For potential readers: Aside from Ravelstein and Closing of the American mind, all the others have 4 page chapters/segments on average. Easy, easy reads!
Here are some books I'm going through lately:
Death at the President's Lodging - Michael Innes
A wonderful little parish murder mystery twist, taking place this time in an imagined university positioned exactly equidistant from Oxford and Cambridge, in the zone of a special conflict of humors where a man of the mind might go mad and kill the president of the university. Written by a real Oxford don! Really good.
Then and Now - W Somerset Maugham
If you've read Machiavelli, The Prince, Discourses on Livy, his dispatches from his diplomatic missions, and Florentine Histories, and his comedies, you should read this. You should read this anyway. Don't even bother. This is what you want. Amazing book. A fun, canny, immaculately written (in a VERY good imitation of Machiavelli's famously cramped and funny prose) comedy about infidelity, political conspiracy, and paying an 18 year old to simp for you.
I Am Dynamite! - Sue Prideaux
An incredible, unbelievable biography of Nietzsche. Did you know he had prophetic visions? Was in a throuple with the incomprable Lou Salome and his best friend Paul Ree? Was a born charmer, a talented pianist (though Wagner didn't think so), a seducer and rogue, with severe disabilities, incomparable good humor and manners? He effortlessly made friends with celebrities! His great challenge in life was a transition from philology, which his (congenital, likely some sort of rare form of congenital brain cancer) disability kept him from to philosophy. Once he lost the ability to read, he became a creature of pure thought, until he was destroyed by his father's disease. An impossibly good book. Great cover. Must-read.
The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom
A must-read from one of the great working class heroes and intellectuals of America, Allan Bloom, the incomparable and peerless and great soul, the greatest soul to ever come from Ohio. A fine argument against subordinating the lives and minds of the best of us to the cold and stupid life of succeeding in easy games like professions.
Ravelstein - Saul Bellow
The roman a clef covering the last years of Allan Bloom's life as he achieved instant fame and wealth with "The Closing of the American Mind," an international bestseller that created the deep play of the right in the culture war, though ironically it came from a gay progressive Jew who wanted to bring us back to the depth of feeling and spirit that we had in the classical world. Saul Bellow is the narrator and the depth of feeling in this is something else. You have never mourned a standard-bearer of the purest and deepest traditions of the greatest geniuses ever to live. The incomparable (and completely unique) emancipatory tradition of Europeans is the great heritage of the world, and Allan Bloom is one of the finest fruits of it, a mind that only wanted to teach, to live and love, obsessed to the end with the great and pure mysteries of the Symposium.
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
One of my next novels will borrow the particular and very special structure of this wonderful novel. You must read it immediately. It's short, simple, but endlessly revealing, a cube that becomes an infinite fractal of memory, association, fantasy, a collection of prose poems about the cities, all women, dotting the world, all of them are Venice, eternal, perfectly and truly timeless Venice, as related by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Nothing compares. You've not read a book like this, and if you have, tell me about it.