A Bit On the Side by William Trevor

I haven't been reading much fiction lately, and sadly, I can't remember the last time I read a book of short stories.

And now, thanks to reading William Trevor's book A Bit on the Side, I've been reminded all over again of the elegance and artistry of a really good short story.

An Irish writer, Trevor has a gift for describing how regular people face the harsh challenges of life. His touching and elegantly worded stories address our fallibility, our loneliness, our fundamental weakness.

His work reminds me a bit of Thomas Hardy, except his characters aren't quite such hapless victims of fate. His story Sacred Statues is a textbook Hardy-esque tragedy, a slow, grinding calamity where the reader hopes against all odds that things will work out for the main characters--yet the odds play out just as expected. Sitting with the Dead, the first story in this collection, is a brief and moving vignette about a woman greedy for what marriage might be, who paid for it with the best years of her life.

Readers familiar with the classic short stories of O. Henry will love William Trevor too. Let me qualify that: lovers of O. Henry will love William Trevor more, because they won't be forced to suspend disbelief and swallow implausible plot twists.

These stories were a gift to read, and I can't recommend them enough. If you're a fan of short fiction, you'll enjoy this book thoroughly.

Highly, highly recommended.

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

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