To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
After finishing “The Master and Margarita”, I started reading earlier this week “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. I wanted to start with Ishiguro a few months ago and I was kind of undecided between this and “Never Let Me Go”, which I nominated for the next bookclub.
I'm currently on page 70 and so far I'm enjoying it. The main character is an old Butler who's kind of of a sperg. His new american boss gives him a few days off and he goes on a roadtrip through the English countryside to visit the old Housekeeper who left the Manor 20 years before while revisiting his memories from the time she worked there.
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I finished listening to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol I-III by Edward Gibbon and the People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn. I kind of wonder what Zinn would've thought of Trump because even though he was a Repub he was the closest thing to an antiestablishment president there has been and that's what he kind of pleads for in the last 1/4th of the book
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Zinn was basically commie adjacent, so I can see him spouting whatever nonsense take Chomsky has nowadays.
Decline and Fall by Gibbon is a Volume set I want to read someday, but I'm concerned is too outdated, so is more like a piece of high quality literature today. Still very worth the prose from the excerpts I read.
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Weirdly enough it wasn't outdated at all, the writing style is definitely 18th century, but the facts are still the same. I think a lot of the value comes from Gibbon's rants against organized religion
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Gibbon used classical sources, so is not that he was wrong with his sources as those are still used today, but rather that modern historians use archeological findings as evidence to complement and mold their theories, so modern historians are kind of divided, some prefer to use “transformation” instead of fall, however books like the Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather claim the collapse of the Western Empire was quite catastrophic and violent due to Barbarian incursions and what Heather called “predatory migration” (he was super criticized for using that term lol). But still, Gibbon's work was quite revolutionary in the 18th century, he was like the Father of Roman studies and he did the best he could compiling the information available to him.
His theory of Christianity as one of the main causes of the Empire's downfall is still controversial but yeah, kind of interesting to analyze.
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I'd bet a million dollars his reaction is "No, not like that!"
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