id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-9094		Catherine the Great - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	19436	1841	69	Catherine read three sorts of books, namely those for pleasure, those for information, and those to provide her with a philosophy.[85] In the first category, she read romances and comedies that were popular at the time, many of which were regarded as "inconsequential" by the critics both then and since.[85] She especially liked the work of German comic writers such as Moritz August von Thümmel and Christoph Friedrich Nicolai.[85] In the second category fell the work of Denis Diderot, Jacques Necker, Johann Bernhard Basedow and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.[86] Catherine expressed some frustration with the economists she read for what she regarded as their impractical theories, writing in the margin of one of Necker's books that if it was possible to solve all of the state's economic problems in one day, she would have done so a long time ago.[86] For information about particular nations that interested her, she read Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville's Memoirs de Chine to learn about the vast and wealthy Chinese empire that bordered her empire; François Baron de Tott's Memoires de les Turcs et les Tartares for information about the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean khanate; the books of Frederick the Great praising himself to learn about Frederick just as much as to learn about Prussia; and the pamphlets of Benjamin Franklin denouncing the British Crown to understand the reasons behind the American Revolution.[86] In the third category fell the work of Voltaire, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, Ferdinando Galiani, Nicolas Baudeau and Sir William Blackstone.[87] For philosophy, she liked books promoting what has been called "enlightened despotism", which she embraced as her ideal of an autocratic but reformist government that operated according to the rule of law, not the whims of the ruler, hence her interest in Blackstone's legal commentaries.[87]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-9094.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-9094.txt