Welcome to Litsy!

September book select time!

My choice for #LetterM in the #alphabetgame has been one of my favourites since I was a teenager.

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Afternoon hockey. Dallas ⭐️. Hoping to get to the 169 page mark needed for January 20th. I'm at 155.

#hockey

2022. New year. Still listening to hockey. ? lead the ? 6-2 after 2 periods.
My book for January is Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien. This is the impossible reading challenge from the French CBC.

Happy new year.
#hockey

#marchreport

The cool, sedate prose is just the right vehicle for these reflections of what a wise man has learnt from his life. Would the real Hadrian recognise himself in this detached view? He might recognise it as an aspiration, one we seem to be discarding, more's the pity.

I first read this book as a teenager, and it is a book that has forever after coloured my perception of Hadrian whatever other factual or fictional account of him I've read.

Re-reading from 2017. Must be the 4th or 5th time I've read it

Do you know of the custom of the outgoing US President writing a letter to his/her successor ? Well, this book is kind of a version from the Roman empire era. Hadrian, Emperor, writes a detailed letter to his successor Marcus Aurelius : challenges awaiting in managing the Empire, reflections about art, Grece, philosophy, life, death, and deep love for Antinoüs, one of his lieutenant. Very well written, but many sometimes hard to get references.

Un libro che non lascia indifferenti. Una volta chiuso ha lasciato un‘impronta duratura nel mio modo di vedere il mondo, sicuramente il modo di guardare la storia Romana.

Each of us has to choose, in the course of his brief life, between endless striving and wise resignation, between the delights of disorder and those of stability, between Titan or Olympian...To choose between them, or to succeed, at last, in bringing them into accord.

I love my chaotic late night bedroom full of books. Excited to read this when I finish off Ovid‘s Amores #latin #classics

Structured as a letter to the young man Hadrian chose as his successor, this is a phenomenal work of imagination and research. Hadrian is concerned with his legacy and the continuation of his great works, both political and physical. It is also a slow meditative missing on his humanness -- the frailty of the body, the moral strength required to rule, the foibles that could lead a lessor man astray.

Brilliant, but not my cup of tea. #1001books

For the letter "G" I have only read four books that fit the categories:

Memoirs of Hadrian -- based on historical event
A Dance to the Music of Time, 2nd Movement -- 400+ pages
A total cheat here, combining Hillbilly Elegy (memoir) and Modern Romance (person of color) because I don't read enough nonfiction to hit these categories without advance planning
Homegoing -- written by a woman of color
#lrc2017 #bingo

A wise man's reflections on a life well-lived

Hadrian's builds his wall

Hadrian on sculpture

I could easily end up quoting the whole of Memoirs of Hadrian

Dinner

This is a masterpiece. What Yourcenar did here is mesmerizing. She created such a believable memoir and portrait of a man that you have to remind yourself that this is fiction every so often. It's so beautiful that you want it to be real, and honestly, it's slightly disappointing that it's not.

Of all our games, love‘s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle our soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body‘s ecstasy.[…] Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordained that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

This is one of the books that should be re read as one ages. It is a lesson in every page, it gives comfort and it is wonderfully written (of course marguerite)

'Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit..'

The fictional memoirs of the emperor Hadrian at first does not seem as the most exciting of subjects. Hadrian was not a conqueror but a consolidator and builder, but Yourcenar makes Hadrian a flawed complex man, full of contradictions, but at heart a man who wanted most to be a good leader.