What I Read in August 2026 – what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge

Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge. (Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, p. 90) An uncomfortable sentence there. A reminder that I will return to non-Shakespeare plays any minute now, with Volpone up next Monday and The Revenger’s Tragedy a couple of weeks after that. VICINITY OF SHAKESPEARE Utopia (1516), Thomas More – Ahead of its time. Poems (1633), John Donne – Well, I read Donne’s collected poems in a modern edition, so a later, accretive version of the 1633 book, a landmark, the first publication of most of its contents. How Donne fell out of favor is beyond me. His emotional, imaginative and formal range is extraordinary. I meant to read a short selection of his hits but just kept going. FICTION The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway – Late, or really mid, and possibly early, Hemingway has a kitsch or self-parodic tendency. I got a taste of that early in this…