Booknotes 5.13

Dubliners, by James Joyce, published 1914, fiction, 249 pages. Alas, I didn’t like it. Sad and melancholy, which itself doesn’t bother me, but throughout I just couldn’t believe that Joyce had any love for his characters, or for humanity, and I have as little love for misanthropy as it has for me. Twenty-four years ago I read Portrait of the Artist and I believe I came away from it with a similar feeling. My interest in someday reading Ulysses has slipped beneath the waves. The Old Regime and the Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville (translated by Henry Reeve), published 1856 (translation published 1873), history, 410 pages. An analysis of the causes of the French Revolution and a thesis that the revolution perhaps didn’t reform French political institutions as much as people may have thought. Fascinating and readable. Felt surprisingly contemporary, too, with passages like these: “And it may be said with strict accuracy that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an…