Reading List

For anyone who might think that the paucity of my posting is evidence of a slow reader, well, you’re not wrong. However, I do manage to get through quite a few more books than is evidenced on this lowly site. So, how do I choose what to write about? I have no idea: it usually depends on what else is going on in life, and my inclination to overcome a certain laziness towards non-essential tasks. I recently thought it might be interesting to me to think about what I’ve read in the past 12 months or so, which led to this list. I’ve relied on memory and on notes jotted down in my little, underutilized, reading journal to come up with this list, which only includes what I haven’t already discussed on this blog.  

The House of Life by Mario Praz

The Death of Lysanda by Yitzhak Orpaz

D’Annunzio by Philippe Jullian

Haunted Castles: Collected Gothic Stories by Ray Russell

A large portion of Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (interest waned about halfway through, but planning to get back to it…)

The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic Versus Classical Art by Kenneth Clark

Three essays on Goethe from Thomas Mann’s Essays of Three Decades

The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders by Peter Heather

The Creator by Mynona

The Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems

Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux

Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment by Paul Monod

The All-Pervading Melodius Drumbeat: The Life of Ra Lotsawa by Ra Yeshe Senge (about halfway through, to be honest)

The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of His Lost Library by Marcus Tanner

Deeply dabbling in The Penguin Book of the Undead

A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux

The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown

Love & Sleep by John Crowley

Goodly portions of Brian Copenhaver’s anthology, The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment

A History of Gnosticism by Giovanni Filoramo (an excellent scholarly study)

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West

ETA:

Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare

The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar