Reading
Kulikowski's Imperial Triumph, Abulafia's The Great Sea, and, in Latin, Ad Alpes and Ørberg's Roma Aeterna. Next: Kulikowski's Imperial Tragedy.
Mostly history (Rome, late antiquity and the steppe, lately) and poetry, with the epic tradition at the center: the shelves run from Gilgamesh to the epic of Gesar. The compilers are next to Heidegger.
The last year in books
- Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians
- Jeremy McInerney, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age (Great Courses)
- Colin Elliott, Pox Romana
- Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome
- Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm
- Tom Holland, Rubicon, Dynasty and Pax
- Anthony Barrett, Rome Is Burning
- Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road
- Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean 🐪
- Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox
- David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything 🤮
- David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain 😍
- John Kelly, The Great Mortality
- Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
- Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror 🫳
And in Latin: Wheelock's, Ørberg's Familia Romana, Colloquia Personarum, Fabulae Syrae, and nineteen sections of De Bello Gallico.
The bookcases are photographed at an angle and straightened with a little linear algebra: four corners of each case fix a homography, and the camera's focal length fixes each case's true proportions.