- The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James, 1881. I had just read this with Great Books in April, but a group of friends wanted to discuss it further and I ended up reading the whole thing again. I’m glad I did. I only marked a few more quotes which will all go in a post… eventually.
- The Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell, 1960. Multi re-read, for the ABC kidlit splinter group. Quotes TBD.
- The Mountain Lion – Jean Stafford, 1947. Second Monday selection; quotes TBD.
- Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life – E. O. Wilson, 2016. Nature Enviro selection; quotes TBD.
- Flood – Stephen Baxter, 2008. A post-apocalyptic novel where water released from the mantle exacerbates climate change induced sea rise. Interesting, not bad, not great.
- Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since – Walter Scott, 1814. Catherine Project book; quotes TBD.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel – Emmuska Orzczy, 1905. Great Books selections; quotes TBD.
- Psycho – Robert Bloch, 1959. From the list for the Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book with a sympathetic villain.” I wrote “Interesting to finally read this – I’ve heard so much about it. I knew the twist from talk of the movie (which I also haven’t seen) so that took some of the suspense away. A decent thriller, but not on the level of someone like Ira Levin. I did not find the villain sympathetic, though!”
- En Famille – Hector Malot, 1886. Comfort re-read; I often remember the part set in the spinning mills and Perrine’s island, and forget the very long and harrowing journey it takes to get there.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1885. Another comfort re-read. Now I want to re-read The Blessing for the great parody of a socialist realism play maybe accidentally recapitulating LLF.
Articles – all by Peter Caws
Continuing my digitizing:
- “Reform and Revolution,” in Philosophy & Political Action (1972). How should philosophers engage with politics? He’s able to critique Friedrich Engels’ analogy, which compares political revolution to steam building up, because he understands the physics of steam:
- “What makes it look so dramatic in teakettles, for example, is that the change takes place at the bottom where all the available space is already occupied by water, so that the steam has to bubble to the top. As an analogy for repressed change this is not bad, but it is not a mass phenomenon—a very small amount of water will make a very large bubble of steam—and there is nothing inherent in the change from water to steam that would sustain the revolutionary analogy.”
- “unending war, deepening poverty, increasing alienation, worsening pollution, and so on” – plus ça change
- “Aspects of Hempel’s Philosophy of Science” – Review of Metaphysics, Vol 20 No 4 (1967)
- “The case of little Johnny and the measles (p. 177), as an illustration of statistical explanation, is followed by the case of little Tommy and the measles (p. 237), so that one is grateful for the variety provided (p. 301) by little Henry and the mumps. (In [Philosophy of Natural Science] it is little Jim and the measles again, p. 58.)”