Obligatory excuse-making: I’ve been finishing up a project at work (now completed) and trying to get done the Tile Job From Hell (not completed).
In the meantime, I’ve finished Parallel Lives, The Aeneid, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, like Dante’s trilogy, I couldn’t make myself do the rest), and am halfway through Arabian Nights, and most of the way through The Moulding of Communists.
Parallel Lives was interesting, in part for the history it covers. I thought I knew a good bit about Roman history in the transition period from Republic to Empire, but nope – there was way more to it than I had previously learned, and Plutarch crams a whole lot of it into a short piece. The other interesting part was how obviously it was a primary source for several of Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, specifically).
The Aeneid was slow going, and as I’ve discovered is typical for classic epics and dramas, was poorly structured and edited by modern standards. It was like a story told by a five-year-old: this happened then this happened then this happened for ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. But like Parallel Lives, it was an engaging overview of Roman pre-history (albeit heavily mythologized and not exactly reliable), or at least how Romans of the early Empire wished to see their history.
It also portrayed the Trojans as the heroes of the Trojan War and the Achaeans as the bad guys, which amused me at first and which I attributed to the pro-Roman slant of the poem. Then I looked it up. Yeah. Even by Homer’s pro-Greek account, the Greeks were dicks.
Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t bad, but it was overly-long and by the end seemed like a treacly Anglican reduction of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Arabian Nights is not what I expected at all. I knew it was a series of stories, but the framing device and its nesting/recursion of stories is handled quite well (in contrast to the chaotic structurelessness of The Aeneid), with the stories fairly short and to the point. They remind me very strongly of the stories in Idries Shah’s books, although it’s not entirely clear that they’re intended that way (some do appear have an obvious moral or underlying meaning, but that could simply be me reading things into the story out of habit from reading Shah).
Finally, The Moulding of Communists has been somewhat of a slog up to the current chapter, but it’s turning into an insightful look at how communists were recruited into the Party back in the day, and after recruitment, selected and formed into “cadre” members. The resemblances to cult practices are remarkable, so much so that I repeatedly wonder whether the cults of the 1960s-1980s weren’t actually following the same playbook (and in turn, it makes me wonder how Soviet communists managed to figure all that out, systematize it, and successfully spread it globally such that it was already commonplace by the mid-1930s in the US).