List of books I’ve read in 2026

  • 2026-09-10: Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
    Reproduction
    The subject is interesting, the author fails to address it. Effectively noticing that when things are reproduced, there are more of them and then explaining that as a loss of “aura” does not do it for me. Another point is when he imagines a man if the Stone Age portraying an elk on the walls of a cage, he assumes that “in the main it was meant for the spirits”. How does he know that? He commonly employs the trope of making unfounded statements and then deriving a lot out of that which had no proof attached. Another example is the assumption that people wanted portraits of loved ones out of some cult rationale (why simply wanting to remember the loved ones is a cult?). Another one is the claim that an actor is gripped with anxiety in front of the camera (can’t they get used to it and relax?). He ends with a nonsensical Marxist speech. 1.5 out of 10 (at least he’s not so deliberately incomprehensible as Derrida).
  • 2026-09-01: Lawrence Lipking: The practice of theory
    How lively to see read a sane and funny at the time article. “To begin with, you have asked the wrong person. Deconstruction is not my game. It is a bit as if a sheep has been comissioned to say something sympathetic about wolves, from a wolf’s point of view”. As an example he goes over “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats and shows that, in isolation, it can be interpreted in many ways, to the point where sometimes it does not make sense. He also points out how common is for critics to criticise other points of view without applying the same standard to their own. 9 out of 10.
  • 2026-08-27: Jacques Derrida: Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the
    Human Science
    Absolute rubbish. Pretentious rubbish. A quote that exemplifies what’s wrong with it: “The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.”. You could forgive the occasional error, but this is full of errors. Will come back and explain more soon. 1 out of 10.
  • 2026-08-14: Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens
    Light comedy book. The theme is a biblical end of the word going in an unexpected direction. Ending is a bit meah, the book is more about enjoying the reading journey than the destination. It’s easy to miss British irony e.g. about building a lot of houses in the “essential character of the village”. It makes heavy usage of a story within story. E.g. there is secondary story about The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the sub-story of the delivery man that reaches them with a message and has to die to deliver the message to the Death character, and the even more minor story of the German lorry driver that kills the delivery man. Read it before. 8.5 out of 10.
  • 2026-06-28: Michel Foucault: What is an author?
    The triumph of scholasticism: the art of making difficult of a simple subject. Not recommended. 1 out of 10.
  • 2026-04-30: William Zinsser: On Writing Well
    This is written by a journalist, it’s in a journalist style. It has interesting points, it feel dynamic, but if you want to really understand a subject look for a subject authority e.g. see something like rancis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner: Clear and simple as the truth. To point just one thing, the advice to avoid passive is wrong. Passive is in the language for a reason: via a already introduced subject, introduce a new one to which the narrative will move next. Not bad enough to stop reading it. The best out of it is a reading list of potentially interesting books.
  • 2026-04-02: Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog
    OKish. More interesting as insight on how to write a novel: you write short stories and then you link them together.
  • 2026-03-24: Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
    Fiction. The action happens in Istambul in about 1591 in the circle of miniaturists around the Ottoman Sultan. Each chapter switches to a different character, some are people, some are abstract ones like the colour red. It is particularly good at describing the way those characters see the action from their perspective and how they lie to protect their interests, sometimes deceiving themselves as well. For example the young infatuated man describes his love by analogy to famous books, the woman at the centre of his attention is on the other side concerned with her wellbeing and the safety of her children, one of the miniaturists when asked a philosophical question about the trade thinks “Of course I do it for money, but if I say that I’ll get into trouble” and the proceeds to give a very elaborate answer. It helped me that last year I learned about the history of the Byzantine empire and the raise of Islam, the action in the book happens after that, but links into it and allows me to make connections: the Turkish baths are just a continuation of the Roman baths and could understand some of the religious concerns of the characters. 10 out of 10, the author got the Nobel prize for literature for good reasons.
  • 2026-01-31: P. J. O’Rourke: How the Hell Did This Happen?
    Exactly. A humorous take on how the orange baby got in power the first time. It’s not even funny.
  • 2026-01-17: J. B. Priestley: An Inspector Calls
    Moralising play written by a socialist soon after the Word War II. Funny to compare it with Brecht and see the differences between a German socialist and an English one. The German one is more revolutionary on the lines “in the same way as science dethrones religion, the workers will overthrow the exploitative capitalists”, while the English one is more “workers should be paid fair wages, customers should be respectful to shop assistants and everybody should stop drinking alcohol”. The morality of the behaviour of Eva Smith (she happily accepts money from men that she sleeps with, giving up job searching) is not questions. There is an English literary tradition to moralize, see Pamela, but there is also a literary tradition to see through, see Shamela; this play is a regression. Not bad, but not good: 6 out of 10.
  • 2026-01-10: Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
    Re-read, this time in the translation by George Lang, which uses thous and doests, which on one side it makes it more difficult to read, but it might be in the spirit of the Meditations which were after all private notes, not public writing. It still felt repetitive almost like a ritualistic incantation, but in a enjoyable way.

It occurred me this time how well educated, read, conversed Marcus Aurelius was. He refers to Epictetus, Socrates, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Hesiod, Homer etc. He was born in the elite Roman families around the emperor, so money was not an objection to give him the best education possible. For example Plutarch was not available since he died in about 120 CE, around the time when Marcus Aurelius was born. So when when he remembers Sextus, at the start of the Meditations in the list of his teachers/role models, he means Sextus of Chaeronea: i.e. they got him one of Plutarch’s grandson or nephew as a tutor.

He’s a stoic, though he has a different feel from Epictetus. E.g. instead of the “shut up and put up with it”, it’s more about a sense of duty, appreciation about the bright side of your circumstances (though it’s easy to say for him, he was the Roman emperor), plus not letting your focus be distracted by unpleasant things that you can’t change.

In Romanian literature there is this traditional ballad Miorița, taught in schools, and there is a whole discussion about the attitude of the character facing death. I realise that there are parallels with Marcus Aurelius’ attitude to death: do your best in every circumstance, don’t fret over death caused by things you can’t control, but this parallel escapes Romanian literature critics, Marcus Aurelius is not on their reading list.

For him the physical space is composed of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire organised in sphere, and he mentions Empedocles a pre-Socratic Sicilian philosopher for the origin of this idea, and the idea spherical Earth-centric layout of the universe.

He does not believe in life after death, more like Heraclitus, another pre-Socratic, perishing is just a transformation. Death is a theme to which he comes repeatedly.

He believes in God enough to be of interest to Christians, which is what probably helped preserve the book, e.g. the translator mentions Bishop Butler’s related opinions.

Similar to Epictetus, he sees himself part of a larger brotherhood of men.

There are plenty of logical fallacies employed, the most common are: the false binary option and the false analogy.

Be deliberate about what you do so that you don’t have regrets:

thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last

Have focus on what you do:

Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around

He does consider that god/gods might not exist, but finds that troubling so he goes back to the assumption that it does exist (I find this funny):

if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of goods and devoid of providence? But in truth they do exist,

Though later he does find useful advice for the alternative:

if there is a god, all is well; and if chance rules, do not though also be governed by it

He has seen enough to know that there are no absolute truths:

Remember that all is opinion

Yes, but some opinions are better (also he has a specific meaning for “opinion”, see below).

We’ve got a limited time, use it wisely:

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.

The idea of continuous change:

all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes though hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Think:

Hast thou reason? I have. - Why then dost not thou use it?

I don’t think he believed in an immortal soul, everything transforms and is reused:

If the souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity?

Be an active listener, see the other side of the argument:

Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another, and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker’s mind.

About happiness:

very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life. […] nor in life be so busy as to have no leisure

Practice makes perfect:

Practice thyself even in the things which thou despairest of accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practised into this.

I find that I’ve read many books recently, Meditations being one of them, that on one side contain a lot of nonsense, but on the other side, though active reading, I can get a lot of value out of them as well.