More Books

I've been reading my way slowly through Giocomo Leopardi's Pensieri. These dark musings on human nature are from the early 19th century, but feel shockingly modern. It's brought me back to a line I wrote once myself: that the worst things were those that never changed, and this lists a good number of them. Not that I think Leopardi's right about everything, but even on the ones where his assertions are debatable or even dubious, you can understand why someone either then or now might believe them.
And with the 4th of July and the Delta variant both looming, I will likely be staying inside as much as possible these next two weeks, so today I got ambitious and took the trip to Tyson's Corner Center for the first time since long before the pandemic. I came home with three books I'd been wanting to get for a while: Phillip Pullman's Serpentine, Madeleine Miller's The Song of Achilles and Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy. I'd already checked out the last on the public library Overdrive, but you need a permanent copy to work through it properly. Now I just need to figure out when I'm going to read the first two, although the first is pretty short.
Also another set of RPG dice. I may need to keep a close eye on my developing habit of buying those.