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What are you reading? April 11, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-11
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - A short read but a rough read. Really rough.
According to the chronology, Ivan Ilyich was written and published after the autobiographical Confession. Ivan Ilyich keeps saying to himself that he had been successful in living rightly and doing everything that he was supposed to do; that is, he conformed to what he was supposed to be at the time. The pain of his death would suggest that the opposite is true.
I haven’t read Confession— maybe I should— but there is no indication that Tolstoy went through the physical pain that his fictional alter-ego went through— but there is every indication that Tolstoy went through the exact same mental/psychic anguish.
BTW, I decided to edit a Wikipedia page for the first time ever. I do need to improve on it but I know a couple of old hands in APR have edit wiki pages before. I suspect that a couple of people here in WAYR know how to do it as well.
I am reading:
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah - This is a reread and emerged out of a YouTube/podcast series that Agnes Callard regularly hosts with Robin Hansen called Minds almost Meeting; the podcast seemed to feature similar themes that Appiah discussed in that book, so I’ve decided to give it a re-read.
How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World by Donald J. Robertson - Starting this over again as I am thinking and writing that Callard review.
Much of this is a reconstruction of 30-40 years of Athenian history before the death of Socrates; therefore, Robertson is situating the life and death of Socrates within the context of the times and location that he lived; something Callard barely alludes to.
Genet: A Biography by Edmund White
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