What I’ve been reading

John Ma, Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity.  I didn’t read much of this book, mostly because it is too good for me to understand just how good it is.  Que triste!  It is like those GPT “advanced reasoning” answers that also can be too good to digest fully.  A small number of you, however, should read this book very carefully and perhaps you already have.

Gina Consing McAdam and Siobhan Doran, Houses that Sugar Built: An Intimate Portrait of Philippine Ancestral Homes.  An excellent picture book, these are art traditions, and bits of history, you otherwise never would see.

Sohrab Sardashti, Iranian Architecture:A Visual History.  One of the very best picture books, both for intrinsic reasons and because many of us cannot expect to see these landmarks anytime soon if at all.

Caroline Potter, Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium.  An excellent work, explores the deep links between Boulez’s music and French surrealism (and to a lesser degree expressionism).  One of the best books for understanding Boulez and indeed serialism more generally.  Is serialism is most misunderstood musical movement to this day?

Ola Olsson, Paleoeconomics: Climate Change and Economic Development in Prehistory surveys plenty of information about what the subtitle suggests.  I found the material difficult to evaluate, and so only read part of this one.  Nonetheless I suspect it is the best book on its topic.

Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.  I don’t feel this book is what I need at the margin, but it is a very good and engaging addition to the canon surrounding Plath.

Uncle Rabbit & the Wax Doll, edited by Jonathan Amith, illustrations by Inocencio Jiménez Chino, a very good and beautiful children’s book, also in Nahuatl and Spanish.