February Wrap-Up and March Goals

February reads

February Wrap-Up

• Finished: 8
• Started but not finished: 3
• Total pages read: 1,824
• Average rating: 3.875

Another great month with eight finished books and closer to two thousand pages read. I don't think the average rating accurately reflects how good this month was. That's because I read several books of ancient philosophy, which is not my favorite genre. The other books, however, I loved a lot.

As in January, two of the books I finished were modern fiction, Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry (5/5 stars) and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (4.5/5 stars). Lessons in Chemistry is already a strong contender for the title of the best book of 2024, and The Midnight Library, despite its minor flaws, was a great book as well. You can find longer reviews behind the links.

I also continued my ancient texts project where I’m reading translations of some ancient Greek and Latin works. I finished five books. One of them, Sophocles’ Antigone, I read in January as a different translation. The translation I read in February is from 1910, and it was very old-fashioned and slow to read, and I must say not the best translation I’ve read, but I love the beautiful vintage cover of this edition.

Plato’s Republic seeks to answer the question what a just man is like. Majority of the dialogue concerns the ideal city-state and the education of different groups of people in that state, including the education of women, which for me was the most interesting part. This is probably Plato’s most famous dialogue, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner unless you’re already really into philosophy. Plato’s shorter dialogues such as Apology or Symposium are a better starting point if you’re just getting started on reading ancient philosophy or want to know what Plato wrote.

Aristotle’s Poetics is a treatise on ancient literary and dramatic theory. I don’t care for Aristotle’s more philosophical works, but this I found enjoyable (and understandable!). That was probably at least partially due to the translation. Quite often Aristotle’s translations strive for accuracy and getting the philosophical terms right, which leads to difficult-to-read technical text. This translation might not have been as accurate, but it was easy to read and understand. As a writer, I found Aristotle’s ideas on plot and characters fascinating even if I didn’t always agree with him. Poetics focuses on drama, specifically tragedy, and touches briefly upon epic narratives. Nevertheless some of the things Aristotle says are at least in part applicable to modern prose fiction.

The last three books were also works of ancient philosophy. I read two Cicero’s short treatises, On Old Age and On Friendship, which talk about the topics mentioned in the titles. I also finished Epictetus’s Handbook, which is a collection of short teachings delineating the principles of Stoicism.

Additionally, I started two books that I’ll finish in March: Sophocles’s The Complete Plays and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

 

March Hopefuls

March hopefuls

My goal for March is to finish eight books and start reading one. I plan to read two modern fiction books, Amanda Darcy’s Of Love and Beer and Tricia Cresswell’s The Midwife. Of Love and Beer is a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I’ve been excited to read it for couple of years, and it’s finally coming out on March 12th. Stay tuned for the review in a few weeks! The Midwife is a historical fiction that I know nothing else except the main character is (can you guess it?) a midwife.

I’ll finally finish War and Peace this month, and move on to another Russian classic, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. I must admit that so far I’ve preferred Tolstoy over Dostoevsky, but we’ll see how I like The Brothers Karamazov.

The rest are part of my ancient texts project. I’ll finish Sophocles’s The Complete Plays and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and move on to the epics: Homer’s Odyssey (19th-century translation of the sixth book of Odyssey and a 1970s prose translation of the entire work) and a 19th-century translation of a part of Virgil’s Aeneid.

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You can find out more about my thoughts on my February reads and about my plans for March in my monthly Youtube reading wrap-up video.