Books I Read August 10th, 2026

And man wares away like rot,

like a garment eaten by moths

Man born of woman,

Scant of days and sated with trouble,

like a blossom he comes forth and withers

and flees like a shadow—he will not stay.

The Translator by Leila Aboulela – A religiously observant Sudanese widow brings a secular Scottish professor to marriage, the Muslim faith. For an atheist, I am generally positively disposed towards expressions of religion in fiction. There are few things I value more than a work which offers some thoughtful defense of God (Marilynne Robinson) or, better and far rarer, to articulate in human language some experience of the transcendent which might allow for a moment of faith even in a non-believer (Dostoevsky, Marilynne Robinson again, but also, in evidence that my appreciation for divinely-inspired isn't Christian specific, Tayeb Salih). This book does not do that, nor does it even make an appreciable argument for Islam. It seems rather to take refuge in the classic Islamic tautology of I'jaz al-Quran, Muhammad's oft-repeated exhortation that the Quran is self-evidently so perfect as to be proof of its own divinity. Which, 10 out of 10 for boldness, but it's unlikely to convince an unbeliever. One can't help but imagine it ranks as a more powerful argument when made while holding a scimitar in the other hand. Anyway, I did not find in this the compelling paean to Islam for which I had genuinely hoped.

Wolves and Other Love Stories by Ivan Bunin – Brief vignettes celebrating the raw potency of life, counterpoised against its bleak and brutal injustices. I delighted in the soaring descriptions of young love, oft-betrayed, and the ferocious intensity it offers to all of the surrounding experiences. Grand stuff by Russia's first Nobel prize winner for literature.

Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe by John A. Lynn – A brief overview of the role of women between the contract army era, when they were a critical component of the wider military system, to the rise of the modern national military in which they were all but banished. I tend to enjoy works of 'New' military history, i.e. those which concentrate on the grander cultural and social implications of combat, rather than plot out specific lines of advance and so on. In general I have a fascination for the minutia of circumstance, books which highlight some particular fractal of the human experience. This was one of those.

Jackal by Erin E. Adams – Racism, supernatural horror in a small town.

The Glory and the Sorrow by Timothy Tackett – Another narrow view on grand events, the life of a minor Parisian lawyer during the heart of the revolution, as retold from a cache of posthumous letters. Interesting if anti-climactic.

Selected Poems by Saint-John Perse – Sort of a cheerier T.S. Elliot (who translates one of these). I enjoyed...

'Be a man with calm eyes who laughs'

and

'He who has not praised thirst and drunk the water of the sands from a sallet
I trust him little in the commerce of the soul...”