May Reading Update

Time to check in with the readership, loyal or otherwise.

A List: Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 326/940.

B List: Henry James, The American, 344/449.

C List: David O. Stewart, American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson's America, 182/317.

The A-list is the one I read at work. I was on vacation for a week at the end of April, which accounts for the slow progress on Dostoevsky.

The Burr book is not completely devoid of value insofar as I was not familiar with most of the information in it. However as a narrative work it is not very dynamic or interesting, and such information in it as would have sufficed to give any general reader a decent idea of what happened could have been condensed into a fifteen or twenty page article to this point. To cite one example of what I mean here, at the beginning of the book there are around seven pages listing the names and brief descriptions of the major persons who figure as characters in the narrative. The note on Burr's daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston, includes the assertion that "Burr exactingly supervised Theodosia's education, even after her marriage, and she has been called the best-educated American woman of her generation." It would have been interesting if the author had gone into this more deeply, as besides being worthwhile to know what being the best-educated woman of one's generation consists of, it would doubtless be edifying and instructive to observe how this education manifested itself in the day to day life and social interaction of its possessor. It would have helped as well to flesh out and bring the reader into some intimacy with the character of Burr himself, which remains rather remote as the book moves along. Perhaps something of this is still to come, though so far we have had only had a couple of very short paragraphs during the introductory sketching of Burr's character and position in the first chapter of the book, which noted that Burr believed women were the equal of men in intellectual talent and that Theodosia, according to the memoir of a traveling young Englishman "...speaks French and Italian with facility, is perfectly conversant with the writers of the Augustan age, and not unacquainted with the language of the Father of Poetry [i.e., Greek]". But there has been no further elaboration or incorporation of any of these elements into the book.

Picture Gallery 

Edward G Robinson as Smerdyakov, 1927