★★★★★

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

★★★★★ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I enjoyed this book and its writing style. It would have been better if I didn’t already know the story from watching the TV series, but the fact that it was still as good as it was when I knew everything that was going to happen earns a five-star rating in my book.  The TV show was good, but the writing here is terrific, and the character development is so much richer than what can be done on screen.

Highlights

Most of us hold that some things only happen to other people. Many of us hold that one such thing is death.

Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.

The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks.

To outward appearances Taverner was a suit, but her heart belonged with the field guys, the handlers. Besides, if you removed operations from the curriculum, security didn’t amount to more than putting on a peaked cap and a shiny badge. As far as the war on terror went, you might as well start digging trenches, and handing out tin hats.

Alcohol thickened the syllables, and slurred the sibilants.

Dune by Frank Herbert

★★★★★ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Rereading one of the first books I was enthralled with as an adult is a trip. I remembered parts of it vividly, but there were huge gaps.

Herbert must have used the Pacific Northwest as his guide for Caladan, but when did he visit the desert? I could not help but compare Vashon and Arizona as Caladan and Arrakis.

Dune is a classic Hero’s Journey, which must have still seemed fresh in 1965.  So many parts of this book are still relevant.

The Private Library by Reid Byers

★★★★★ | Reading and Books | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Reid Byers Website | Readwise

Two Quotes:

Book-wrapt — that beneficient feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, inlibriated, circumvolumed, peribibliated … it implies the traditional library wrapped in shelves of books, and the condition of rapt attention to a particular volume, and the rapture of of being transported to the wood beyond the world.

The Age of Faith by Will Durant

★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I finished this fourth installment of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization after three months of slow, careful reading. The Age of Faith begins with the fall of Rome and carries through the end of the Middle Ages. The writing is clear, colorful, engaging, often horrifying, and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. Along the way, I encountered kings and popes, treachery and atrocities, saints and philosophers, economic systems, the building of cathedrals and castles, and primers on the great works of literature and philosophy across a thousand years of recorded time.

Caesar and Christ by Will Durant

★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Volume III of the eleven-volume Story of Civilization by Will Durant. I knew so little about the rise and fall of Rome and the formation of Christianity before reading this. I feel so much more informed. My favorite so far!

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

The Life of Greece by Will Durant

★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I paused reading this history to read The Odyssey by Homer to give me a better insight to that classic’s role in Greek history.

My mind seems most interested in philosophy these days, so my notes and highlights below tend to center on that area of the book vs. historical events, of which there were many.

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