<*> # |> Booklist <| I typically read a number of books at once (with a correspondingly high incompletion rate :) ) and they are typically grouped in four broad categories. ## Action/Adventure/Science Fiction =================================== -- "Schismatrix Plus" by Bruce Sterling While I have at times been a pretty avid reader of Science Fiction, I had not ready anything by Sterling or even heard of it until I stumbled across Circumlunar via gopher. I read in the Amazon reviews (most of my reading currently is on Kindle) that one would be better served by reading some of the short stores at the end of the collection before reading the novel as they lay out the "universe" better as they were earlier works, I went ahead and just started immediately with the novel. I regretted that a bit initially but am enjoying the novel more and more now. -- "Sage: The Man They Called 'Dagger' of the OSS" by Jerry Sage If you have watched the classic WW2 movie, "The Great Escape", you already know Jerry Sage as the "Cooler King" character played by Steve McQueen. It is a bit odd that Wikipedia states that the character was an amalgamation of a couple other (and different) real people. This book's forward was written by an American Air Force officer who was also at that POW camp and who later became a Lieutenant General, and of course speaks highly of Sage and mentions some of the escapades portrayed in the movie. Sage later became the 1st commanding officer of 10th Special Forces group in Bad Tolz Germany. I have had a long fascination with OSS (and to a lesser extent OSE) history, these "Glorious Amateurs" who with no real prior training and seldom relevent experience volunteered to be trained to go behind enemy lines and risk everything for their country in its time of need. -- "The Killer Elite" by Ranulph Fiennes Fiennes is more famous in his latter and longer career as an Arctic Explorer, but when younger he served as an SAS officer in the horn of Africa. This book was notoriously claimed by him as being based on personal experience but this was deemed as implausable by many. This book was made into the movie "Killer Elite" (prior to the movie the book was published as "The Feather Men" ) ## Science/Philosophy/History ============================= -- "Philosophical Investigations" by Ludwig Wittgenstein This is Wittgenstein's late-career counterweight to his early but equally famous "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". This book is interesting to me in that it poses in simple numbered outline-like paragraphs various ruminations on how language or thought convey meaning. It is presented almost as a stream-of-thought. While I do not have the philosophical training to glean everything from this book, it is written in a way that even I can hobble along :) and it has been a subject of interest to me for years. -- "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric" by Sr. Miriam Joseph An "approximately modern" (1930s) presentation of the Middle-Age schooling approach. -- "Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning" Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov and Lavrentov A massive survey of the main branches of Mathematics, written by 3 of the 20th century's (Soviet) Mathematicians. I always get sidetracked from reading this through but it always remains my reading list. Content is very well presented and though I have no doubt it will eventually delve into material where lions and bears and dragons do lurk it has not thus far. ## Literature ============= -- "Inferno" by Dante (Robert and Jean Hollander version) I had read the Divine Comedy once long ago in the Bollingen edition which had a good translation and very complete textual notes, but this edition seems to exceed it particularly with regard to the notes, so much so, one is in danger of being so caught up in notes that one loses the thread or feel of the work. So I try to read each chapter once without notes, then slowly work my way through the textual apparatus and then again without reference to the notes but with them in short-term memory. -- "The Plague" by Albert Camus A novel about an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Oran in North Africa. Everything I had read by Camus has been very good and this book is keeping to form. I started this long long ago but got sidetracked with something else. When Covid hit this was one of the first books to come to mind (along with Andromeda Strain by Chrichton which I have already re-read and the prologue to Boccaccio's Decameron, also likewise re-read) -- "The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse" Shi Wu (Stonehouse) translated by Bill Porter (Red Pine) Stonehouse was a Buddhist monk in China from the 1300s. I read this collection early last year but had to read it again, poems are pretty short but are relaxing and give a good "color" to the day. I wish I were able to read Chinese in the original as there are so many works I admire but I have found Red Pine to be an excellent translator (judged in terms of a translator that ends up with a well presented cohesive work) ## Catholic =========== -- "The Mystical City of God" by Ven. Sr. Maria de Agreda. This is another long-term reading project. It is a pretty large work (4 volumes) but pretty dense in its content and not something I can read and digest more than 10 or 20 pages at a time. Sr. Maria de Agreda is most famously known as the "Lady in Blue". While serving (under strict rules of enclosure) as the Abbess of a Conceptionist Monastery in northern Spain during the 1600s, she is credited with teaching the faith (via bilocation) to various Native American Indian tribes in New Mexico and Texas, while those Indians were out of reach of the Missionaries or other Europeans that were in the Southwest US at the time. The book describes the visions and instruction she herself received from the Blessed Virgin Mary and Our Lord Jesus Christ for her to write down for posterity. At various times since the book was written it was treated with some skepticism, partly because it was written by a woman who at that time would not be expected to be educated (though she was also a Spiritual Advisor to the King of Spain), but many Popes have spoken highly of it as well as saints and venerables (a big proponent of her work was Bl. Solanus Casey). -- "The Names of Jesus" by Fray Luis de Leon Another work from the 1600s in Spain, takes the form of a dialog of three religious on the various names of Jesus Christ in scripture and the meanings for these names. -- "The Life of Jesus Christ" by Ludolph (the Carthusian) of Saxony From the 1300s, a long and detailed study of the life of Jesus. I had previously read some snippets of his writings that seemed to show him as more of a devotional writer but this work (or at least the translation) shows him as somewhat more scholastic in his approach (though I have not yet got far in the book, which is also multiple volumes). St. Ignatius Loyola was said to carry this with him when he campaigned as a General and when reading it while recovering from wounds received in battle, decided at last to become a priest (and subsequently found the Jesuit order.)