The seven wonders of the week

1—A reader's digestive 

I hope to live long enough to devour Arthur Henry King's "Reading List for a Lifetime."

• The Standard Works (the scriptures)
• Homer, "The Iliad" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore), "The Odyssey" (translator Emile V. Rieu)
• "The Bhagavad-Gita" (The Song of God) (translator Christopher Isherwood)
• Aeschylus, "Aeschylus I -- Oresteia" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
• Sophocles, "The Oedipus Cycle" (translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)
• Plato, "Phaedo," "The Republic"
• Euripides, "Euripides One" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
• Herodotus, "The Persian Wars" (translator George Rawlinson)
• Virgil, "The Aeneid" (translator John Dryden or Robert Fitzgerald)
• Livy, "The Early History of Rome"
• Josephus, "The Jewish War"
• Plutarch, "Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans" and "Lives of the Noble Romans" (editor Edmund Fuller)
• Eusebius, "The Essential Eusebius"
• Augustine, "The City of God"
• Bede, "The Ecclesiastical History of the English People"
• Dante, "The Divine Comedy" (translators John D. Sinclair or Dorothy L. Sayers)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Canterbury Tales" (translator Nevill Coghill)
• Niccole Machiavelli, "The Prince"
• William Shakespeare, "Hamlet," "Othello," "Measure for Measure," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolanus," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest"
• Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote" (translator Walter Starkie)
• Rene Descartes, "Discourse on Method" (translator Wollaston)
• John Milton, "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," "Samson Agonistes"
• George Fox, "Journal" (editor Rufus M. Jones)
• John Bunyan, "The Pilgrim's Progress"
• Jean Baptiste Racine, "Athaliah," "Phaedra"
• Moliere, "Tartuffe," "The Would-Be Gentleman," "The Precious Damsels," "The Misanthrope" (translators Morris Bishop or Kenneth Muir)
• Jonathan Swift, "Gulliver's Travels"
• Antoine Prevost, "Manon Lescaut"
• Samuel Richardson, "Pamela" (Part I), "Clarissa"
• Montesquieu, "The Spirit of the Laws" (translator Thomas Nugent)
• Voltaire, "Candide"
• James Boswell, "Life of Samuel Johnson"
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile"
• Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
• Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
• John Woolman, "Journal"
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Faust I, II" (translators Walter Kaufmann or Charles E. Passage), "Wilhelm Meister"
• William Wordsworth, "The Prelude" (Books I and II)
• John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, "The Federalist Papers" (editor A. Hacker)
• John Keats, "Letters" (editor Robert Gittings)
• Jane Austen, "Persuasion," "Emma"
• Stendhal, "The Red and the Black"
• Soren Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling," "The Sickness Unto Death" (translator Walter Lowrie)
• Honore de Balzac, "Eugenie Grandet"
• Karl Marx, "Early Writings"
• Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," "Civil Disobedience"
• Parley P. Pratt, "Autobiography"
• Charles Dickens, "Little Dorrit," "Great Expectations"
• George Eliot, "Middlemarch," "Daniel Deronda"
• Gustave Flaubert, "A Sentimental Education" (translator Robert Baldick)
• Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
• Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace" (translator Rosemary Edmonds), "Anna Karenina"
• Sarah Orne Jewett, "Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories"
• William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience"
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (translator Walter, Kaufmann)
• Henrik Ibsen, "Peer Gynt" (translator Michael Meyer), "Rosmersholm," "Ghosts," "Hedda Gabler"
• Thomas Hardy, "The Mayor of Casterbridge"
• Henry James, "The Ambassadors," "What Maisie Knew"
• Anton Chekhov, "The Cherry Orchard," "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," "The Three Sisters" (translator David Magarshack)
• Joseph Conrad, "Nostromo"
• James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
• Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" (translator James Strachey)
• Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain," "Joseph and His Brothers"
• Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way" (translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
• John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace"
• D.H. Lawrence, "Women in Love"
• E.M. Forster, "A Passage to India"
• Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
• Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf," "The Glass Bead Game" (Chapter 7)
• George Santayana, "The Last Puritan"
• Montaigne, "Essays" (translator John Florio)

2—An amazing quote

Dostoevsky wrote this in a letter to Mme. N. D. Fonvizina after he was released from prison in 1854 (and don't I wish he would write to me).

I am a child of the age, a child of lack of faith and doubt till now, and (this I know) this will be true till the coffin closes over. What frightful torments this thirst to believe has cost and costs me now, one which is all the stronger in my soul the more there are opposite proofs in me. And yet God sometimes sends me moments in which I am perfectly tranquil; in these moments I have formed in myself a symbol of faith in which everything is clear and sacred for me. This symbol is very simple; here it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, intelligent, manly, and perfect than Christ, and not only is not but, with jealous love I say to myself, cannot be. Even more, if somebody proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really were so that the truth were outside of Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.

3—Socca

Oh, blessed chickpea crepes! Thank you, France! Really, you've got to try this recipe, with or without the fresh rosemary. Or the chevré.

4—Anti-Candida regimen

Did I mention that I'm finally back on the wagon? Goodbye, Krispy Kremes.

5—Inversion

Because the air outside is practically unbreathable (worst air pollution in the nation this week, right here) and because January begs for laughter I need to be indoors seeing this. And this.

6—Community seed swap

And I'm in charge of organizing it. That's what they tell me anyway. Will keep you posted.

7—Madness!