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“What follows (I need hardly say) is not science. It has no pretensions to dispassion. Though in no sense fiction (for there is no deliberate invention), it may well strike the reader as story rather than history. It is an exercise in animated description, a negotiation with a two-hundred-year memory without any pretense of definitive closure. And both the form of its telling and its chosen subject matter represent a deliberate turning away from analytical history towards Events and Persons, both long forbidden, or dismissed as mere froth on the great waves of history. It is a narrative not by default but by choice: a beginning, middle and end that tries to resonate with its protagonists' own overdeveloped sense of the past, present and posterity. For it is not in the least fortuitous that the creation of the modern political world coincided precisely with the birth of the modern novel.”--
Simon Schama, "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution"I guess that is why this book has made it into Monk's hit-and-run reading. A history made of stories and personalities, imagine! He must be enjoying it; he decided to hold off on "Story of O" in favor of this non-fiction book. Still, to keep this reading as sweet as can be, when it comes to such works, Monk will likely break away every two or three hundred pages for the joys of pure fiction. So, don't worry, O, we still have that date.
Of course, this means that we are dropping the constraint that these books have to be pocket-size. But that was too arbitrary a limitation for worthy rereadables. Monk will just have to carry around a larger pocket. So, the only necessary condition is that these are books that have already been read, thus diminishing the compulsion to want to race to the end and allowing for more desultory reading.
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