Before I head to bed tonight, I will have reshelved Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021) — review here. It moved up in my TBR stack when I registered for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Book Breaks event featuring the author. What an education — the book, of course, and the lecture. I am nearly through another Chief Inspector Gamache title (Louise Penny) and am keeping pace with the Tolstoy Together and 100 Days of Dante groups.

Other books I’ve recently read:

■ The Complete Tales (Beatrix Potter; 2002 edition. Fiction.)
■ God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Kurt Vonnegut; 1965. Fiction.)
Two of my reading challenges were unmet in August: art and Vonnegut. Now only the Potter biography remains to complete the art category.

■ The Two Noble Kinsmen
■ Henry VIII
■ Pericles
Only five remain in my quest to reread all Shakespeare’s plays this year.

■ The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed (Wendy Lower; 2021. Non-fiction.)
Read prior to attending a virtual event at the Gross Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

■ The Long Way Home (Louise Penny; 2014. Fiction.)
■ The Nature of the Beast (Louise Penny; 2015. Fiction.)
■ The Great Reckoning (Louise Penny; 2016. Fiction.)
These are not perfect books, but the world Penny has created and the people with whom she has populated it both interest and engage me.

■ The Push (Ashley Audrain; 2021. Fiction.)
Selected on a whim. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) covers the same territory far more compellingly.

■ The Optician of Lampedusa (Emma-Jane Kirby; 2016. Fiction.)
For a Cardiff Book Talk program.

■ Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert; 1857 (trans. Lydia Davis; 2010). Fiction.)
With my daughter prior to listening to the terrific podcast by The Readers Karamazov.

p. 77
But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she will struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

I have always been drawn to tomb figures.

Last week, I had an opportunity to revisit the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The book I chose for the drive there and back was The Beautiful Mystery (Louise Penny; 2012). When I returned home, I finished Migrations (Charlotte McConaghy; 2020), which I loved and particularly recommend to fans of Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel; 2014). Related review here.

Since my last annotated list I’ve finished both Othello (1603) and Timon of Athens (1606) as part of my goal to reread all of Shakespeare’s plays this year.

For a recent Chicago Humanities Festival program, I devoured The Taste of Sugar (Marisel Vega; 2020) in two sittings; and for The Readers Karamazov lineup of Middlemarch related texts, I read Clouds (Aristophanes (trans. I. Johnston); 423 B.C.), again relying on the wonderful Reading Greek Tragedy Online resource.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman; 2021) yielded a number of passages for my commonplace book. (The title of this entry is taken from the introduction.) The premise? If we make it to eighty, we live for about four thousand weeks. How will we spend them? This book, writes Burkeman, “is an attempt […] to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.”

p. 64
In case this needs saying, it isn’t that a diagnosis of terminal illness, or a bereavement, or any other encounter with death is somehow good, or desirable, or “worth it.“ But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonizing loss.

p. 115
The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay. The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future — but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future.

p. 116
[T]his underlying longing to turn the future into something dependable isn’t confined to compulsive planners. It’s present in anyone who worries about anything, whether or not they respond by devising elaborate timetables or hypercautious travel plans. Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again — as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine….

p. 158
The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they are truly happy in a way that the rest of us — pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment — are not.

p. 159
There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.