A while ago on this page, which I normally use as an archive of events, etc., relating to my various literary endeavors, I made a comment about not being the biggest fan of Tony Judt. At the time, it seemed everyone from Momus to the NYRB was fawning over him. I brushed him off, finding the numerous excerpts from his autobiography in NYRB tedious. Man was I wrong! The setup: I’ve been in a reading group with my friends Peter and Meredith for about five years. We call ourselves the “Spinoza Club” as a result of reading Ethics our the first year together. We read mostly tomes: Origins of Totalitarianism, Pursuit of the Millennium, or Dark Back of Time. The books we decide to read arise during dinner conversation. We get together to eat dinner, something that used to happen monthly, and we begin talking about what we’re currently reading. That leads us to other topics, and finally someone says (quite often Peter), we should read “_______”. His most recent suggestion — which he had, in fact, already started himself! — was Judt’s Postwar, an eight hundred page history of postwar Europe. As I always like taking the opportunity to change my mind, I thought that would be great. I’m about a hundred pages in and — wow — I’m enjoying it so much I felt not the need to say I like it publicly (because I wouldn’t bother with that), but to say that I like it so much I have to take back whatever unsubstantiated public dismissal I made earlier. Ha! So far I’d put it up there with books like Origins, Pursuit and Robert Caro’s Power Broker as necessary sociohistorical books.

2:27 pm  •  7 September 2011  •  1 note