The books which arrived while I was in hospital – mostly ordered before I was admitted.

I was pleased to be able to find a complete set of the Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, along with the Écrits politiques; a few books by or about Saussure, including some of his previously-unpublished manuscripts. Other books here include Jeffrey Whyte’s The Birth of Psychological Warfare, which I read in manuscript, and which is open access as an e-book. There’s also a copy of Shiloh Krupar’s Health Colonialism: Urban Wasteland and Hospital Frontiers (also an open access e-book), Emmanuelle Loyer’s biography of Lévi-Strauss (I’d had the Warwick library copy out for months), and the new René Girard collection, All Desire is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, edited by Cynthia L. Haven.

The last of these piles has some English translations of Portuguese books, kindly sent by my former PhD, António Ferraz de Oliveira. As it is some time before I’m supposed to be back at work, these are likely to be some of the first things I read from this lot.