The latest addition to my website is Harald Voetmann‘s Vågen (Awake). Voetmann is a classicist and this book is about Pliny the Elder, famous for his Natural History, an early encyclopedia, and for his death from the fumes of Vesuvius. The book is narrated by Pliny and by his nephew and adopted son Pliny the Younger. We follow Pliny the Elder’s compilation of the work but also see a comparison between his worthy intellectual effort and the ugliness of the world in which he lives. Pliny aims to catalogue the whole world but even he realises this is not feasible and many of the things he believes to be facts are not, with our greater knowledge, at all accurate. His nephew takes a more pragmatic view, preferring sex to his uncle’s great labours.