I have a new post over at Thermidor Magazine, reviewing Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, a collection of closely related short stories about his experience in the Vietnam War. It is my favourite war novel, and one of my favourite works of fiction generally. It’s even rather new by my standards, published in 1990, within my lifetime! Well, I was a small child at the time, but still. In my review of Lone Crusader, a new work by any standard, I quoted C. S. Lewis’s famous advice, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” My general rule is that a “new” book for this purpose is “written within one’s own lifetime.” Cicero said that “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever,” so the goal here is to avoid being temporally parochial-minded.
In any case, I’ve had a backlog of reviews to write, and I’m almost caught up. Next up will be a collection of treatises by Xenophon, after which I’ll start preparing for a Very Special Episode next month, which contains a momentous landmark for Everything is Oll Korrect!