Reading: My Book Club

Six years ago I joined a book club that had already been meeting for a year. Six guys, all lawyers. Three partners from two different big firms, a general counsel of a bank, a partner at a small international law boutique and me. The international specialist was a close friend of mine from college with most of the rest his housemates from law school who were barely acquaintances before the club. Laura is convinced that the only theme of the club is who can pick the most obscure or difficult books. A few themes have actually emerged over the six years I have participated. The current selection is Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti whom I am told is a Nobel Prize winner in literature for other work. I was the one who picked the graphic novels!

Here's what we have read so far:

Chekov, Uncle Vanya, the Cherry Orchard and other plays

India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age by Gurcharan Das-David

De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Twain, Roughing It

Jefferson -- notes from Va. And autobio

Musil-- man without qualities

Mann -- magic mountain

Vetruvius, Twelve Books of Architecture and Palladio, Four Books of Architecture

William James-- pragmaitism

Bulgakov -- the White Guard

Our Final Home, Rees

Persepolis, Satrapi
Watchmen, moore

The Lunar Men, Uglow

Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

The Leopard, di Lampedusa

The Federalist Papers

Solzenytsin-- First Circle

Pamuk, Museum of Innocence

Appel, Jazz Modernism

Bellow, Augie March

Rorty, achieving our country; essays by Emerson

Whittman, selections from Leaves of Grass

Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

McBeth; also, Witches and Jesuits,
Study of mcb by Gary Wills

Faith and Treason, Fraser

Readings in Aesthetics, Kandinsky, Bergson, Bell (Art), Weschler (Boggs) and others

Dorris Kearns, Team of Rivals

In A Dark Wood Wandering, Haasse

The Kite Runner, Hosseini

Thorough, Walden Pond and Civil Dis.

The metaphysical Club, Menand

Proust, Swan's Way

Proust, Within a Budding Grove

Good Soldier Shvejk, Hasek

Wittegenstein's Poker, Edmonds and Eidenow

Kind of Blue (re miles Davis), Kahn

Einstein, Isaacson

Mokyr, Gifts of Athena

From Soul to Mind, Read

Human, Gazzaniga

The Singularity--kurzweil

Watson, the Double Helix