Acquisitions
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“Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”
In February, I joined a reading group comprising two moderators and, depending on the week, seven to ten other readers (thinkers, learners) who are tackling the twelve books and a three-chapter epilogue of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov one book a week. Before the first meeting, I asked which edition we would use and was advised to choose whatever worked for me. The Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation has been on my shelves since 2003 when I joined an online group that fell apart after Book II. After revisiting it and then perusing the Norton Critical edition (which is based on the Constance Garnett translation), I chose the Barnes and Noble edition of Garnett. The Garnett translation is also readily available in audiobook format, and having the book in my ears and before my eyes greatly enhances my deep reading.
Naturally, I’ve been marking memorable passages. Here are some from the first four books.
Book I: The History of a Family
Chapter I: Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple‐hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
Chapter IV: The Third Son, Alyosha
He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love.
Chapter V: Elders
Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling‐block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.
And later…
For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to‐day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before.
Book II: An Unfortunate Gathering
Chapter II: The Old Buffoon
“And, above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all.”
And later…
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness. But get up, sit down, I beg you. All this, too, is deceitful posturing….”
Chapter IV: A Lady of Little Faith
“And do you know, I came with horror to the conclusion that, if anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I am incapable of loving any one.”
And later…
“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint‐heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions.”
Chapter VI: Why Is Such a Man Alive?
With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears of emotion in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, “You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You’re acting now, in spite of your ‘holy’ wrath.”
Book III: The Sensualists
Chapter VIII: Over the Brandy
“There’s absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something? Anything is better than nothing!”
And later…
“No, I am not angry. I know your thoughts. Your heart is better than your head.”
Book IV: Lacerations
Chapter III: A Meeting with the Schoolboys
Alyosha had no art or premeditation in beginning with this practical remark. But it is the only way for a grown‐up person to get at once into confidential relations with a child, or still more with a group of children. One must begin in a serious, businesslike way so as to be on a perfectly equal footing. Alyosha understood it by instinct.
“Who in the world, the strange and incomprehensible world, did she think she was?”
Since closing The Count of Monte Cristo with a satisfied readerly sigh on February 21, I’ve read eleven books, for a year-to-date total of forty-eight.
■ Macbeth (William Shakespeare; 1606. Drama.)
■ Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (Harold Bloom; 2019. Non-fiction.)
■ The Merry Wives of Windsor (William Shakespeare; 1597. Drama.)
As I’ve mentioned, I am rereading all of the plays this year.
■ My Man Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse; 1919. Fiction.)
A delight-filled reread.
From “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest”:
I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare — or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad — who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. There’s no doubt the man’s right. It’s absolutely the way with me.
From “The Aunt and the Sluggard”:
As I stood my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I’ve always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven’t got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don’t you know. I mean to say, ever since then I’ve been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.
■ Hope Rides Again (Andrew Schaffer; 2019. Fiction.)
■ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne; 1871. Fiction.)
Two more rereads.
■ Kindred (Octavia Butler; 1979. Fiction.)
Read for this month’s Cardiff BookTalk. I was late to the Octavia Butler fan club but am glad to have received my membership card.
■ Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (Katherine May; 2020. Fiction.)
Reviews here and here.
■ We Run the Tides (Vendela Vida; 2021. Fiction.)
Heard about this on NPR; borrowed it from the library; read it in two sittings.
p. 33
I pass the bushes where butterflies like to flutter and feed. Sometimes we catch them in jars for a minute before releasing them. Sometimes we wait too long to release them and find them dead. We know the names of the girls who keep the butterflies too long, and we have no idea what to do with this information.
■ Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout; 2008. Fiction.)
Reread in anticipation of Olive, Again (2019). The title of today’s post occurs on page 162 of my edition, as does the following:
There were days — she could remember this — when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.
■ Ice (Anna Kavan; 1967. Fiction.)
An essay in my edition of Kindred likened Butler’s novel to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I reread last year, and Kavan’s Ice, which was already on my shelves — genre-defying. Naturally, I had to move Ice up the TBR list. Related article here.
Acquisitions
Recent acquisitions
Ma foi!
A few recent acquisitions.
With just twenty minutes remaining before we tuned in for the season finale of All Creatures Great and Small, I savored the last page of the “thumping good read” (R.I.P., A Common Reader) that is The Count of Monte Cristo.
p. 191
“Upon my word,” said Dantes, “you make me shudder. If I listen much longer to you, I shall believe the world is filled with tigers and crocodiles.”
“Only remember that two-legged tigers and crocodiles are more dangerous than those that walk on four.”
Reading notes
The view from my desk earlier this month.
❧ To prepare for a new book group, I read (and reread) Book I of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. For a number of reasons, I’m working from the Constance Garnett translation rather than the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (which has languished on my shelves since 2003). Just a scant twenty-five pages in, I am wondering what took me so long to arrive at this incredible book.
❧ Now that I have reached Chapter 76 in The Count of Monte Cristo, I think I may safely report that I will finish this tome well ahead of schedule. What a face-paced (if highly improbable) tale of revenge!
❧ I finished Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) for The Deep Read. Topping a number of 2018 best-of lists, this novel needs no additional recommendations from me, but Orange’s delicate spider web of a plot really does dazzle.
p. 20
Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not going to hurt as much anymore. One time she use the word devastating after I finished reading a passage from her favorite author — Louise Erdrich. It was something about how life will break you. How that’s the reason we are here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness. I didn’t know what it meant then, and she saw that I didn’t. She didn’t explain it either. But we read the passage, that whole book, another time, and I got it.
❧ My commitment to rereading Shakespeare’s plays remains steadfast. Since my last checkin, I finished Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V. To complement the Henriad, I plucked Harold Bloom’s 1992 meditation on the Fat Knight, Falstaff: Give Me Life, from the Shakespeare collection.
p. 50
If there can be a secular Resurrection, it would be Falstaff rising from the dead. The spirit that surges in all of us, even in the face of death, mounts to more life in the presence of the grandest personality in all of Shakespeare.
❧ As I mentioned in my last post, my reawakened Betty Broderick obsession / fascination demanded feeding, so I finished Bryna Taubman’s brisk if builder-grade Hell Hath No Fury.
❧ I’m also reading Maurice Chammah’s Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, which I heard about on NPR on the (long but worthwhile) drive to Ann Arbor last month.
❧ So that puts me at thirty-six books read since the beginning of the year, twenty-eight of which were read from the shelves.
“It is a refuge from distress….”
A recommendation that I look into Zena Hitz’s The Catherine Project sent me to shelves for Lost in Thought.
p. 58
Intellectual life is a way to recover one’s real value when it is denied recognition by the power plays and careless judgments of social life. That is why it is a source of dignity. In ordinary social life, knowledge is exchanged for money or for power, for approval or for a sense of belonging, to mark out superiority in status or to achieve a feeling of importance. These are our common currencies, our ways of advancing ourselves or diminishing others. But since a human being is more than his or her social uses, other, more fundamental ways of relating are possible. These forms of communion can consist in the joyful friendship of bookworms or the gritty pursuit of the truth about something together with people one would otherwise find unbearable.
p. 110
What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective, to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among others.
Other reading notes:
I finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998). If you missed this New Yorker article, when I linked it after reading Parable of the Sower, make time for it now.
I’m on Chapter 51 of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a brisker pace than Robin proposed, but that’s all right.
I’m also reading Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) with The Deep Read.
Dirty John reawakened my dormant obsession with Betty Broderick, so I am revisiting Bryna Taubman’s Hell Hath No Fury (1992) and Bella Stumbo’s Until the Twelfth of Never (1993). Related article here. I love that showrunner Alexandra Cunningham “has been obsessed with the Broderick story since she was a teenager and read journalist Bella Stumbo’s book … so often that she stole it from the library.”
Some reading notes
I reread three more Shakespeare plays:
■ Titus Andronicus
■ The Comedy of Errors
■ Henry IV, Part I
And read these:
■ Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (Talia Levin; 2020. Non-fiction.)
NYT review here.
■ The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler; 1939. Fiction.)
In So We Read On, Maureen Corrigan makes much of The Great Gatsby’s debt to hard-boiled detective stories, which led me to this classic. Thanks to Corrigan, I plan to read The Maltese Falcon, too, and, for other reasons she explores, to revisit Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
■ The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai (John Tayman; 2006. Non-fiction.)
This has been on my shelves for fifteen years. NPR interview here.
■ Herakles (Euripides (trans. R. Potter); 416 B.C. Drama.)
Read in anticipation of an upcoming Theater of War event, Hercules in Pennsylvania. In my search for supplementary resources, I stumbled on Reading Greek Tragedy Online.
■ The Old Guard, Book Two: Force Multiplied (Greg Rucka; 2020. Graphic fiction.)
What fun to discover a second volume of this series on Hoopla.
“Unity is an anomaly.”
From Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authority by Anne Applebaum (2020):
p. 56
Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
p. 171
For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump. It’s not enough to express tepid approval of a president who is corrupting the White House and destroying America’s alliances. You have to shout if you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.
Nerdishly 