tbr

I was thinking about it and I think the reason I liked Stacy Schiff's The Witches so much, when I didn't really feel the same way about other books about the Salem witch trials, even though I'm fascinated by the subject, is because it unfolds as a story - it has a strong narrative arc. It wasn't just information bound together to support a thesis. That's part of the reason why, as I wrote about in another blog post, Schiff is able to write abut things that to the modern mind are impossible, as if they did happen. In a standard, traditional non-fiction text, or an academic text, such techniques would be out of place. 

My Vollmann reader (Expelled from Eden) arrived. I think I need to learn to read the way academics read - how they can read 15 books and 30 articles a week - because there are so many books I want to read. Rather than give a long list, here is a list of the categories of books I want to read, with some explanation and examples:

Books about people who don't comform to social norms

One book like this that I read and enjoyed last year is, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and one that I'm reading/ will be reading at the moment is My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

books by people who have very different views from mine

I never used to read books like that. But lately, especially in the last few months, I've become interested in reading and researching views that are different from mine. 

Difficult books

I want to read long, difficult (mostly philosophical) works, like the work of Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes. 

books of essays and literary criticism 

My favourite literary critics are, Harold Bloom, (more recently) Slavoj Zizec, Julia Kristeva (even though I don't understand most of what she writes....like, literally no-idea-don't-understand), Mikhail Bakhtin. For essays, I like Susan Sontag. I want to read more of Gore Vidal. I also like the literary criticism of J. M. Coetzee. I think because he writes literature himself, he knows how to make theory really sing. Or, to put it in terms of what I wrote at the start of this post, he knows how to tell it as a story. 

history books

I've got quite a lot of books about history, but two that really stand out to me and that I want to read are:

The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson and The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. 

And there are lots more - novels, books about psychology, memoirs and biographies, journals of famous people, history of science, books about religion and spirituality, poetry, plays....