Classics Considered

Apologies for my two weeks' radio silence...  Work has been intense, so I haven't mustered up the energy to blog until this weekend.  Happily, I've been reading, and there is plenty to catch up on! My current obsession reading focus is an unlikely one: CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping (2016) by Kerry Brown.  I picked this up last Saturday and just ordered my own hard copy - yes, it's that interesting. Brown is a professor at King's College, as well as a contributor to The Diplomat .  This combination of academia and journalism means his writing carries the best of both worlds and is well annotated, particularly for a book geared towards the general public.  (One or two reviewers complained he is too challenging to read... from my perspective, Brown's prose is more digestible than Michael Korda 's, no offense to Korda.) To be sure, the well-written biography is my favorite way to consume history.  There's several reasons for this: Certain individuals...

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) If you've been following me on Goodreads, you'll understand I have been reading books this year , while blogging at a record low.  Far from a lack of interest in blogging, my motivation was the need to take a break...I still consider myself on break as I write this.  However, I wanted to say a few thoughts on my longest read of the year (thus far) before removing all my markers in it and packing it off back to the library.   A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence was written by psychiatrist John E. Mack, published in 1976, and came highly rated (based on my internet research).  Let me take a moment to dissect that sentence:  First off, I felt uncomfortable with the title.  The quote is not by Lawrence, and while it's provocative, I had no idea going into the book what the "disorder" refers to.  What a great and awful title for a biography. The author is not a historian by profession, but a different type of so...