The Obstacle is the Way & Notes of a War Correspondent

The Obstacle is the Way & Notes of a War Correspondent 

I finished reading two books that I had been reading together.  That is, I would read two chapters of one book and then two chapters of another.

The first book: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holliday was a stoic self help book.  I saw it referred to on, possibly, the Daily Time Waster website.   It wasn’t very helpful, but then I’ve discovered that self help books are never very helpful or transformative.  This book was full of cliches and even tried to shoehorn Barack Obama as an example of stoic overcoming of an obstacle.  Geez.  How does a stoic deal with affirmative action?  That question was never dealt with.

The other book, Notes of a War Correspondent was written by Richard Harding Davis, an American war correspondent who wrote around the turn of the 20th century,  In this volume, which I heard about on a war podcast where the guest said he found Davis’s work on the project Gutenberg site.  I read in Notes, Davis’s accounts of the Boer War, a Greek - Turk battle, the Spanish American war, and the Russo-Japanese war.  The author wrote in a tongue-in-cheek style, which probably wouldn’t past muster today because war is so absolutely bad, you know. The author didn’t slink away from depicting the silliness, tragedy, and filthiness of war. But he didn’t also slink away from depicting the bravado and comradeship of it as well.  An author writing in that style today would come across as refreshing to the likes of me and other would be reactionary types.

I am currently reading:  a Chesterton Calendar; Nicholas Gomez Davila Aphorisms in Spanish, English and French; The Way by José María Escrivá; Baltimore Catechism #4; The Book of English Verse 1250 -1900; Real Soldiers of Fortune by Richard Harding Davis; Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikoku; and Maxims; and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (Ricordi).