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  "description": "Letter No. 141: Includes my favorite historian, a boring Stoic, and a book about books. ",
  "path": "/book-report-for-april-2026/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-21T12:57:14.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.dalekeiger.net",
  "tags": [
    "Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque",
    "Ex Libris, Michiko Kakutani",
    "These Truths (pp. 1 – 348), Jill Lapore"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Not an extraordinary month for reading.** Some days just get away from the doctor, unread. So it goes. Books purchased from Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque earn the doctor a modest kickback, not of Trumpian dimensions, but still...\n\n##### Completed\n\n  * Ex Libris, Michiko Kakutani**.** I bought this book as much for its design as for its contents. Long-time book critic for  _The New York Times_ Kakutani discusses ~100 books, old and newer, that have mattered the most to her. She writes not as a critic but as an enthusiast, she explains, and that’s accurate. Of the books listed, I’ve read 26, better than I usually do on those lists. She introduced me to a few authors I’ve never heard of but who sound worth a look, like David Finkel and Tara Westover.\n\n\n\n  * **_A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Life of Stoic Joy_ , William B. Irvine.** A guide to Stoicism by a philosophy professor who, unfortunately, writes like a philosophy professor. Bought on remainder, it had enough information to keep me reading for a while. Then I got tired of the professor’s flat prose and tendency to condescend, so I skimmed the last two-thirds, with un-Stoic impatience.\n  * These Truths (pp. 1 – 348), Jill Lapore**.** I am working through this one at a stately pace. It was too heavy to pack on a 10-day road trip, so my progress has slowed, but it is worth savoring. This is not a conventional chronological history that devotes pages to all the major events in a year-by-year narrative, like a textbook. (She dispatches the entire Civil War in a handful of pages.) Lapore begins in 1492 and seems intent on demonstrating how the United States has, from the beginning, been steered, for better or frequently worse, by ruthless capitalist exploitation and slavery. In this argument she is convincing on every page, so far.\n\n\n\n##### In progress\n\n  *  _These Truths_ , Jill Lepore.\n  * _Schild’s Ladder_ , Greg Egan.\n\n\n\n##### Purchased\n\n  *  _The Last Movement_ , Robert Seethaler.\n  * _Chasing Homer_ , László Krasznahorkai.\n  * _Perspective(s)_ , Laurent Binet.\n  * _On the Calculation of Volume IV_ , Solveg Balle.\n  * _True Color_ , Kory Stamper.\n\n",
  "title": "Book report for April 2026",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-21T12:57:14.633Z"
}