Some of my recent reading:
1) 1Q84, Kafka on the Beach, and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
I marathoned these because I wanted to make room on my bookshelf. I loved Murakami in middle school, but returning to these books many years later, well, I don't want to be too hard on him because I realise he's popular, but I just didn't get it. I remember Norwegian Wood in particular left a strong impression on me the first time I read it, but I don't know, it just felt off and underwhelming somehow. Murakami also has a tendency to recycle certain tropes that makes reading too many of his books at once tedious. The translation is probably part of it, but the writing did not impress me that much. Murakami's apparently bottomless horniness is also a bit much but it works well for Norwegian Wood at least. I felt very uncomfortable reading it on the train, though.
2) "New England and the Bavarian Illuminati" by Vernon Stauffer, plus some related primary sources: Morse's sermons that started the controversy, Ogden's "A View of the New England Illuminati", and Dwight's "Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis".
This is a pretty classic, albeit old, historical study of a debate that took place in New England between 1798 and 1800 about whether the Illuminati, who it was widely believed had master-minded the French Revolution, had made their way into America. This was largely due to the deteriorated relationship with France (apparently the French Directory sent privateers en masse to go after American merchant vessels, among other diplomatic crises), a feeling of moral and political decline among Federalist congregationalists who drove the initial debate, and concerns about the rising Jeffersonian ideology. The most interesting part of the controversy is that as soon as the original debate ran out of steam, Jeffersonians like Ogden started accusing the Federalists of being the real Illuminati. Anyway, Stauffer's dissertation is from 1918, so of course the writing style is excellent and very lively in a way only old scholarship can be.
I really just picked it up to continue my studies in the reception of Barruel's and Robison's Illuminati conspiracy theories, but it was honestly kind of confusing due to my ignorance of the period, so I might stay in 18th-century America for the time being. Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" looks pretty good, but I haven't ordered it yet.
