by Valerius Claudius Iohanes on Wed Jan 09, 2008 4:41 am
Salvete, Sodales -
This thread was an engaging one and I quite enjoyed it when I discovered it a couple of years back. Now, as we begin the year 2008 AD/CE and approach April of the year 2761 AUC, shall we update it? Who's reading what? Amici, chime in, et Clarissimi et Humiliores, reveal a bit of YOUR reading diet, if you would, and let's have a little convivium legendorum.
I just finished A. Everett's book on Cicero while on vacation, and it seemed a decent study, although plainly Everett is a Cicero booster. Now I need to finally read some of the esteemed orator's speeches and his dialogs.
I have to start Livy at some point, too. In translation, no doubt, to allow me to get well into it before the 22nd century.
I started Seneca the Younger's Thyestes some while back, in the original, but I need to pick it up again; nonetheless, it's still in my bag, still on my list. It was suggested to us some time back (2006) by Iacobulus, and I'm irked that I haven't pressed forward with it.
I've also recently finished a bio of John Quincy Adams by Nagle, the material based on Adams' decades of diary entries. It's somewhat relevant here for John Quincy being a Latin reader himself, and a fan of Cicero - even if a number of us are Cicero critics.
I finished a modern treatment of Arrian's Handbook of Epictetus, "Art of Living" by Sharon Lebell. It's a popularization, and at times I wonder if she isn't sweetening it a bit too much. But it's still of value; and since I haven't finished reading the translation of the Discourses that I began before that, I'll return to that next. Epictetus has been quite a find for me; thank God Arrian preserved so much. (It occurs to me that twenty years ago I probably wouldn't have paid his work any attention.)
I have just picked up a general book on Rome by Anna Maria Liberati and Fabio Bourbon that is of the coffee-table sort, full of color plates, diagrams, a reconstruction of the Forum and so on. I'm taking a bath in it, you might say. Aerial photos of the forum, illos reconstructing Rome as though seen from on high with temples and basilica tall and pristine, and so on and so forth.
And then there're other titles at the library I want to get at, and others waiting here at home. And little time for it. And I've gotten back my appetite for fiction, too, these days, and so I've been reading old Abraham Merritt's The Metal Monster (an odd thing from the days of the pulps) and enjoying a modern but well-written fantasy novel by L. McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion.
Verum, quid de vobis, sodales? Quid legitis?
Valerius Claudius Iohannes
Curator anno MMDCCLXII
Centurio Honorarius Societatis
Civis ab MMDCCLIV
:: Adversitas bono viro intelligentiam docet. ::