder what he would make of recent EU strength vis a vis Russia, not sure he or many others saw that coming. I think we're seeing a dynamic where the EU has shown it will react to hostility by pushing closer together and relaxing controls on what it is prepared to do militarily and in terms of other coercive tools available to it
• He believes (As I do) that much of the southern hemisphere and developing world is facing into a protracted period of complete chaos and failure caused by a combination of youth bulges, ethnic conflict and coming food and water shortages
• What does he get wrong? He seems to envisage a cornucopia of economic and corporate plenty that will just keep coming in the future. He imagines powerful and wealthy mega cities that will become like new nation states. I'm not sure how that squares at all with the climate emergency that's coming down the tracks. I think we're looking at an end to globalisation and the economic growth of the past 30 years and a move to slower, more regional economics and politics

Finished STEELHEART. Enjoyable but a little bit lightweight, definite YA qualities to it. Not sure I will read on in the series, but never say never.

Quite far into RETURN OF THE KING, I'm enjoying it, I think often on re-reads it's the first two books that stick with you from before. I didn't have a detailed recollection of the siege of Gondor.

Started (re-started, really) Rod Dreher's THE BENEDICT OPTION.

I feel like this is an important book for the religious and non religious alike.

Dreher's analysis is that the West has become secularised and "post Christian" to a large extent, with mainstream law and culture largely antipathetic towards the dwindling minority of people who want to live orthodox Christian lifestyles.

He also sifts through research which supports the idea that even among Westerners who do identify as Christian, their self-reported understanding of Christianity is largely a 'hollowed out' Moralistic Therepeutic Deism (MTD), a term coined by researchers, which is characterised by being a pretty easygoing belief system that puts personal happiness at the centre of the person's worldview, and where God is not largely required in a person's life except when something is going wrong.

So Dreher argues that not only are Westerners departing various Churches in record numbers, he says they don't really understand the belief system they're discarding anyway.

He baldly states that the decline of Christianity in Northern Europe and North America is "irreversible" but that the faith will survive in China and the global south.

The thrust of his argument in response to this set-up is that the decline should prompt people to largely abandon attempts to evangelise and fight culture wars, and rather create resilient faith communities within the broader culture, which will the preservation of a Christian lifestyle within the community. Dreher is talking in terms of not so much the first generation benefiting and holding on to their beliefs, he is suggesting an approach like this to ensure the continued faith of the second and third generations, so they aren't assimilated / leave the Church.

The titular reference to Benedict is, of course, because all of this is somewhat similar to the formation of the Rule of St Benedict, following the fall of the Roman Empire, when Benedict set up a series of monasteries which were like lifeboats amid the collapse and corruption of the Empire. Dreher argues, in effect, for a new "Benedict Option" that would see the creation of little Christian communities and networks throughout the West.

There are at least some projects of this nature that seem to be doing well. I find it a fascinating idea, even as an agnostic.