good books so far this year

First books, then movies, food, theater, and bakery recs

Ancient & Classical

Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History, Roel Konijnendijk, 2018. Covered in an upcoming podcast. Fun to read a book where from the first five pages it’s clear the author has an absolute command of his sources.

My favorite riff was his exploration of the debate around what actually happened at the Battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas’ famous victory over Sparta in 371 BC. Prussian historians tried to make him into another Frederick the Great grand tactical genius, but the sources just don’t give you enough color to know what it was he did to win this battle, so each historian came up with their own pet theory.

Roel also squared a lot of circles by emphasizing just how corny all Greeks save Spartans thought hoplite training was. Xenophon acknowledges that Athenians “not only neglect to make themselves fit, but mock at those who take the trouble to do so.” Beyond general fitness, weapons training was practically non-existent, and all hoplites save Spartan ones couldn’t turn. This limitation limited just how creative generals could get with their tactics.

Pod with Roel here:

Side note: According to Plutarch, Epaminondas was a fat-shamer. “He hated fat men, and dismissed one of them, saying, that three or four shields would scarce serve to secure his belly, so that his belly would not let him see his own genitals.” And this was pretty hard too: “When the Argives were confederates with the Thebans, Callistratus the orator reproached the cities with Orestes and Oedipus. But Epaminondas stood up and said: ‘We confess there hath been one amongst us that killed his father, and among the Argives one that killed his mother; but we banished those that did such things, and the Athenians took them in.’”

The World of Odysseus, Moses I. Finley, 1954. The history books that still get recommended from the 1950s are some of the best I’ve ever read. This era had writers with so much confidence and style!

*Odyssey on audiobook!

Highly recommend listening to the Clare Danes’ Emily Wilson in parallel with the Ian McKellen’s Fagles rendition. Both bring completely different energies, highlighting their respective translators’ strongsuits. Listening gives you more of a Homeric experience and reminds you how fun and plotty this text is. Compared to the Old Testament, you get much more time for characters to breathe while still benefitting from the extreme economy you get in ancient literature.

Some bits that stuck out to me this read through:

Zendaya crying at Troy’s sacking is a slightly different energy than Athena helping Odysseus make heads roll!

Side note—Claude is pretty fun to ask questions about Homer’s word choice!

2800 years later and still no-one has out-simile’d Homer.

And I love the shade that Odysseus shows his son here:

Korea & the DPRK

Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, Jonathan Cheng, 2026. Covered in this podcast.

Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964, Balázs Szalontai, 2005. Deeply archival, it has some good lore and new perspectives on familiar political beats as it explores the question of why the DPRK got so weird while other divided communist countries like East Germany and North Vietnam didn’t grow into wacko personalist dictatorships.

His answer in brief is that it’s Kim being Kim:

“In my view, one of the principal causes of North Korean despotism was the intense and xenophobic nationalism professed by Kim Il Sung and the former Manchurian guerrillas. Rooted in the latter’s personal experiences and reinforced by Japan’s post-1937 assimilationist policy, this nationalism greatly influenced Pyongyang’s actions toward both South Korea and the ‘communist camp.’ In turn, the goals the North Korean leadership pursued in the field of foreign policy produced a strong effect on its domestic policies. Furthermore, the excessive importance Kim Il Sung attached to direct participation in the armed revolutionary struggle against Japanese rule became a source of excessive elitism.” After Stalin’s death, the purge of the Soviet and Yan’an groups in 1957–1959 subsequently “secured Pyongyang’s political independence from Moscow once and for all.” (pp. 229, 246)“Kim was neither willing nor compelled to liberalize his regime. Paradoxically, he could usually count on external assistance—and actually badly needed it—yet he distrusted his aid donors, resented being dependent on their good will, and did his best to prevent them from establishing contacts with the North Korean population. His obsession with absolute control over the society was a straitjacket that inhibited the dictatorship from introducing far-reaching changes.” Ultimately, “it was the severity of repression and the extensiveness of state control over society and cultural life that primarily distinguished Kim Il Sung’s despotism” and “the repressive character of the North Korean regime cannot be blamed on external factors alone.” (pp. 258–261, 264, 266)

It was rough out there…

Wild to get quotes like this…

Dresses fade after first wash in DPRK…

Mao handed over territory at a rapid clip to DPRK in return for friendship points.

Grab Bag

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, 2004. Great reading books where the authors are masters of their sources. Greenblatt isn’t a genius literary critic but I really appreciated the historical grounding that reading this book gave the plays.

My favorite extended beat was how his marriage informed how he portrays relationships in his plays. Will was eighteen and Anne Hathaway was twenty-six and pregnant. The plays kept working through it.

And Will? Through the centuries eighteen-year-old boys have not been famously eager in such situations to rush to the altar. Will might, of course, have been an exception. Certainly, he was able as a playwright to imagine such impatience. “When and where and how / We met, we wooed, and made exchange of vow / I’ll tell thee as we pass,” Romeo tells Friar Laurence on the morning after the Capulet ball; “but this I pray, / That thou consent to marry us today.”Romeo and Juliet’s depiction of the frantic haste of the rash lovers blends together humor, irony, poignancy, and disapproval, but Shakespeare conveys above all a deep inward understanding of what it feels like to be young, desperate to wed, and tormented by delay. In the great balcony scene, though they have only just met, Romeo and Juliet exchange “love’s faithful vow” with one another. “If that thy bent of love be honourable, / Thy purpose marriage,” Juliet tells Romeo at the close of the most passionate love scene Shakespeare ever wrote, “send me word tomorrow.” When she knows “Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,” she declares, “All my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay, / And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world.”

In the Tempest near the end of his career, as the father of two grown daughters, he rails against premarital sex far louder than the scene seems to call for.

The intensity of the dire visions of premarital sex and its consequences may have had much to do with the fact that Shakespeare was the father of two growing daughters. His most explicit warnings about the dangers of premarital sex take the form, in The Tempest, of a father’s stern words to the young man who is courting his daughter. Yet in Prospero’s lines from this play, written late in his career, there is a sense that Shakespeare was looking back at his own unhappy marriage and linking that unhappiness to the way in which it all began, so many years before. “Take my daughter,” Prospero says to Ferdinand, and then adds something halfway between a curse and a prediction:If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be ministered,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.

On to the industry. The most underrated fact about Shakespeare is that he took equity. Playwrights mostly sold scripts for a flat fee and mostly died broke. Shakespeare saw that and knew he had to found a company with its own theater in order to improve his lot, and ended up retiring to one of Stratford’s best houses.

Shakespeare not only had a share in the profits from all the company’s court and public performances, but as part owner of the Globe, he also received a portion of the rent that all of the sharers paid (that is, he was in effect in the happy position of paying rent to himself). Imagination, entrepreneurial skill, and unremitting labor had made him a wealthy man; he had, as Juliet’s nurse says, thinking of the sound of coins in money sacks, “the chinks.”

The playhouses shared a neighborhood, an architecture, and an audience with the bear gardens.

Shakespeare’s imagination was excited as well by the less innocuous amusements of the suburbs. Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a love of seeing bulls and bears “baited,” that is, penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs. The bulls—on occasion “wearied to death” for sport—seem to have been more or less anonymous, but the bears acquired names and personalities: Sackerson, Ned Whiting, George Stone, and Harry Hunks (the latter blinded to increase the fun). The game was something of an English specialty—in their travel journals foreign tourists frequently noted that they took in the sight, and Queen Elizabeth treated visiting ambassadors to it. [The UFC of their times!] “Be there bears i’th’ town?” asks the asinine Slender, in The Merry Wives of Windsor; “I love the sport well.” Shakespeare clearly visited the bear garden in person—he had professional reasons to be interested in what crowds were excited by—but evidently he was less wholeheartedly enamored. The sport, he saw wryly, served to make the Slenders of the world feel more like real men. “I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain,” Slender boasts. “But I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrieked at it that it passed. But women, indeed, cannot abide’em. They are very ill-favoured, rough things.”Elizabethans perceived bears as supremely ugly, embodiments of everything coarse and violent, and Shakespeare repeatedly echoed this view, but he also grasped something else: “They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,” says Macbeth, his enemies closing in around him, “But bear-like I must fight the course.”

Theater also competed with public punishment as entertainment, and playwrights knew their audience could judge the props against the real thing.

London was a nonstop theater of punishments. Almost daily he could have watched the state brand, cut, and kill those it deemed offenders. London’s many established punishment grounds did not exhaust the locations of these spectacles: in some cases of murder the offender’s right hand was cut off at or near the place where the crime was committed and the bleeding malefactor was then paraded through the streets to the execution site. Such spectacles were virtually inescapable for anyone who lived in the great city.Lavinia’s ghastly fate in Titus Andronicus—her hands lopped off, her tongue cut out—would have been easy for Elizabethan actors to represent in graphic, realistic detail, for they had seen such things performed in the flesh on scaffolds in the suburbs, near the playhouse. And when Shakespeare’s characters displayed the bloody heads of Richard III or Macbeth, members of the audience could easily have compared the simulation with the real thing.

The moralists’ bill of particulars against the theater functioned mainly as advertising. John Florio’s English–Italian phrasebook treats playgoing as simply what Londoners do on holidays:

The theatrical world Shakespeare found his way into was volatile, speculative, competitive, and precarious. The stage had vociferous enemies: the theaters, preachers and moralists charged, were temples to Venus and other devilish pagan deities; respectable matrons who went innocently enough to watch the plays were quickly lured into lives of licentiousness; men were sexually aroused by seductive boy actors; the Word of God was mocked and piety held up to ridicule; grave authorities were brought into contempt; seditious ideas were planted in the minds of the multitude. Go to plays, thundered one irate minister, John Northbrooke, “if you will learn how to be false and deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlots to obtain one’s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, to flatter, lie, swear, forswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and rebel against princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to ransack and spoil cities and towns, to be idle, to blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love, to speak filthily, to be proud. . . .” The catalog of vicious lessons continues breathlessly, to be augmented over the years by many other preachers. And as if this were not enough, the wickedness on stage, the theater’s enemies complained, was matched by the wickedness of the audience. At our playhouses, wrote Stephen Gosson in 1579, “you shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women; such care for their garments, that they be not trod on; such eyes to their laps, that no chips light in them; such pillows to their backs, that they take no hurt; such masking in their ears, I know not what; such giving them pippins, to pass the time; such playing at foot saunt [i.e., footsie] . . .; such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home, when the sports are ended.” It is a terrible thing, moralists sourly observed, that many who sit happily for two hours to watch a play cannot bear to sit for an hour to hear a sermon.These charges were leveled in the name of closing down the theaters, but apart from leading to a ban on Sunday performances, they principally served, not surprisingly, to intensify the public’s interest. “Where shall we go?” wrote John Florio, in an English-Italian phrase book that he published in 1578. “To a play at the Bull, or else to some other place.” Florio was born and brought up in London, the son of refugee Italian Protestants. His little language lesson—revealing, as those in modern textbooks are, precisely because it was attempting to be so ordinary and everyday—continued:Do comedies like you well?
Yea sir, on holy days.
They please me also well, but the preachers will not allow them.
Wherefore? Know you it?
They say, they are not good.
And wherefore are they used?
Because every man delights in them.

When Tamburlaine hit London, Shakespeare understood what league he would have to play in. John Douglas Thompson’s 2014 Tamburlaine at Theatre for a New Audience is still the coolest thing I have ever seen in a theater.

Nothing holds Tamburlaine back, no fear, no deference, no respect for the established order of things: “Emperors and kings lie breathless at my feet.” With these words and with the slaughter of the innocent virgins of Damascus, he takes his beautiful bride, the divine Zenocrate, daughter of the conquered sultan of Egypt. Then, shockingly, outrageously, the play was over, and the crowd applauded, cheering the trampling of everything that they had been instructed with numbing repetition to hold dear.This was a crucial experience for Shakespeare, a challenge to all of his aesthetic and moral and professional assumptions. The challenge must have been intensified when he learned that Marlowe was in effect his double: born in the same year, 1564, in a provincial town; the son not of a wealthy gentleman but of a common artisan, a shoemaker. Had Marlowe not existed, Shakespeare would no doubt have written plays, but those plays would have been decisively different. As it is, he gives the impression that he made the key move in his career—the decision not to make his living as an actor alone but to try also to write for the stage on which he performed—under Marlowe’s influence. The fingerprints of Tamburlaine (both the initial play and the sequel that soon followed) are all over the plays that are among Shakespeare’s earliest known ventures as a playwright, the three parts of Henry VI—so much so that earlier textual scholars thought that the Henry VI plays must have been collaborative enterprises undertaken with Marlowe himself.

The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America, Samuel Eliot Morison, 1978. Good for falling asleep you’ll get some great nautical dreams.

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726.

Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America, Michael Kimmel, 2024. Getting its own book review.

*First 200 pages of Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years. First biography of an author I’ve read and won’t be the last. Incredible the talent level this genre brings in.

*Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, Julia Ioffe, 2026. Full review in Q3, would love to have her on a podcast alongside Wang Zheng.

Painting As a Pastime, Winston S. Churchill, 1948. My brain might be too fried to paint or draw anymore, which means I probably really need it. Maybe when kiddo is old enough to sit and draw for more than three minutes?

Madame de Pompadour, Nancy Mitford, 1954. Brilliant beach read, will get its own review later.

The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis, Carl H. Builder, 1989.

For more books, check out Q1 2026 as well as past years’ books!

Movies

Screwball

Lady Eve and Some Like it Hot are all-time gems. Life is short you deserve to watch movies that make you smile.

The Lady Eve, 1941. ★★★★★

Some Like It Hot, 1959. ★★★★★

The Palm Beach Story, 1942. ★★★½

Christmas in Connecticut, 1945. ★★½

Airplane!, 1980. ★★★½

Film Noir

Out of the Past, 1947. ★★★★★. Well-treated in this podcast episode.

Cold War & Espionage

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965. ★★★★★

War

Battleground, 1949. ★★★½

New Releases

Bugonia, 2025. ★★★½

Sentimental Value, 2025. ★★★★

ny theater:

Henry VI Part 1 at the public made me embarrassed for the public. it’s a bad play the actors did not enliven in the slightest, the asia styling of the fights made no sense (ok, so joan of arc fights with a wushu stick...) wish i could’ve walked out faster.

The Winter’s Tale in central park I got a magic ‘warm night, raining just a little bit but not too much that they cancel the show’ night. Within 30 seconds was a night and day experience from Henry VI Part 1—these actors actually know how to make Shakespeare make sense! The midwife was commanding, and fools all excellent.

Anatomy of Melancholy by Eno River Players continues their streak of doing weird erudite stuff that makes me read alot to prep. Verdict: yes, Robert Burton deserved his own play.

Well, I’ll Let You Go brilliant acting by the leads, fun seeing a few actors I recognized at the matinee I attended be so locked in to their peers’ performances

Birthright was the play of the year so far. Skipping forward ten years every intermission hooks the audience into guessing how they all develop. Even at 3.5 hrs I could’ve done with more! I loved the ‘room goes dark when you’re checking your phone in a crowd.’ Politics were cringe to listen to but juggling six characters and their interactions was serious playwriting achievement. Having the mom character does break up/dull the confrontations considerably, would’ve liked for maybe one more dramatic blow up than the ‘oh we’re all friend in the end’ energy it leaves you with. I’ll take 9.5/10 though.

food H1 2026

little uluh—best hunan food in nyc, seriously hot, recommend the fish head, chicken lemongrass curry fish, mung bean drink (’green smoothie’), ‘stir fried double crispy’ (beef aorta + chicken gizzard--now we’re really living, and 辣子鸡。The guy who makes the milk tea also has been very sweet giving whole milk to our daughter when we’ve dropped in. Haven’t seen it full yet but it absolutely deserves to be.

Dumpling Xi--best dumplings in ny, sadly now closed. they weren’t able to offer any vegetarian dumplings for months because home base wouldn’t let them touch any of the recipes.

lin & daughters--excellent buttery noodles and chicken soup.

pizza studio tamaki—heralded tokyo pizza chain drops in, perhaps limited by nyc’s vegetables but dough a perfect nepolitan that retains its chewiness though the middle of the pie

dolar shop--hot pot is not fun and has a ceiling on how good it can be. maybe it’s a fun novelty when you’re 10 but i want people to cook for me

886--excellent fried chicken, cold sesame noodles are good days after, but st marks makes it hard to enjoy

Borgo--great service and backyard, but haven’t actually enjoyed the food as much as others seemed to

Claud--walked in to a table under a stairwell, food was 7/10

Casa Mono--best spanish food in the city, chef taught me how to make scrambled eggs like them, trick is heavy cream low flame and stirring until your wrist hurts

bakeries h1 2026

Papa D’amour--banana bread an A+, scallion bun A, ‘croissant bao’ underwhelming, corn ice cream solid, salt bread bagel a letdown, vanilla ice cream with the butter salt inedibly salty

Lysee--maybe i’ve had too much of them but the preciousness gets a little annoying. very bringable to dinner parties, you want to share bites not eat full cakes

Radio Bakery has nothing asian about it but its focaccia sandwiches are worth the nap required to eat them.

nick & sons--greatest discrepancy between ‘looks like this should be amazing’ and ‘actually not great’ i’ve come across in the nyc bakery scene

apollo bagel--best emerging bagel in the city? It puts popup bagel to shame, some real chef action going on w the cucumber dill bagel in particular. reminds me of a slightly less doughy but still perfectly chewy Bo’s Bagels of Harlem.

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