Hacker News Books

Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe by Wright Morris, a memoir of spending part of 1932 and 1933 in Austria, Italy, and France. Not on the whole as rewarding as his other memoirs Will's Boy and A Cloak of Light, but interesting enough.

Adolphe and Le Cahier Rouge by Benjamin Constant. The former a devastating short novel, the latter a memoir, a portrait of the artist as a young twerp. (The things we boomers would say if something comparable had been published by a millenial!)

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a novel read for a book club. The less said, the better.

Autobiography by Henry James. Very slow going, but rewarding, a mind at work.

My Promised Land by Avi Shalets. A history of Israel and the Zionist project by an Israeli journalist. It covers a lot of ground that most Americans (I infer from my book club) don't know. It seemed to me that it could have been maybe 15% shorter, and that David Remnick should have impounded Shalets's thesaurus.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder by Isaiah Berlin. Well worth reading, but requiring more time than just its own reading, for now I have to read some Herder. I have already fought my way through some Hamann; the translation is heavily footnoted, as necessary for those of us who aren't handy with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and don't have the Bible memorized.

Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (vol. ii) by Egon Friedell. Clive James's recommendation in Cultural Amnesia put me onto this one. Most interesting, but slow going because my German is rusty.

[Edit: got rid of most of the "most interesting"s.]