Reading List: September 2011

The Holy Bible, New International Version
The Holy Bible, New King James Version
Shiloh, by Shelby Foote
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, par Marcel Proust
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson
The Koran, translated by N.J. Dawood
The Lost Peace, by Robert Dallek
Sir Dominic Flandry, by Poul Anderson, compiled by Hank Davis
Germinal, par Emile Zola
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
The English Assassin, by Daniel Silva
Crossers, by Philip Caputo

The late Shelby Foote was a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative, partly because he was featured in Ken Burns's documentary television miniseries on the Civil War.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Shelby Foote wrote a number of novels - five, I believe - and I recently read two of them. Follow Me Down is a story of love and murder set in Mississippi (in Foote's fictional Jordan County), in about 1946. It is beautifully written, and uses very well the narrative technique developed by Foote's fellow Mississippian William Faulkner of moving the point of view from narrator to narrator. Foote uses that same technique in Shiloh, in which he follows a number of people through the fighting around Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. In the course of reading Follow Me Down, I came to the realization that the grandfather to whom one of the characters refers is, in fact, the young boy we have seen in Shiloh. It's kind of nice to know that he lived to be an old man, even if he was missing an arm.

The quality of Foote's writing stems from his choice of subject and his extreme sensitivity to the telling detail. Foote understands how people react in moments of extreme stress.

Robert Dallek doesn't. His rather idealistic work, The Lost Peace, tries to assert that there was an alternative to the Cold War. At least Dallek is an honest scholar; his work reveals that there was no alternative, given the people, their histories, and their interactions. One thing that Dallek shares with a lot of people is the misconception that there are offensive and defensive weapons or forces. Inevitably, forces created with, we may presume, purely defensive motives, will appear to one's opposite numbers as threats. And there are three good reasons for that. First, a rifle fires whether the target is moving or the shooter if moving. I.e., many weapons are more or less equally useful on offense or defense. Second, the felt need to create a substantial defense indicates a level of distrust which will almost immediately meet its doppelganger on the other side. Third, there is the military maxim that the best defense is a good offense. Which is to say, even with motives which may be generally defenses, one may decide that the best way to defends one's own territory is to mount an attack against an opponent.

My reading in September 2011 was also heavy on the prophets. I read Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah.