I have to say, I really admire the graphic designer who decided to put a blown-up image of a face on the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary. My other favorite cover is the one chosen for the Standard Ebooks ebook, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
Anastasia (1997)
According to Wikipedia, there was a 1956 movie based on a 1952 French play based on the idea that Anastasia survived. Also, the phenomenon of people claiming/pretending to be Anastasia is real, and the play is based on the most famous of these. (The story continues to evolve: a 2016 stage musical included some of the same songs and characters, but substituted or added others.)
The rags-to-riches plot of this 1997 movie makes it feel like a standard Cinderella tale, but now that I think about it, the story may be more like Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady): a man fabricates an identity for a woman, then falls in love with her. That arc fits better with the 50s versions, though: in the 90s cartoon, the woman really was a princess all along. (Edit: It’s not my imagination… again, according to Wikipedia, they actually considered adapting My Fair Lady and deliberately took elements of Pygmalion. But I noticed the similarity myself.)
Tron: Ares (2025)
Welcome to a movie with no character arcs whatsoever! Sit back, relax, look at the pretty colors, and succumb to the nostalgia. (I hope you like Nine Inch Nails.)
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He apparently jotted down some philosophical thoughts in a diary as he was marching around on various military campaigns, and these fragmentary thoughts form part of the corpus of texts associated with stoicism, an ancient school of thought that encourages people to take life as it comes, good or bad.
The book is not coherent, and there’s a lot of repetition. It wasn’t written as a thoughtfully organized presentation designed to be consumed by others. And my understanding is that it’s not even complete. Bits of text are lost because the source is old and “corrupt”.
If you want to understand stoicism, I think it’s probably better to read some modern synthesis before or after reading old source texts. Still, I think it’s worth reading source texts like this one, because whoever writes the synthesis is going to put their own spin on whatever was “meant” by the original authors; but the same thing can be said for any English translation! I think it must be impossible to translate philosophy without making some biased assumptions about the author’s intended meaning. Maybe all we can really wrap our heads around is what people today construe stoicism to be. We just have to guess at what it used to be originally; and there may never have been a consensus among thinkers even then.
So anyway, what are some of the ideas to be found in the text?
Continue reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
When and Why I Read Meditations
Foundational stoic text.
Genre: philosophy
Date started / date finished: 29-Aug-26 to 10-Sep-26
Length: 101 pages
ISBN: marcus-aurelius_meditations_george-long
Originally published in: written between 170 and 180, translated from Koine Greek in 1862, ebook in 2014
Source link: Meditations
Now You See Me (trilogy)
The three Now You See Me movies are heist stories where the criminals in question are professional masters of deception—and possibly also of petty theft, burglary, and extortion. But as it turns out, the “Four Horsemen” are stealing for an arguably just cause, rather than personal gain, although of course their primary motivation seems to be that they really enjoy fooling people. After all, that’s why they’re magicians.
That’s why, at some level, I don’t like them. But I still like these movies. (Go figure.)
The Odyssey (2026)
As we’ve established elsewhere, I don’t much like tricksters, and The Odyssey is the story of the trickster Odysseus. But I would much have preferred the actual story of the trickster Odysseus to whatever you want to say Christopher Nolan gave us instead.
Selected works of Henry James
As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.
- 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
- 1880 – Washington Square
- 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
- 1886 – The Bostonians
- 1897 – What Maisie Knew
- 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
- 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
1903 – The Ambassadors1904 – The Golden Bowl
I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.
Through Rocks and Clouds (2024)
This movie, set in Peru and with mainly Quechua (not Spanish) dialog, reminded me of Mongolian Ping Pong (2005) because the pacing was slow, and both feature a young boy from a herding culture against the backdrop of an immense natural landscape. However, the relevant landscape in Mongolia was flat, and the relevant landscape in Peru was… not.
The boy, Feliciano, seems to spend all his time outside with his dog (Rambo), his own alpaca (Ronaldo), and a small herd of other alpacas. He loves soccer and hopes Peru can qualify for the World Cup. He breaks into a one-room schoolhouse where he used to go to school, but it seems nobody goes to school there now. There seems to have been a shift away from traditional herding culture; some of the townspeople have jobs related to the local mine, and one of them even has a shiny pickup truck. The mine seems to be polluting the lake, though, and that’s not the end of the townspeople’s problems. Meanwhile, there’s a kind of buffalo spirit watching over Feliciano…
Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
My German colleague recommended this book and lent it to me. It is a semi-autobiographical account of when the 6th German Army was encircled by Soviets at Stalingrad in 1942 and then, due to freezing winter temperatures and lack of supplies as much as actual fighting, was defeated in 1943. The message is, of course, that the human costs of war are tragically high.
The book was interesting in several ways…
Continue reading Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
When and Why I Read Breakout at Stalingrad
Recommended/lent by German coworker. Novel based on the author's life experience.
Genre: Historical Fiction (WWII)
Date started / date finished: 10-Jul-26 to 24-Jul-26
Length: 720 pages
ISBN: 9781786690630
Originally published in: 2016/2017/2019
Amazon link: Breakout at Stalingrad
Bambi (1942)
One of my favorite movies ever is Disney’s Lion King (1994). I know the music and the script inside out. So when I watched Bambi in 2021, and again when I watched it recently, I was struck by how similar Bambi is to The Lion King. Both movies follow a princely main character through the major stages of his life.
