Weekly Recap June 20-June 26 2021

Fellow Readers, I fear I may disappoint you: this week, I only read two books. The first was a buddy read with a new friend, and I had the opportunity to annotate as I was reading. I thoroughly recommend marking up the books you own, to pick out favorite lines and interesting themes. The other was a play from one of my favorite modern playwrights. I enjoyed them both:


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Against the urging of his friends and mentors, author avatar Stephen Dedalus grows from a confused child into a freethinking artificer. While many passages in this archetypical Bildungsroman are scarily accurate to my own experience, any personal affection I have for Joyce or his prose is overwhelmed by respectful awe. 


“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning” (291)


Describe the Night by Rajiv Joseph

A riff on truth and censorship that ties a 1920 diary to the 2010 Smolensk plane crash, featuring Soviet writer Isaac Babel, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov and an enterprising KGB agent. It’s not as good as Guards at the Taj, but Joseph’s trademark interpersonal nuance and literary “breathing room” make this play glorious to stage.


“NIKOLAI: Behold, Young Vladimir: The Black Magic Marker: The most useful tool in all of communism” (59)

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