Summer Reading - 2015

Very informative - panoramic general history on the Paris conference of 1919 - leading up to the 

Versailles Treaty. 

Naipaul's 1981 tour of the Islamic world written in the author's vividly visual prose...

A day in the life of a dypsomaniacal British emigre on his last leg as well as a brilliant tour of Quauhnahuac, Mexico...

The epic saga of the modern Mexican revolution (1910-1920) told in shimmering prose...

Flaubert's lesser known classic involving a young "flaneur" - (walker-seeker-observer) obsessed with an older woman in Paris of course...

An American journalist goes down to the Yucatan province and discovers that the Mayan population is being enslaved on the large plantations...

Part 5 of Proust's In Search of Lost Time - Will the narrator never give up his preoccupation with the ever-mysterious, ever-unfaithful Albertine?

The final installment of what is supposed to be the definitive Kafka biography...

A teacher is called upon to befriend and raise up the spirits of a man on death-row in Louisiana circa the 1940s...

A first-hand account of the Mexican Revolution by someone who soldiered alongside Pancho Villa...

A rousing general history of the protracted but crucial Congress of Vienna that re-constituted European monarchies and governments in the midst of Napoleon's demise...

Oscar Wilde - Prophet of the Current Age

The following excerpt - taken from his famous "prison correspondence" - is uncannily in sync with the present-day zeitgeist of the secular, self-made "artistic-minded" individual. But is Wilde really convinced that in the future all of us will pursue life as art - hungry for new and messy experiences - ready to disregard prior orthodoxies?  And do you follow him down the same road - truth seeker?

"Morality does not help me.  I am a born antinomian.  I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.  But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.  It is well to have learned that...Religion does not help me.  The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.  My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.  When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.  Every thing to be true must become a religion.  And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.  It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.  But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me.  Its symbols must be of my own creating.  Only that is spiritual which makes its own form.  If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me." - from De Profundis