This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Sensation and Sex
by Lucretius (99-55 BC)

Memorable Line
“For the barrenness of the males is due in some cases to the over-coarse grain of the seed, in others to excessive fineness and fluidity. The fine seed, because it cannot stick fast in its place, slips quickly away and returns abortive. The coarser type, because it is emitted in too cohesive a form, either does not travel with enough momentum, or fails to penetrate where it is required…”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

The Symposium
by Plato (429-347 BC)

Memorable Line
“Socrates sat down and said, ‘How splendid it would be, Agathon, if wisdom was the sort of thing that could flow from the fuller to the emptier of us when we touch each other, like water, which flows through a piece of wool from a fuller cup to an emptier one.”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series, which was the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

The Art of War
by Sun-tzu (551-496 BC)

Memorable Line
“The Way of War is a Way of Deception. When able, feign inability. When deploying troops, appear not to be. When near, appear far. When far, appear near. Lure with bait; strike with chaos.”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series, which was the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

The First Ten Books
by Confucius (551-479 BC)

Memorable Line
“The Master said, ‘If one learns from others but does not think, one will be bewildered. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one will be in peril.’”

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By popular request, a list of the second set of Penguin Great Ideas books. (Tomorrow, #21…)

Any favorites here? I’ve marked with * authors I’ve read, and if I’ve in the past read any particular book listed below, I’ve marked it with **.

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I’ve now reached the end of the first series of Penguin Great Ideas books. You can find the breakdown of the last week in my latest Amazon post on the Omnivoracious blog. You can read all of the 60-in-60 pieces here.

For those of you tuning in late, this project started because I wanted to force myself to focus on books I felt I should have read before now. It coincided with my return to blogging after a break to finish my novel, Finch. So, to give myself a little challenge, I wrote to my friend Colin Brush at Penguin Books UK and said, “If you’ll send me the 60 books in your Great Ideas series, I’ll review one a day for 60 days.” Colin replied that he liked the idea and sent me the books. So for the past three weeks I’ve started in on what has been called by at least one friend “foolish” and by another “the endeavor of a madman.” Penguin’s own blog questioned my sanity. Yet, I have persevered to the end of the third week, and my audacity has been rewarded by attention from, among others, the Guardian (as book site of the week) and the Harvard University Press, which urged its readers to emulate my craziness.

As for my reading thus far, few of these books have bored me, fewer still have I disliked, even when I’ve had problems with either their execution or their contents. Many of them I plan to return to, in their full, unabridged form at a later date. Every last one has given me something interesting to think about, sometimes well after reading and blogging about them.

However, reading a book each night, although often energizing, began to wear on me by the time I came to Schopenhauer. Ruskin and Darwin revived me greatly, and Nietzsche entertained in his way, but by Woolf and Freud I was, I have to admit, a little exhausted (it didn’t help that these readings occurred during the New Year’s holiday). Freud, in particular, suffered from my own suffering, and I hope to return to him after my sojourn to a sanitarium sometime in March.* (Your well-wishes are most appreciated.)

One expected result of reading these books back-to-back was that they tended to communicate with each other, and I could sometimes see the ghosts of previous books in the current ones. An unexpected consequence of the order was a difficulty on my part to adjust when a book diverged wildly in tone from the previous selections. For example, it’s possible that if I had read Nietzsche directly after Swift, or some other more lively stylist, Nietzsche would not have seemed so over the top. This is something I will take into account going forward.

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Why I Write
by George Orwell

Memorable Line
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Civilization and Its Discontents
by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Memorable Line (if you can call it that)
“These people make themselves independent of the concurrence of the object of their love by shifting the main emphasis from being loved to their own loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the love object by directing their love not to individuals, but to everyone in equal measure, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by deviating from its sexual aim and transforming the drive into an aim-inhibited impulse.”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Memorable Line
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture her gift had put her to.”

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Why I Am So Wise
by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Memorable Line
“Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made upon it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.”

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