William Rosen's Justinian's Flea

Justinian's Flea is a book about the fall of Rome through the advent of the plague. It's an unusual book because it's half history of Antiquity, half epidemiology of the plague. Well, I had read more compelling histories for both. I am now reading Jack Higgins' latest book, and I am failing to be held breathless by the plot. More Arabs kidnapping and threatening more innocent people, being fought by more Western super spies.

Eclectic round-up: biography of Lady Randolph Churchil, Alphonse by Mme de Genlis, John Grisham

John Grisham's latest, The Appeal, has disappointed me a little. I really enjoyed his earlier novels, but as time goes by he hangs his plots of particularities of the legal profession and uses his novels as a bully pulpit. This last one isn't that good, but I'd read all of them and so I wanted to keep up. The biography, American Jennie, was superficial in its treatment and without insight in its conclusions. Finally (I must be crabby), Mme de Genlis' novel Alphonse about an illegitimate child was melodramatic in its plot, and didn't have her usual charm in writing. I also read a large number of magazines: Vanity Fair, with an article on women comedians which managed to be boring, this week's New Yorker, with an interesting article on magic and magicians, among other things, two issues of the New Scientist, Elle Quebec, and OK magazine. Meanwhile I'm carefully watching a storm brewing on Obama and his church attendance by reading dozens of newspaper articles and columns online.

Madame de Genlis

I have read and discovered a new authoress, the prolific Comtesse de Genlis, who lived through the French Revolution, then the restoration, then through Bonaparte. I read a bad biography -- bad because he drops details and omits important episodes, by Gabriel de Broglie, then her own works: Le Comte de Corke, La feuille des gens du monde (a delightful newsheet she produced at court), several shorts stories like Zuma and Mademoiselle de Clermont, her first book of memoirs but not her second, a charming discussion of etiquette under Louis XVI, but I skipped her works for youth, plays and essays. I did read her philosophical dialogues, Diners d'Holbach, which show her mastery of classical philosophy. I am about to look at the first of her historical trilogy, La duchesse de La Valliere, and will do my best to get the other two, Madame de Maintenon and Mademoiselle de Lafayette. This woman withdrew from her glittering position at court to retire to the country, educate the Orleans children, and pursue knowledge and writing when she was only 30. She later refused a seat at the Academie francaise to preserve her independence of mind and freedom to express herself honestly. She wrote her whole life, lived long if tumultuously. I have a great admiration for her.

Oeuvres completes, Blaise Pascal

I finished off the complete works with his 100-page fragment on grace. I was hoping for something more mystical than theological in that document, but it was not to be. I am pleased to have read Pascal, but his scientific texts were a slog. I skipped most of the geometry, I'll admit, although perusing them as I did gave me a better understanding of how he approached his meditations on God. I was thankful some of his scientific work was in Latin, so I didn't have to read those too. I did spend some time thinking over Pascal's conversion, provoked by his niece's lachrymal fistula. How can the fruits be so great when the original provocation, the spontaneous healing of the fistula, was considered wrongly to be a miracle?

I now undertake the first volume of Maurois' complete works.

In Pursuit of Military Excellence and other readings

Since my last post, I've read two issues of The New Yorker, two issues of The New Scientist, Vogue's spring issue, several works of Pascal, and Shimon Naveh's Pursuit of Military Excellence. This last book was published in 1997, and it looks at the operational art. The problem with it, I think, is that he never moves beyond the idea of national schools of strategy into the more theoretical realm, although he may do that in another book. It otherwise treads on some of the same material that I have written about. It is incredibly generously footnoted, and for the first time in my career he refers to works in strategy that I haven't read. I will be returning to Pascal shortly. I am considering starting to read a lot more in French for the next while.