For my birthday, my wife has agreed to set me free in a good bookstore to buy three books.

She's actually a little upset about the clutter our books represent - although she has many of her own - so it's very generous of her to suspend her wishes to embrace mine. (She's always trying to get me to "donate" books, but generally doesn't succeed.)

That's what a good marriage is about, letting go of some desires of one's own to embrace those of one's lover. My marriage has made my life worth living, because I try to do as much, and she succeeds at doing as much.

The bookstore in question is Labyrinth Books in Princeton, effectively the bookstore for the University, despite it's emasculated math and science offerings that the old University bookstore featured in a vast treasure trove. (The loss of college bookstores - many of which have been outsourced to Barnes and Noble - and the ability to browse them for math and science is a great tragedy in my view.)

Be that has it may, I seldom venture far into Labyrinth since it's marvelous and transcendent and thoughtful history section is near the door. There are a lot of books that touch on political history and one could in theory go broke there left free to buy more than three books - I could so do.

We spent a little time there this weekend, looking for art books to give my son for his birthday, close to mine, and I selfishly browsed in anticipation of my own birthday after finding one (slightly political) art book for him.

Two books caught my eye in this age of rising fascism, here and abroad: Plato and the Tyrant, and France on Trial: The Case of Phillipe Petain.

A discussion of the latter book with the author, Julian Jackson, who is a bit overly loquacious with a metered and slightly odd rhythm to his speech, is in a video on line:

One of the participants in the discussion Alice Kaplan, a professor of French history at Yale, makes a delicious comment on the modern day, about the orange pedophile in the White House, about whether the lack of intelligence, an inability to think clearly which she says Petain - then 89 - exhibited during his trial, makes such a being, an unintelligent fascist, more dangerous than a coherent fascist. It's at about the 55th minute in the discussion.

I don't know that these books are the ones I'll actually buy in the "kid in a candy shop" setting - although I am now a very old man, not a kid, but it's what I'm thinking now.