The Unbearable Lightness of Wednesday
Apr. 26th, 2017 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted to Livejournal
My wrists are messed up for reasons 99% unrelated to this journal, so this will be a short Wednesday Reading Meme. Regular posting will probably resume next week.
What I've Finished Reading
"Alcibiades I" and "The Symposium," two dialogues by Plato (translated into English), for the Alcibiades Book Club, which is not a real book club, just two people reading a bunch of books with Alcibiades in them. Alcibiades I is funny and charming but The Symposium is brilliant, even before Alcibiades crashes the party with a flower crown to deliver the most beautiful drunken speech about Socrates and throw everything into confusion. It's one of the best drunken speeches I've ever read.
(the origin of the Alcibiades Book Club: last Christmas I started reading Plutarch's life of Alcibiades in a used bookstore and found myself unable to stop)
What I'm Reading Now
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, more Catullus, more Girl of the Limberlost
What I Plan to Read Next
Books of some kind! Maybe A Single Man or maybe this very large History of the Peloponnesian War. But first I have to get through a thicket of work.
My wrists are messed up for reasons 99% unrelated to this journal, so this will be a short Wednesday Reading Meme. Regular posting will probably resume next week.
What I've Finished Reading
"Alcibiades I" and "The Symposium," two dialogues by Plato (translated into English), for the Alcibiades Book Club, which is not a real book club, just two people reading a bunch of books with Alcibiades in them. Alcibiades I is funny and charming but The Symposium is brilliant, even before Alcibiades crashes the party with a flower crown to deliver the most beautiful drunken speech about Socrates and throw everything into confusion. It's one of the best drunken speeches I've ever read.
(the origin of the Alcibiades Book Club: last Christmas I started reading Plutarch's life of Alcibiades in a used bookstore and found myself unable to stop)
What I'm Reading Now
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, more Catullus, more Girl of the Limberlost
What I Plan to Read Next
Books of some kind! Maybe A Single Man or maybe this very large History of the Peloponnesian War. But first I have to get through a thicket of work.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 07:53 am (UTC)In the meantime, yay for drunken speeches? (Is it better than Tuppy in Jeeves and Wooster?)
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 05:29 pm (UTC)I don't have the memory of a Tuppy speech right now but I'd definitely rank Alcibiades' speech about Socrates alongside Gussie Fink-Nottle's speech for the Market Snodsbury Grammar School. It is a very great drunken speech that deserves its own disheveled flower crown of fame.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 05:32 pm (UTC)You could make a list: great fictional drunken speeches of our times?