ET: Almanac

479.

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

- Emily Dickinson

What's Going On With My Hometown Orchestra?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUojDkfHugM

So word is leaking that my hometown orchestra has apparently decided on a new conductor, though I've heard nothing about whom it might be. Considering that the search is over two years early, I suspect that can only mean one thing: somebody they previously wanted took the job, and I think it's probably the greatest conductor in the world.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2iQYbFzXQs

If it's a shame that the search finished early, it's only because a number of really wonderful conductors presented themselves this year: I was all set to hate Ken-David Masur as a nepotism career, but he floored me past even his father. It was like hearing a Brahms 2 from Fritz Busch, where the expression was completely natural and spontaneous even at top tempi. Christian Reif and Rune Bergmann were both superb in exact opposite ways - Bergmann a kapellmeister who knows exactly the essentials like Sawallisch, Reif a bravado-laden daredevil like Pretre. and even a few who were less than superb were still very good: Dalia Stasevska and Christoph Konig particularly stood out. I was out of town for Jonothan Hayward but people told me great things.... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8dh6rW0Q1k

Maybe Conlon decided to come on permanently, and I'd certainly welcome that development. Conlon is not the excitable sort, but he's like a neo-kapellmeister for our time, who knows exactly what he's doing in all situations, knows every detail of hundreds of scores, will introduce all sorts of fantastic repertoire we'd never otherwise hear, will bring all manner of great soloists who love working with him, and will raise the bar concert by concert to an unheard standard. He's a wonderful communicator who could engage the audience magnificently and clearly feels a duty to both community and education. But since he was already in town this week, I'd imagine they'd have announced it then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0PeGGQuGyY

So before this 'worldwide conductor search' the perennial favorite guests here seemed to be Markus Stenz, Hannu Lintu, and Juanjo Mena (not counting Mario Venzago, who's nearly 75). Mena's amazing, even if I sometimes think to myself that he's either overly virtuosic or overly austere and never just right. I'd be absolutely thrilled to have Mena here a couple months a year. He should be consistently in front of the world's best, but he has the 'difficult' label affixed, so I'd imagine him changing his mind about us would not be sufficient to conclude a worldwide search. Lintu is often magnificent. I've never heard him be less than very good, from him I've obviously heard Sibelius for the ages, very good German rep like Beethoven 7 and Brahms 2, and, surprisingly, perhaps the best Dvorak 8 I've ever heard, including Ivan Fischer's. If Lintu comes here, I'll be thrilled too, but running a major opera house in your hometown makes little Baltimore a distant second priority - so I can't imagine there is reason enough to end the search two years early for Lintu either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy5EGj791uE

But Markus Stenz has no other job, and omgomgomgomgomgomg Considering the smallness of the audience I may be the only person in the world who cares about this, but I'm currently on vacation, and aside from depression over an enormous fight with a good friend, this is the only thing I can think about right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLo0uzzv54M

It would be such a triumph to get him here. He would do for Baltimore exactly what Manfred Honeck did for Pittsburgh, only still moreso. Honeck is a master of traditional repertoire, but past 1910 and the Rhine river, Honeck doesn't travel very well. Stenz does trad rep at least as well as Honeck, and everything that isn't trad rep he does just as well. Of any conductor I've heard more than half a dozen times live, he is, quite simply, so far over and above everyone else that I don't have words for the musicianship I've seen on display. There are obviously influences in him from Carlos Kleiber in his fleet electricity and Leonard Bernstein in his romantic extravagances, but Stenz is better than either of them. In his particular mix of classicism, romanticism, modernism, diversity of repertoire, precision and hyper-expression, he reminds me of no one so much as Ferenc Fricsay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVRa1HCNAuk

My seemingly modest hometown band punches well above its weight - and to this day, we have David Zinman to thank for raising standards so high. No amount of irresponsibility from Temirkanov or (undeserved) demoralization under Alsop could kill the esprit de corps - the precision, the electricity, the blend and passionate expression. But if Stenz is coming, then like Vanska in Minnesota before him, I would in all seriousness be sitting in front of the band into the best in the whole nation - better perhaps even than Minnesota under Vanska. But by the time Stenz is done, I might be the only person left in the concert hall, and unless we can get people to start coming to the increasingly mausoleum-like Meyerhoff Hall, the only person left who might appreciate all they've done. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HaJCJ7Jz28

Underrated Classical Music: Sibelius's Pelleas

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iulnOW18hfg&fbclid=IwAR1WAGrOxR1wASfHnvy0b97_TKMR1AipzQ8wjcQJ3ImimeXYxcvHuCtMnDw

I dont' believe it. A Zinman Pelleas (Sibelius). Pelleas is, I think, Sibelius's most underrated work. At least The Tempest has its champions, but Pelleas just floats under the radar - everybody who hears it loves it, but there is so much Sibelius and even now with 50 Finnish conductors proliferating on the world scene like rabbits, we still hear not even half of it regularly.

I could do a long Sibelius post. He has gone slightly down and up in my estimation as I get to know the work of contemporaries better like Nielsen and Janacek, but the fundamental fact of Sibelius is that, like Brahms, there is nothing but dependability in Sibelius's music. It has this overwhelming spiritual center, and the very act of listening is a sort of catharsis. But Sibelius has even truer forerunners than Brahms. The only composers I can truly compare Sibelius to are Bach and Palestrina. there is a kind of purity to the part writing which is unique to them. Bach and Sibelius clearly grew up with the hymns of Luther in their ears, and there is a spirituality that is unlike any other composer. In Bach's case, the center of his musical imagination is obviously the Protestant Church, in Sibelius's case, it is just as obviously the dark Nordic woodlands, but within those woodlands is a pagan spirituality completely unlike any other composer.

Is Sibelius one of the greatest of the great? There are moments when I truly wonder if he is, but there is also a kind of humanism that Sibelius lacks, and sometimes I think that is a willful choice on his part. He prefers the inanimate and the animals within it, and that's certainly his right, but for those of us dependent on music for the strength to go on, there are moments when the gloomy and bombastic lack of humanity leaves a sour aftertaste.

Such is the sublimity of his vision that there are a number works which belong among the very greatest ever written (Tapiola, symphonies 4-7, En Saga), and there are also so much wonderful light music for the salon. Pelleas is a seamless unity of those two sides of his musical imagination, and consequently one of his greatest and most renewable works. On days like today when some of us desperately need the morale to go on, Sibelius is perfectly attune what we need.

ET: Almanac

When I go musing all alone

Thinking of divers things fore-known.

When I build castles in the air,

Void of sorrow and void of fear,

Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,

Methinks the time runs very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

When I lie waking all alone,

Recounting what I have ill done,

My thoughts on me then tyrannise,

Fear and sorrow me surprise,

Whether I tarry still or go,

Methinks the time moves very slow.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so mad as melancholy.

When to myself I act and smile,

With pleasing thoughts the time beguile,

By a brook side or wood so green,

Unheard, unsought for, or unseen,

A thousand pleasures do me bless,

And crown my soul with happiness.

All my joys besides are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.

When I lie, sit, or walk alone,

I sigh, I grieve, making great moan,

In a dark grove, or irksome den,

With discontents and Furies then,

A thousand miseries at once

Mine heavy heart and soul ensconce,

All my griefs to this are jolly,

None so sour as melancholy.

Methinks I hear, methinks I see,

Sweet music, wondrous melody,

Towns, palaces, and cities fine;

Here now, then there; the world is mine,

Rare beauties, gallant ladies shine,

Whate'er is lovely or divine.

All other joys to this are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.

Methinks I hear, methinks I see

Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my phantasy

Presents a thousand ugly shapes,

Headless bears, black men, and apes,

Doleful outcries, and fearful sights,

My sad and dismal soul affrights.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

None so damn'd as melancholy.

Methinks I court, methinks I kiss,

Methinks I now embrace my mistress.

O blessed days, O sweet content,

In Paradise my time is spent.

Such thoughts may still my fancy move,

So may I ever be in love.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

When I recount love's many frights,

My sighs and tears, my waking nights,

My jealous fits; O mine hard fate

I now repent, but 'tis too late.

No torment is so bad as love,

So bitter to my soul can prove.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so harsh as melancholy.

Friends and companions get you gone,

'Tis my desire to be alone;

Ne'er well but when my thoughts and I

Do domineer in privacy.

No Gem, no treasure like to this,

'Tis my delight, my crown, my bliss.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

'Tis my sole plague to be alone,

I am a beast, a monster grown,

I will no light nor company,

I find it now my misery.

The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,

Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so fierce as melancholy.

I'll not change life with any king,

I ravisht am: can the world bring

More joy, than still to laugh and smile,

In pleasant toys time to beguile?

Do not, O do not trouble me,

So sweet content I feel and see.

All my joys to this are folly,

None so divine as melancholy.

I'll change my state with any wretch,

Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch;

My pain's past cure, another hell,

I may not in this torment dwell!

Now desperate I hate my life,

Lend me a halter or a knife;

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so damn'd as melancholy. 

-Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Book Proposal: First Third to Half

 

If You Read The Whole Thing You're Capable Of This Job

Dearest Editors, 

So I won't lie, this is a daunting project, like... this is not even your run the mill novel. As it exists in my head, I doubt I could ever finish this project, I wonder if it's even finishable, but if I do more than 4% of it I will have gotten further than Sufjan Stevens did in his 50 State Project. 

So before we begin, before I even describe the project, here's the biggest obstacle, and as an editor it would be your #1 mission to look out for any and all examples of this because it's the curse of every ambitious person in the world: Importantitis - the idea that your work should matter, that it will change the curvature of the world, that people will rethink their lives from reading what you have to say, that it will overthrow a government or cause world peace. Importantitis kills everything it touches - it gives everybody who suffers from it automatic creative block, and whatever gets written is inevitably more pompous than it ever would be if you weren't posing for history. 

So as an editor, if you see even a sentence I write with importantitis in it, unless it's funny, send it back to me (or any other writer) for a rewrite. Here's particularly why....

Ahem,... I have not exactly made a secret on social media of my struggles over the years with mental health, and this project, like the musical one I've been doing for seven years, came to me from what we'll charitably call the 'magical thinking' of my brain as a younger man before I got it under control really.... well... it took a while...

Here's the thing... take a deep breath and sit down everybody because this sentence is automatically self-selecting... 

At some point, I don't even remember how, I got it into my head that God had charged me with writing a (or THE) great epic meganovel of Jewish history from its founding to the present day, and that it would be a maze of interconnected stories that connects the stories of every generation to one another over thousands of years. At this point I'll just quote one of the best half-paragraphs I ever wrote (after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting) to give a better description of why I've wanted to write this novel than I could come up with here and now:

"Because the fact is, everywhere we've (Jews have) gone, we are the barometer of your civilization. We have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably say, but we have been the yeast that makes your society rise. When we are your honored guests, your civilization prospers, when you do us dishonor, your civilization declines. It's probably not because God is watching over us, it's because a civilization well-disposed to its guests is a civilization that values tolerance and progress and liberty and justice, and is therefore destined to improve."

So it follows that the aim, if not the achievement, of this... whateveritis, would be to show how Judaism and Jews, guests of every world civilization, act as a kind of filigree that connects every major new civilization (at least every major Western one... so far...) to those cultures who came before and those who will come afterward. How those who take us in inevitably seem to be rewarded (if you squint), and those who punish and expel us inevitably seem to be punished themselves (if you squint a little harder). 

I will explain more as this goes along, but here's what Joseph Campbell (or Dan Harmon) would term the monomyth on which these stories would be based (Campbell, by the way, was the world's most goyish thinker, and not particularly fond of us... I'll try to limit the parentheses from here on...).

Every time and place in Jewish History: 

1. Spring - romance: Somewhere in the world, a not particularly prosperous place has a community of good people who stumble on the secret of improving their communities: hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better. And being so often the most down on their luck people in the world, Jews inevitably come, and find a kind of understanding from people who are simultaneously appalled by their suffering yet find them distasteful, are fascinated by their culture yet terrified it will pollute and pervert their own, and ultimately, realize that these people are improving their lives with astonishing speed, such speed that the natives can't resolve for themselves if these immigrants are entirely human. 

2. Summer - comedy: This place grows incredibly prosperous, and it may or may not be because of the influence of Jews, or of immigrants generally. Nevertheless, the country/community/society is disproportionately successful, and even within that place, Jews are particularly disproportionate in their success. But this country's native born Jews, whose parents and grandparents dwelt in so much oppression, become very conspicuous in how they display their success, as the newly rich often do. It creates what seems like a golden age in the community, at least in retrospect, but so high is the prosperity that  expectations grow of what the future will bring, and inevitably, the better future doesn't come, because it was already there.... So the new generation, who never knew a time without prosperity, rebel against the prevailing expectations of their society, and even the smallest rebellions against the society seem like earthshaking events (think of the sixties and Baby Boomers...). And in this new society, Jews are so conspicuous and eminent that they are the leading figures in both the rebellion against the community, and the establishment who wants to keep things exactly the way they are! (think of the difference between Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg, or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman - remember him?). 

3. Fall - tragedy: Just as Jewish success never lasts very long, a country's success never lasts particularly long either, and eventually it collapses (sorry but it's true) in war, or famine, or dictatorship, or anarchy. It seems to happen in every country and every era, I grievously doubt we will be an exception. The reason that happens is that success is a poisoned chalice. It always manages to highlight those ways in which we're all still lacking, and eventually the inadequacies seem larger than the successes, and because the inadequacies seem larger, the inadequacies BECOME larger because nobody has the morale to do the colossally tough work and sacrifice it takes to keep a society functioning properly. And so people turn to explanations for why life isn't better than it is, and these explanations become like an intellectual suit of armor for them that explains the inexplicable. At the time, their newly adapted identities seem to them like revelations which will change the quality of their lives forever; but life is tenaciously mysterious, and no explanation of why life is the way it is solves our problems any more than temporarily. But since Jews are inherently mysterious and ambiguous, both native to their countries and not,  It is inevitably blamed on the country's most conspicuously successful people, who suddenly find themselves the most oppressed people in their society as quickly as their parents or grandparents rose to success. 

4. Winter - Irony: Having cleared a community of its Jews, the newly cleansed society is supposed to take root in a luminously glorious new golden age. But it never does, because it turned out Jews were not parasites, they were yeast, and without Jews, the bread falls and burns. So depleted has this society become from its obviously misplaced priorities that the misfortune which was supposed only to fall upon Jews falls upon everybody. Here's another of the best paragraphs I ever wrote: "If we're The Chosen People, it's not because we're a better nation, it's because God chose us for his laboratory. We're an unending scroll through which is inscribed the whole world's history. Every new century and country is a new chapter but the lesson of Jewish history is that everything Jews undergo, the world undergoes next. By enslaving us, Egypt eventually enslaved themselves. By crucifying us, Romans eventually crucified themselves. By massacring us, the Crusaders eventually got massacred. By putting us in a religious torture chamber, the Spanish put themselves in too. By imprisoning us in a ghetto, Russians eventually imprisoned themselves. By burning us, Germans eventually burned too. When Jews are accepted, others get accepted next. When Jews are rejected, others get rejected next. When Jews are killed, you get the point...

5. Spring somewhere else, where Jews go next...

So when you perceive these life cycles in society, how they keep happening everywhere from century to century, and how often Jews seem involved, it's very hard for some of us not to see an animating hand in it. Perhaps there is someone out there using Jews as test subjects. Is God testing the Jews? Or is he testing the people who react to Jews? So whomever he tests, why is he testing us? And are these tests in fact a reason to celebrate him or a reason to condemn him? 

Obviously, this myth is not true, and if there is truth in it, it's obviously a matter of perspective. Jews are not big on monomyths. We're Pharisees, remember? We only like rules when we can make exceptions to them, because the state of every Jewish life is ambiguous. If you've read the first five books of the Bible, particularly Leviticus, you'll realize that the Torah has so many laws (613 to be exact) that it is impossible to observe in modern daily life unless they are constantly reinterpreted for new circumstances, generation after generation. We don't even know what our own laws mean! 

It then follows that the one monomyth which applies to Jewish life is that anybody who believes in their own monomyth eventually comes across terrible trouble with Jews. Whether your monomyth is Christianity or Islam, or paganism, or nationalism or socialism (or obviously combinations thereof), or science and technology, or atheism and philosophy, you will come to look at Jews with incredible amounts of suspicion, because the nature of Jewish identity is so incredibly difficult to pin down. 

Just to take the most obvious example from contemporary life: are American Jews loyal first to US or Israel? The answer is obviously the US, or at least usually the US by far. Are there Jews who are loyal to Israel first? Sure. Even a few powerful ones. But the vast majority of Jews of any social station are self-evidently Americans before Israel comes into the equation at all. But to anyone whom the suspicion of dual Jewish loyalty occurs, they seem unable to get it out of their minds, and it can act on them like a mental poison. 

And the reason is because antisemitism is another of those ambiguities. It's like racism, but it's not the same. Racism is, in many ways, a gut level disgust for someone who looks  different than you. But an antisemites can never be sure that anybody they meet is not a Jew. It acts almost like a paranoid psychological disorder, and in that way, it's closer to homophobia. But nobody, nobody sane at least, is worried that gays are secretly controlling any industry but culture, whereas Jews are supposed to be controlling not just our culture, but our media distribution, our banks, and our government. 

Furthermore, agreement about whether Jews are white isn't nearly as widespread as the average 

There are a bunch of leftists out there who think Jews are all capitalists who control all of those organizations. There are a bunch of right-wingers out there who think Jews are all radical socialists trying to upend the societal order they think they've always known and loved. There are these 'dual versions' of how Jews poison a society in every country Jews have ever lived in. 

Obviously, most people sympathetic to the right or the left don't believe that, but there are certain things they believe very passionately. Right wingers see that there's clearly a disproportionate number of Jews in Hollywood (which is true...), and therefore draw a conclusion that Jewish influence on Hollywood and culture is something insidious, and some version of that always gets said in a a heated argument. Left wingers, on the other hand, see that there's clearly a disproportionate number of Jews in Washington (also true), and they draw a similar conclusion about Jews' role in government - that some conspiracy of Jews is creating our foreign policy to be beneficial only to Jews. And in heated arguments, that always comes out too. 

So eventually, when conflict becomes unavoidable, the host countries suffer terribly, but Jews so often seem to suffer the first and worst. Ultimately, I don't know why that is or if that's entirely true, but it just seems to be the way of things: Germany, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, more recently in the Middle East (we'll talk about that controversy another time...) and if you go far back enough, there are examples all around the Western world. 

So the question becomes, when Jews are getting killed, why do millions of people not defend Jews against their murderers? Not all Germans were Nazis, not all Russians participated in pogroms, not all medieval Spaniards denounced their neighbors as Jews or went to auto-da-fe's (public burnings of heretics). But when encountering clear evidence of horrific oppression, why did so many of them just kinda shrug?

Here, we're going to stop and talk about the job. I need seven to eight hours a week and will pay $40 an hour. I need someone with a real knowledge of history and real knowledge of the bible, and when talking to you individually I will obviously pop quiz you with intermediate level questions from both. I don't need a Jewish editor (though it would be nice maybe...) but I need someone who clearly knows a thing or seven about Jewish culture, and has obvious familiarity with the general way Jews do things - which is both exactly like everybody else and very, very different. I need someone who can edit the obvious howlers in my careless punctuation and tendency mid-correction to forget replacing the deleted word with the correct word. I need some who edits the authorial voice with a view to making it sound less pompous than its author; but I'll also be going to great lengths to establish very specific authorial voices, so please do your best to edit the tone with an eye to sharpening it, not dulling it. We would meet for roughly ninety minutes by zoom at some point during the week for a combined notes, brainstorming, talk about other books, and general therapy with a guy who has been going to it almost without a break for thirty years. I may or may not get to know you very well over this project, but you will certainly get to know me. 

Most importantly, I need someone who can handle colossally dark subjects without getting more disturbed than its author, maintain a sense of humor when reading and talking about the darkest subjects, and find ways of appreciating the beauty in terrible struggles. Jewish history is very dark, the life of the crazy is very dark. As my longtime musical engineer recently told me, in terms of being actually crazy, I'm still clearly an 8 out of 10, but in terms of actually being difficult, he called me a 5.5 - not a pushover, I'm still this guy... but not actively difficult to work with either and certainly not someone who ever makes a request without five preparatory clauses before and five apologies afterward. Maybe he was being nice... but once he tells you you're 8/10 crazy, it's hard to imagine he's trying to sugarcoat things. 

For better or worse, I can assure you, dear editors, this current easygoing go with the flow Evan is still alive at 40 due to an enormous amount of personal work and introspection he had to undertake so he might have some hope to control a live wire of a brain which was suffering quite a bit more than I ever even admitted to nearly anybody. Part of this project will be to document those chapters of my life in relative detail, I will enumerate that later in this proposal as well. So now let's go back to the question three paragraphs up. 

There's no easy answer to that question, but I think there are four layers operating here: 

1. They're obviously afraid of dying themselves. When helping condemned people condemns you and your family, you're obviously not inclined to help.

2. Peer pressure. I doubt more than one-third of Germans had truly positive feelings about Hitler and Nazis, but when defending the defenseless means defending the most hated people in your country, it will even change the opinion of people who love you enough not to turn you in. You become thought of at best as a lost soul, at least as someone who is no longer trustworthy, at worst, someone deserving of contempt and humiliation. 

3. There's always the off chance that some of those awful things Hitler and Torquemada (if you don't know who he is take a moment to look him up now :) claim about Jews are true. So why take the chance to save them when Hitler just might be doing a social good by getting rid of them?

4. Even if the claims of Hitler and whoever else are untrue, there are so many competing claims about Jews. Some people say Jews are horrible because we're capitalists, some because we're communists. Some say we suck because we refuse to be Christians, others say we suck because we made the seed from which Christianity sprung. Today, some of the world thinks of us as the most brutal nationalists on earth, and some of the world thinks of us as the world's most corrupt cosmopolitans who ruin everything distinct about every culture we touch. So when so many competing claims are made about Jews, millions simultaneously must reason, 'Nobody knows the specifics, but everybody agrees that Jews are bad, and if people who disagree on so much else can agree on that, they must be just as bad as everybody thinks.'

Jews wander from nation to nation, penniless and persecuted, but in new countries they're given opportunity, and suddenly they run circles with it and rise to the top of society more quickly than anyone ever knew somebody could. They change everything about the societies in which they live, but the whiplash of quick societal change can hurt everybody. Half the society gets hung up recapturing the way things used to be, and half the society gets hung up on why the new society isn't better than it is. It distracts them from doing the work of maintaining their society, which makes the society worse. The only thing both sides eventually agree on is that this new country that Jews helped build sucks, it needs to be torn down, and it was only ever to Jewish people's benefit. 

All they come to agree on is that we are parasites. We accelerate the growth of a society, and we accelerate its demise. Letting Jews emigrate to their society is a 'deal with the devil' for short term gain at the expense of long term success. 

The average Jew might be a little more successful than the average person elsewhere, but not markedly so. But still, it's hard not to notice that there's a lot of disproportionately successful Jews, and that seems to be true everywhere Jews go. How do so many Jews get disproportionately successful? Well, Jews aren't inherently smarter than anybody, but Jewish life is a series of routines. You keep the kitchen a certain way, you memorize hundreds of prayers, you have laws for how to dress, how to raise children, how to do business, how to.... go about every facet of your life. So Jews, at least Jews raised in the culture, learn very early about the importance of perspicacity, precision, and practicality. We are trained practically from birth to do routines. The routines may be stupid or meaningless, but they do prepare Jews for the routines that are meaningful in creating a good life. 

Form

I don't believe I'm capable of writing a long-form narrative. My ability to sustain a narrative usually empty out around about 7,000 words and my best quality writing averages at about 4,000. This will most likely be a long collection of short stories. 

So here are the options for how to do it. 

1. A loose collection of short stories, none of which technically have anything to do with the other. 

2. 

Jarvi doing Copland

Here's Neeme Jarvi doing Copland 3 better than any American except for... maybe Michael Tilson Thomas? But honestly, other than an MTT broadcast with the LSO I'm not sure I've ever heard a performance this great. This is a colossally hard symphony to play, and if you don't believe me, listen to any recording that Copland conducts - it's faster than any other conductor, and no orchestra can keep up with him. Lenny's recordings are obviously very moving, and never moreso than in reflective pastoral music, but... come on, if Copland 3 does not whiz by, it's a very long slog, and Bernstein makes it longer. Perhaps because it's too difficult for orchestras to play at full tempo - even the New York Philharmonic, or perhaps because he is trying to make the work sound more profound - something which, contrary to so much critical opinion, this work already is and needs no help from conductors to be. Jarvi doesn't get perfect playing from the Sydney Symphony to sound more 'American' than the New York Philharmonic. The fast string counterpoint in the finale has to sound like bluegrass fiddling. The second movement is another of those scherzos like Prokofiev 5 and Shostakovich 8 that have to sound like an aural equivalent to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times - only here, Chaplin's Tramp is being lionized as the Common Man. So many of the fanfares (not the obvious one) have to sound like the raw American power that won the war - the factories, the weapons, the sheer awe of America's war machine - about which, if you really listen, Copland is not nearly as gung-ho about it as the music might make it seem. The mid-slow movement dance has to sound like as much a contra-dance as anything in Rodeo.

It's a very tough piece to play, and much more emotionally sophisticated than it ever gets credit for being. Sadly, musicians are still figuring it out. Not Jarvi though, he gets the whole thing. The pastoral passages have all sorts of eerie moments that anybody hears when out in the open spaces of nature, of which the US has more than nearly any country on earth. Jarvi deliberately underplays the Fanfare for the Common Man - mostly at a mere forte though he crescendos toward the end of it. The second appearance is the important one: if you don't hold back before the climax, there isn't much room for the climax to mean anything. He seems to hold back the tempo for the string counterpoint after the fanfare - probably because you need three weeks of rehearsal to get that passage right, but when the winds and brass take over, he goes fully up to Copland's speed, and we're suddenly hearing an American work of momentum, optimism, heroism and symphonic argument fully worthy of Beethoven. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuhwkKIqOvo

The Beginning of A Lifetime Library - Still Quite Incomplete for Now (sorry Eli... :)

Except for the mandatory reading, this is for whenever you and any others of the new generation are ready, and whenever you've completed your education, which I hope is longer than mine and so much more rewarding. This is obviously supplementary, mostly for in your older years when or if you ever have time, and you obviously should add your own to this list that are hopefully in the same spirit, or you can find books that provide the critiques from other ideologies if you are so inclined, and inclined you very well may be. 

This is a library, not a reading list. It is meant to have exponentially more books than you will ever read. I do not pretend to have completed any more than 8% of these books, nor to have started more than 14; and the more I add, the less I'll have read, and the books I've read are heavily weighted toward the easy ones. So I can't even verify if these books are as reliable as I hope they are, nor can I testify with any certainty to their difficulty except as an uneducated guess. Nevertheless, this library will be supplementary to every letter I write you, and they all stand in my mind as books to be read that I trust will be worth my time, yours, and any friend or family member who approaches them in good faith, which is the only sentiment guaranteed to keep the world afloat; moreso even than love or kindness. 

One thing though: if this list is heavily weighted toward the writings of white males, the reason is this: the inadequacies of modern liberalism toward the disadvantaged are present for all to see by now, but the only prescriptive solutions yet are radically progressive or radically reactionary with no thought to how these solutions may shake the earth's foundations to mass death. 

But there are two loopholes that liberals like me can use by listening to two alternate political ideologies with whom you can ally yourself with reasonable safety:

1.  Listen very carefully to the ideas of people who call themselves progressives - not radicals, not socialists, not anarchists, not intersectionalists. Progressives are the true left wing of any free society. Many of their ideas are bad, but progressive movements are the garden through which every country generates their best ideas for the future. However, the benefits of progressive openness are counterbalanced by an extreme political naivete, a facile excitement for all new ideas because they are new, and therefore a dangerous inability to distinguish their good ideas from their bad. Do not believe any modern progressive of my generation who, when you're older, tells you that your generation of liberals can partner with your generation of radicals without danger - and many of them inevitably will. They are leading the modern left through a very old dimensional doorway which has long demonstrated a near-100% rate of explosive failure. 

2. Listen with your brain to progressives, but listen with your heart to moderates. That does not mean to be more attached to them than to progressives, but because progressives think with their hearts, you need to be their brains, and because moderates are overly skeptical about progress, you need to use your intuition to distinguish which cautious instinct of theirs is accurate. Listen particularly to the attachments of their past and what those conventions of about daily life they're most worried about losing. Some of their attachments to old ways are without use, and occasionally their notions of what ought remain are dangerous. Nevertheless, political moderates are the true right wing of a great society. They are the best adjudicators you will ever experience of what older societal notions are worth preserving. Nevertheless, moderates are as politically naive as progressives. They will try, as tenaciously as they can, to argue that they are the true center of discourse; and that the truth is, for all meaningful purposes, the middle point between the traditional conservative line and the traditional liberal line. But what the general public deems a traditional conservative is a dangerous reactionary, attached to a world that can no longer exist and perhaps never did; and what the public deems reactionaries are dangerous authoritarians. The center of discourse is not moderation, the center of discourse is whatever empirical inquiry shows the center of discourse to be. This goes back to Aristotle and Nicomachean Ethics, which I won't subject you to (yet:), but until the world finds reliable empirical evidence on all subjects, modern liberalism is risibly far from ideal to creating a world akin to its aspirations. Nevertheless, modern liberalism is the only reliable ideology which trusts empirical findings and puts into action what experience dictates we should do. Therefore, liberalism deserves your loyalty as the least objectionable option - which is the best you're going to do in this difficult world. 

We are still waiting for liberalism to undergo another evolutionary leap to include the narratives of women and peoples of color and LGBTQ peoples in a manner that dispenses by and large with radical notions of completely upending society as we know it, because such notions are shown in every era to be as dangerous as the reactionary beliefs which inevitably create such radicalism. Other readers, radical and reactionary, may look at this list closely, and if they ever see it, it is my fatigued expectation that they would view certain inclusions and absences as provocative, but it is not meant as provocation. I cannot help my creeping doubts about their good faith any more than they can help their creeping doubts about mine, and I gravely fear what they believe and what they represent, because, whether rational or not, I believe they court death to us all quite deliberately - the people they love along with the people they hate, and that practically defines bad faith. I cautiously believe that I'm right about what I believe, but they seem to know that they are with a certainty anyone who disagrees with them would find not just angering, but deeply, deeply disturbing. The continual allowance for uncertainty the difference between someone who may accurately see the world sometimes, and someone who is guaranteed to never do so. We are only human, and not meant to see the world accurately more than 20 or 30 percent of the time. A conviction is only a belief, and beliefs are usually wrong. When a person thinks they are right, they will be open to all those ways they're wrong and change their beliefs accordingly. When a person knows they are right, they will never be open to viewing the ways in which they are wrong, and wrong they will always remain. 

Furthermore, it's my perception that such ideologues believe everyone else views the world with a similar lack of ambiguity to theirs, and any appearance of ambiguity in their beliefs is just a cosmetic patina, because to them, all thought depends on clarity of concept, and one must first arrive at clarity of thought before one proceeds to finding exceptions to their beliefs. There is no graver, more dangerous error in any form of inquiry. All beliefs summed up in a paragraph, be they religious, political, sociological, or metaphysical, are untrue and unsound. And because such beliefs are overly simplistic, the beliefs grow an entire world around them of terms and jargon which are deliberately as indecipherable as their core beliefs are simplistic; because the less comprehensible the details of their beliefs are, the more their meanings can be manipulated by their leaders as a means to control their followers. To understand the meanings of their gibberish, one has to believe in the simple belief with such fervor that you convince yourself that deliberately nonsensical concepts have any meaning at all. The truth is the opposite, world of inquiry, rather, depends on the ambiguous nuances of the world articulated with easily understood clarity.  

I do reserve one absolute belief, which I stand behind with everlasting faith: that better views of the world inevitably come just as worse ones do, and however transitory these states are between good and bad, better things will continue to come in your time and for millennia thereafter just as they do in mine. But all these better moments are earned by trials of anxiety and confusion. There will be a crucial mission in your generation for intelligent people of conscience to learn from your suffering better than my generation has, so as my Bubbie's generation did, you can render the radicalism and reactionism of my generation antiquated and irrelevant, at least temporarily. 

Therefore, it is not only the moral obligation of white males and Jews like you to facilitate the growth of liberalism in marginalized peoples, it is an imperative matter to ensure your survival and the survival of your own next generation, lest the world embrace still greater forms of radicalism, which provokes a vast plurality of modern whites and Jews into still more murderous forms of reaction. Like reactionary conservatives, radicals will inevitably resent the good but cautious intentions of liberals as the condescension of the privileged. Let them. There is no better determinant of who approaches you in good faith versus bad than by discovering people interpret your caution about their motives with resentment. There will be many times when that person of resentments is you, god knows it's been me - exponents more times than I will ever remember; but there are so much worse motives in life than condescension, and those who approach you in good faith will realize your good faith. 

This library, like all good libraries, will hopefully grow very large, and there will be separate wings for every chapter. 

Easy and Hopefully Mandatory Reading:

Literary

1984 by George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

The Long Road to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry 

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Candide by Voltaire

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

Night by Elie Wiesel

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Non-Fiction

The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson

Resignation Speech and Final Address by George Washington

Gettysburg Address, Emancipation Proclamation, and 2nd Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln

Freedom or Death by Emmeline Pankhurst

Ain't I a Woman by Sojourner Truth

The Pleasure of Books by Lyon Phelps 

Quit India by Mahatma Gandhi

Abolition Speech by William Wilberforce

The Appeal of 18 June by Charles de Gaulle

Farewell Address by Dwight Eisenhower

I Am the First Accused by Nelson Mandela

First Inaugural Address, Pearl Harbor Address, Fireside Chats by Franklin Roosevelt

Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

Hiroshima by John Hersey

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Right to Privacy by Louis Brandeis

Listening:

I Have a Dream, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Montgomery Bus Boycott Speech, Our God is Marching On, The Three Evils of Society, I Have Been to the Mountaintop by Martin Luther King

Put a Man on the Moon, City Upon a Hill, Inaugural Address, American University Address, Civil Rights Address, Berlin Address, Nuclear Test Ban Address by John Kennedy

2004 Keynote Address, A More Perfect Union, Love is Love, Cairo Address, Tuscon Memorial, Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me, Selma Anniversary, Amazing Grace, Reimagining Policing, Second Inaugural Address by Barack Obama

Impeachment, 1992 and 1976 Democratic National Convention Speeches by Barbara Jordan

Good Trouble, You Cannot Tell People They Cannot Fall In Love, 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday by John Lewis

2020 Convention Speech, & The United Efforts of the Free World to Support Ukraine by Joe Biden

The Black Woman in Contemporary America by Shirley Chisolm

We Must Practice Dissent by Julian Bond

America Beyond the Color Line by Henry Lewis Gates

Liberty or Death by Patrick Henry

Unlock the Greatness of Girls by Leymah Gbowee

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Malala Yousefaza Address to the United Nations

International Women's Day by Michelle Obama

Protect Black Trans Lives by Raquell Willis

Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders by Sheryl Sandberg

Speech to the UN Earth Summit by Severn Suzuki

Speech to the UN General Assembly by Chaim Herzog

Speech to the UN General Assembly by Abba Eban

Women's Rights are Human Rights by Hillary Clinton

The Negro Revolution in 1965 by Bayard Rustin

Freedom from Fear by Aung San Suu Kyi

The Misogyny Speech by Julia Gillard

1964 Democratic Convention Testimony by Fannie Lou Hammer

First Inaugural Address by Franklin Roosevelt

Suggested Easy Reading:

Africa's Tarnished Name by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

Why I Write by George Orwell

The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa and Risa Kobayashi

What Are the Blind Men Dreaming by Noemi Jaffe

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

This is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore

Politics and The English Language by George Orwell

Under a Cruel Star - A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly

War is a Racket by Maj. General Smedley D. Butler

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

For everything else, you can read them in hard copy (if that still exists in your time), read them in screen form, listen to them on audiobook - it doesn't matter, but just try to read some of them, even just a few of them, if their subject interests you. 

Here's the big secret to deciding if a book is interesting: read the first three chapters and the last two. Then decide if it's worth continuing. If it isn't, put it down immediately and move on to another book when you get the opportunity. Do not be put off by any author if you don't think one of their books is interesting. Most authors, even good ones, have three or four good books in them, and the rest of the books are experiments by which they reach their best efforts.

Moderate Level:

Literary Work

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Enemy of the People by Henryk Ibsen

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Half of the Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

 Claudius the God by Robert Graves

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

---------------------------------------------

Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Jerusalem: A City of Mirrors by Amos Elon

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Peddling Prosperity by Paul Krugman

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho by Will McGrath

Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexevich 

Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today by Yoani Sanchez

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Morris Dees: A Lawyer's Journey by Morris Dees

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

An Assault on Reason by Al Gore

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert Reich

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Oscar Martinez

Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom by Thomas Jefferson

Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals by Benedetto Croce

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

America: What Went Wrong by Donald Bartlett and James Steele

House of Commons Speeches by Charles James Fox

Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

Imperial Illusions by Amartya Sen

The Fragility of Goodness by Martha Nussbaum

The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter

Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin

Colored People by Henry Lewis Gates

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

The Idea of America by Gordon S. Wood

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore

Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad Chaudhuri

The Prince by Nicolo Macchiavelli

Decisive Moments in History by Stefan Zweig

Neither Victims Nor Executioners by Albert Camus

The Crisis of Man by Albert Camus

The Pilgrimage from Tiennamen Square by Ian Buruma

A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 by Paul Berman

The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin & Prague by Timothy Garten Ash

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garten Ash

The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

Long 'Moderate' Reading

Jerusalem: A Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman

Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power 

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power

The Five Giants: A Biography of The Welfare State by Nicholas Timmins

The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People by Alan Brinkley

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The Source by James Michener - 

The Age of Reagan by Sean Wilentz 

Really Long 'Moderate' Reading:

America in the Martin Luther King Years Trilogy by Taylor Branch

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

The Mahabharata by Vyasa (abridged and translated by Ramesh Menon - still 1400 pages)

Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, Reaganland - ongoing history of the modern Republican Party by Rick Perlstein

American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Give Me Liberty: An American History by Eric Foner

Intermediate Level:

Literary

Short Stories and Parables of Franz Kafka

Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Children of Gebelaawi by Naguib Mahfouz

A Doll's House by Henryk Ibsen

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Red and the Black by Stendhal 

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Light in August by William Faulkner

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

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

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

------------------------------------------------------

The Liberal Tradition in America by Louis Hartz

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin

Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin

Race and History: Essays by John Hope Franklin

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph Stieglitz

Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lackoff 

Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate In the Reagan Aftermath by Kevin Phillips

Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America - edited by Stephen Fraser

The Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin Cardozo

The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Autobiography by Tomas Masaryk

Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It by Louis Brandeis

Full Employment in a Free Society by William Beveridge

Essays on Liberty by Raymond Aron

The Liberal Hour by John Kenneth Galbraith

From Hope and Fear Set Free by Isaiah Berlin

Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivations by Amartya Sen

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values by Amartya Sen

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Martha Nussbaum

Sex and Social Justice by Martha Nussbaum

From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law by Martha Nussbaum

The Idea of a Party System by Richard Hofstadter

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War by Alan Brinkley

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman

Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars by Henry Lewis Gates

The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch

In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by David Bell

Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s by Lynn Dumenil and Eric Foner

Saving America's Cities by Lizabeth Cohen

Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong

A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights by Elizabeth Borgwordt

The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East by Juan Cole

The Hidden Face of Eve by Nawal el-Sadaawi

Being Arab by Samir Kassir

Beware of Small States by David Hirst

The Mantle of the Prophet by David Mottahedeh

When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World by Hugh Kennedy

Robin Hood by J.C. Holt

Victorian Feminists by Barbara Caine

Ornamentism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine

On History by Benedetto Croce

The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus trans. Jonathan Franzen

German History in the 19th and 20th Centuries by Golo Mann

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

Images of Italy by Pavel Muratov

Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun by Jean-Francois Revel

The Plague by Albert Camus

The Rebel by Albert Camus

The Fall by Albert Camus

The Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956 by Tony Judt

Long Intermediate Reading

The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

The Age of Reagan by Sean Wilentz

Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans by John Hope Franklin

The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum

Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis by Raymond GarthoffThe Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-62 by Alistair Horne

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes

The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick

A History of the Modern World by R. R. Palmer

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki

History of Africa by Kevin Shillington

Black and British by David Olusoga

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee

The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 by Angus Calder

The First World War by Huw Strachan

The Author as Himself by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Marie Antoinette: Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig

Maria Stuart by Stefan Zweig

Really Long "Intermediate Reading":

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

All Our Yesterdays by Manes Sperber

A History of Britain by Simon Schama 

The Encyclopedia of Diderot

Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Jerusalem Quartet by Edward Whittemore

The Raj Quartet by Paul Mark Scott

Rabbit Tetralogy by John Updike

Advanced Student Level: 

Literary

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Germinal by Emile Zola

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

-----------------------------------------------------

Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism by Paul Starr 

American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

On Liberty by John Stewart Mill 

The Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Picketty

The Spirit of the Law by Baron Charles de Montesquieu

Philosophical Letters on the English by Voltaire

Philosophical Dictionary by Voltaire

On the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation by Benjamin Constant

On Politics by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Nominalist and the Realist by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Socialism by John Stuart Mill

Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch 

The Living Law by Louis Brandeis

Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorston Veblen

Theory of Business Enterprise by Thorston Veblen

Three Enemies of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin

The Opium of the Intellectuals by Raymond Aron

Sovereign Virtue: Freedom and Practice in Equality by Ronald Dworkin

Land of the Free: A History of the United States by John Hope Franklin

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by TImothy Snyder

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

Liberty Before Liberalism by Quentin Skinner

Plagues and Peoples by William H. MacNeill

A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War by Melvyn Leffler

Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War by Eric Foner

Vichy France: Old Guard and the New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert O. Paxton 

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 by Orlando Figes

The Age of the Democratic Revolution by R. R. Palmer

The French Revolution: From It's Origins to 1793 by Georges Lefebvre

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

Reading the Holocaust by Inga Clendinnen

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lizabeth Cohen

Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt

A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation by Hajo Holborn

Africa: Biography of a Continent by John Reader

The African Poor: A History by John Iliffe

Africa and the Africans in the Nineteenth Century: A Turbulent History by Catherine Coquery-Viderovich

Africa Since 1800 by Ronald Oliver

Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present by Frederick Cooper

From Deep State to Islamic State by Jean-Pierre Filiu

The First European Revolution: c. 970-1215

The Making of the Middle Ages by R. W. Southern

The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland by Steven G. Ellis

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought by Quentin Skinner

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 by Conrad Russell

The World We Have Lost by Peter Laslett

Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758-1834 by Charles Tilly

The Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History by J. W. Burrow

Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism by Ronald Robinson

Ethics and Politics by Benedetto Croce

The French Revolution by Francois Furet

Persian Letters by Baron Charles de Montesquieu

Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno

Antisemitism and the Western Tradition by David Nirenberg

Long Advanced Student Reading: 

Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the American Civil Rights Movement by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen

Really Long Advanced Student Reading: 

The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg

The Story of Civilization by Will Durant

A History of the Jews by Heinrich Graetz

A Cultural History of the Modern Age by Egon Friedell

Advanced Level: 

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Ulysses by James Joyce

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

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The Purpose of American Politics by Hans Morgenthau

Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith

Essay on the First Principles of Government by Joseph Priestley

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind by the Marquis de Condorcet

Principles of Politics by Benjamin Constant

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

Democracy and Totalitarianism by Raymond Aron

Peace and War by Raymond Aron

The New Science by Giambattista Vico

The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen

The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State 1688-1783 by John Brewer

Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990-1992 by Charles Tilly

Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 by Jeanette M. Neeson

A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky

The Feudal Society by Marc Bloch

Aztecs: An Interpretation by Inga Clendinnen

Citizenship Between Empire and Nation by Frederick Cooper

The Venture of Islam by Marshall G.S. Hodgson

On the Limits of State Action by Wilhelm von Humboldt

Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s by Joyce Appleby

Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages by Walter Ullmann

On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State by Charles Tilly

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott

Long Advanced Reading

Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch

Extreme Level: 

The Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant

Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant

Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kolakowski

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World of Philip II by Ferdinand de Braudel

The Sources of Social Power by Michael Mann