Tuesday, December 16, 2003
(12:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On not reading books
Via Invisible Adjunct, which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs, I find that Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy has a post about the best books that she did not read this year. My personal favorite is #9:
Athenian Democracy by A.H.M. Jones. I picked up a copy of this in Melbourne and read two of the essays, so you may think it doesn’t qualify. But the book — a marvel of compact, lucid prose and judicious use of the sources, by a mid-20th century giant in the field — deserves its place here. It is so well-written and approachable that you can read pages and pages of careful commentary on the social structure of Athenian society before remembering that you have no real idea who any of the historical figures are, what the relevant sequence of events is, or which century is presently under discussion. Athenian Democracy is that rare sort of book, in other words, which you can have read and still effectively have not read at all.
In the comments to the Crooked Timber post, I also found a link to a Slate story that asks famous literary critics what they haven't read. I was relieved to find that I'm not the only one who hasn't gotten all the way through A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [In Search of Lost Time] -- Louis Menand hasn't, either, although he tries to make up for it by citing the title in French.
On an unrelated note, I always enjoy CalPundit's weekly Survivor post -- here's his last one for the season. The main thing, of course, is the comments, and there are always trolls who mock us Survivor fans for watching TV. This comment thread includes a preemptive strike against such trolls, but I'd like to add that I like Survivor because I watch it with all my friends and because it's fun to talk about what's going to happen next and to analyze the missteps everyone made the week before. I never would have watched it if Tara hadn't forced it upon all of us, and I realize that I could probably be using that time to write sonnets or read the Critique of Pure Reason, but still -- come on. How is trolling comment sections complaining about people watching Survivor any less loserly than actually watching it yourself?
