#115

History is some crazy stuff. These histories of Showa Japan have got my fever going. Next I think I shall dive into Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, or perhaps shorten the step and read The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U. I've been meaning to get to J.M. Barrie's History of Europe for some months and this book by Robert Levin called A Geography of Time for a couple years now. 

Yeah, I think I'm ready for a long, manic nonfiction jag.

Some point this year though, The Decameron. Last summer as we drove many hours the narcissist ex and I listened to a CD lecture course on the Black Death by Purdue professor Dr. Dorsey Armstrong, who I wished wouldn't try to be funny and maybe states some of her opinionated interpretations as fact but who overall delivers a knockout, very well thought data brick on that crazy ole plague. She talked about Boccaccio a great deal, which I loved. Been meaning to get into it with him.

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Fernando Pessoa is a great writer and his images and moods and ideas are good, everything is in place and I like the book, but I'm not making much headway in The Book of Disquiet because it lends itself so marvelously to being drunk in small sips over a long period in whatever page order you please. Also I find myself rereading a passage I've already completed by accident and finding it a different animal than it was before, sentences in a different order than I had thought, words I had missed, meanings askew or multiplied or shifted slightly in tone; the tome seems ensorcelled, slippery with mist, its particles constantly rearranging themselves in a swirl of smoke. 


--JL