Books!
Heck ... Eric just keeps on posting away and apologizing about no posting more often, and here I am keeping quiet.
Let's see what kinds of excuses I can come up with, but first I'll list some recent booksale acqusitions (recent meaning Sunday morning):
- Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.
- A famous an influential imagining of the 'lost' ballads of the early Roman Republic by the great essayist and historian of England.
- T.Z. Lavine's From Socrates to Sartre
- A popular survey.
- Lily Ross Taylor's Party Politics in the Age of Caesar
- A classic on politics at the end of the Republic by a Bryn Mawr professor.
- Harold Lamb's Alexander of Macedon
- A biography apparently bordering on historical fiction.
- G.E. Duckworth's The Nature of Roman Comedy: a Study in Popular Entertainment
- Described by Sander M. Goldberg as "the single most comprehensive guide to Roman comedy." Dope.
- John Summerson's The Classical Language of Architecture
- Looks to be a very readable guide with essays, illustrations, and a nice glossary.
- Will Durant's The Life of Greece
- Volume 2 in the series 'The Story of Civilization.' It apparently sweeps through from 3500 to 146 BC, and is said to be enjoyable.
- The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer from the Riverside Press, Cambridge
- Complete text with notes and glossary.
- A Conrad Argosy, edited by William McFee
- A large, pretty anthology (Heart of Darkness, the Secret Sharer, ...) with woodcuts.
- Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. And it's about Mark Twain!
That last book leads me to excuses. I've been obsessed with Mark Twain lately. While his works are classics, they're classics of a different sort. In the past week I've read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective, and numerous short pieces, and have begun Life on the Mississippi.
There's that and my current job search. And being sick.
But here's hoping all turns out well in the end.
Good book buys always help, especially when you get all of the above for $16.
1 comment:
Please post for the fans, thanks Dave:
It has already been observed, that Xenophon’s diction is an anticipation of the Common dialect. With Attic for its basis, it allows of words from all the dialects, and is wanting in that quality which has justly been termed purity. Moreover, not only the diction, but the style as a whole lacks the masculine simplicity and manly self-restraint which marks all genuine Attic work, and has many of the characteristics of the feminine Ionic. Certainly no pure Attic writer ever recalls by faults of style the Greek of Macedonian times so frequently as Xenophon. He is wanting in dignity, loquacious, superficial, and indifferent to all that differentiates a good style from a bad. He uses different words of identical meaning in the same paragraph, and never exercises his judgment in the selection of terms. On the other hand, he does not disdain the trivial methods of ornamentation which every good style is without.
W. Gunion Rutherford, The New Phrynichus, p. 160f.
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