Hello, and Books dcozy has read, is reading, and will read in 2008

Reading has never seemed to me a challenge. For me the challenge has always been getting off the couch and doing something besides reading. That being the case I hadn't planned to join this group, and still can't get excited about meeting or exceeding any particular number of books read in 2008. Lurking around the edges of the group, though, I found that I very much enjoyed reading other people's accounts of the books they were reading. It seemed just possible, therefore, that others might be interested to know what I am reading. If they are I invite them to go here:

http://onlyablockhead.vox.com/books-david-finished-in-2008/

Click on the icons to get, not a review, but a short reaction to the book.

Also, if you have a spare moment, please check out the blog of which that book list is a part:

http://onlyablockhead.vox.com

Thanks,

dcozy

Oh, and perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm currently reading the New Directions Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca and wondering why it took me so long to delve into this delightful poet's work. My Spanish is just good enough that I can sort of follow the Spanish side of the page (and revel in the rhythms, the play of vowels and consonants), but I'm certainly happy to have the English side to check when, quite often, unfamiliar vocabulary crops up.

I'm also loving Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire. Why is this writer so little known, so little celebrated? Is it the lushness of her language at a time in our literary history when the plain style is venerated? Is it her erudition in an age of know-nothingness and diminished attention spans? Is it her cosmopolitanism at a time when "foreign" has become synonymous with "threatening"?

Who knows, but I'm sure grateful I discovered this author and her remarkable work.

I updated the list of books I've completed in 2008 with a couple of recently consumed books (the second volume of Janet Browne's splended Darwin biography, and a thriller by the best-selling Japanese mystery author, Miyuki Miyabe):

http://onlyablockhead.vox.com/books-david-finished-in-2008/

Now, back to the books.

I've added a few more books to this year's list. See what they are, and what I thought about them (click the thumbnail) at:

http://onlyablockhead.vox.com/books-david-finished-in-2008/

(Why did I wait so long to read Donald Barthelme?)

Sorry to get grumpy so early in the morning -but could you list your books read here? When I went to your site immediately some company wanted to install a virus remover or something on my computer!

Curious. I've accessed the site from two different computers and not had the problem you describe on either of them. Computers are mysterious things.

Maybe I'll list the books here, and offer the link to my site for those intrepid souls who are willing to brave the pop-up forest (which may or may not, for them, exist) to make their way to my site for the rather inconsequential squibs I write about the books I've consumed.

Thank you! I like to see what books people are reading- I have found some wonderful books through threads like this.

May I second the request to put the list and your comments here? Unless you're desperate to build traffic to your site, is there any reason not to put the information in both places?

Heyokish saw right through me: I did sort of want to create a little activity at my site. I hope that's not terrible of me

I have taken the hint, however, and will begin posting on the books I read not only on my site, but also here. It'll just entail a little cutting and pasting. Thanks, torontoc and heyokish, for chastising me with such restraint.

I'm currently in the middle of Robert Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and loving every page. He's my favorite new writer--though of course he's not new at all. It's just that he's only recently come into English in a big way. That new works keep appearing—most recently Nazi Literature in the Americas—help fortify the illusion that he is a prolific and protean young writer, busy in his Mexico City garret. In fact, of course, he is dead—but I believe those of us who read in English are promised his magnum opus later this year.

(Silly touchstones refuse to recognize Bolaño unless one (mis)spells it minus the tilde. Touchstones are also clueless about Nazi Literature in the Americas. So it goes.)

I finished Bolaño's The Savage Detectives today. It's a remarkable novel. Here's what I wrote about it:

The novel—one of the many novels—that came to mind as I read The Savage Detectives was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In just the same way as Conrad's Kurtz exists more as a rumor than a reality, as the verbiage he produces and which is produced about him rather than the referent of said verbiage, so Bolaño gives us a main character, Belano, whose existence is the stories others tell about him. Those stories, the seemingly countless stories, about Belano of which this book is made make it a much more expansive novel than Heart of Darkness; they call to mind, in fact, a work such as George Perec's Life: A User's Manual. As well, the formal exquisiteness of Bolaño's masterpiece evokes the meticulousness with which Perec constructed his novel. In short, The Savage Detectives is a masterpiece worthy of standing with those masterpieces. I'm eager to embark on Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Engaged in the group read of Gödel, Escher, Bach going on over at Book Talk under the auspices of the Philosophy and Theory group I decided to take a break this weekend with a thriller, William Gibson's Spook Country. Here's what I wrote about it:

I'm aware of no one writing now who produces thrillers as satisfying as William Gibson's. His taut narrative lines are strung with enough satisfying tidbits—reflections on consumerist society, characters we'd like to know, places we might like to visit—and the language, if not consistently, then often enough, rises off the page to sing. Pattern Recognition, his last novel, deals with the nether edges of the advertising world; Spook Country introduces us to rogue intelligence agents, some of whom might actually be the good guys. Where will Gibson take us in his next offering? I look forward to finding out.

I just finished A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien. Here's what I had to say about it:

Whether it's Jane Austen's shires or Patrick O'Brian's ships, it's never a bad idea to set a novel in a clearly defined, tightly constrained and constricted world. That's one reason Hollywood has been such a fruitful subject. From Nathaniel West through F. Scott Fitzgerald and Michael Tolkin, Hollywood has proven fertile ground for authors taking a break from their screenplays, or, as in the case of Darcy O'Brien, taking a break from his professorial duties at Pomona College ( less than an hour, traffic permitting, from Hollywood and Vine). The gossip and glamor, the grime and grief of the place have fired many a writer's imagination—or perhaps it's the journalist that's inspired, since when dealing with the capital of glitter, "you can't make this stuff up." In O'Brien's case, the autobiographer comes into it too; he may have turned himself into a scholar, but he was born into Hollywood royalty, son of George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill. They were Hollywood royalty, however, who were soon deposed, and that's what, for the most part, O'Brien writes about: the formerly famous and their uneasy relationship with real life. He gives us the story through the eyes of a boy and young man, moving, finally toward independence from his train-wreck of a family. With a skillful blending of farce and comedy, tragedy and wit, O'Brien has given us a delighful addition to the short shelf of essential Hollywood novels. (And don't skip over Seamus Heaney's excellent introduction.)

Today I completed my journey through The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Here's what I wrote about it:

Reading Federico García Lorca reminds one that surrealism, in poetry, doesn't have to be facile, that stanzas like: "La muchacha de lágrimas / se bañaba entre llamas / y el ruiseñor lloraba / con las allas quemadas," can elicit and deserve reactions more heartfelt than "wow, that's weird."

In W.S. Merwin's translation the passage above is: "The girl of tears / bathed among flames / and the nightingale wept / with charred wings." Like most of the renderings (by a variety of translators) in this edition it seems to me well-done, and was certainly helpful to me as I puzzled my way through the Spanish on the left-hand pages, enjoying García Lorca's music, even as the meaning, at times—before a quick glance over at the right-hand page—eluded me.

Being laid up with a cold gives one a great excuse to spend the whole day immersed in a novel. For me, yesterday, that novel was Before the Cock Crow by the incomparable Simon Raven. My attempts to alert friends to the pleasures of his work have fallen on stony ground, but for those who don't find the English upper classes, by definition, beyond the pale there's a great deal of pleasure to be had in his work. Start with the Alms for Oblivion series of novels.

Here's what I wrote about Before the Cock Crow:

Although may of the same characters move through Simon Raven's "The First-Born of Egypt" series of novels as populated his magnum opus, the "Alms for Oblivion" sequence, one sees why Raven viewed the two series as a separate entities. The elements of farce are more pronounced in the First-Born books, as are intimations of the supernatural. Wikipedia tells us that "these books were written strictly for money, and received little critical acclaim." One supposes the critical reaction was tepid because the novels were a a less serious attempt to chronicle—a la Anthony Powell—a generation of upper-class English than Alms had been. That the First-Born books were written for money seems neither here nor there: Raven was always a professional, and as such, both in his books and in his work for the BBC, endeavored to give good value. He achieves this in Before the Cock Crow and everything else of his I have read.

I've at long last ventured into the baroque—or is it gothic?—cathedral of Julien Gracq's prose. Here's what I had to say about the experience:

To enjoy a book like Julien Gracq's Château d'Argol one has to be in the mood for sentences like:

"And such was the explosion of life in her that it seemed to her that her body in the consuming heat was about to open like a ripe peach and her skin in all its massive thickness about to be torn from her, turned inside out toward the sun to exhaust the fires of love in all her red arteries, and that her most secret flesh as well would be torn out of her very depths in quivering shreds, and burst through all her thousand recesses like a banner of blood and flame flashing in the face of the sun in a final inexpressible and appalling nudity."

It's usually a fib when someone writing about a book claims, in order to make a point about a writer's style, to have quoted a sentence from the book at random; not in this case. One must, therefore, be eager for a bit of baroque to relish a venture into Gracq's world, at least the world of Château d'Argol, the only of Gracq's works I have read. I found—even though I'm a reader who enjoys Henry James's endless qualifications, and Proust's ceaseless circling—that it was difficult, reading Gracq, to fall in love with his overheated prose. And yet I also find myself wondering what else by this writer—a true original—I have on my shelf. (And I also find myself wondering how much of Gracq's style, as wrestled into English by Louise Varèse, is Varèse and not Gracq.)

Ashes for Breakfast by Dürs Grunbein

A collection of poetry--particularly a selected or a collected--rarely has the narrative drive of fiction. There's no reason that it should. It's a different animal, after all. Every so often, though, one comes across a book of poetry that does pull one along just as joyfully, just as relentlessly, as does a well-told story. Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast is one of those, perhaps in part thanks to Grünbein's gift for a consistently conversational tone infused with worldly cynicism, humor, and learning lightly-worn. All of this is certainly on display in his ode to the city of my birth (can you guess what city it is?): "To be truly happy here, you need a dentist. 'Such a dazzling smile . . .' / Because happiness is the first duty of every citizen. / Whoever is happy, is unstoppable. Nothing so cheers the loser / as the successful sparklers." He can also be heartbreaking, though, as in an ode to the city of his birth, Dresden: "Nothing veiled anymore, history, / the hot, dusty wind that eradicates, / and I care. And in the name of what happened there / one gives up the Vermeer (burned) / and the Bach (disappeared). / Was it worth it? That whole cities, / from which the death transports rolled / became wastelands on Lethe's banks." That there is no easy answer to this question augments the poem's simple power. I can't judge the fidelity of Michael Hofmann's translations, but the versions he has given of Grünbein's work certainly read well. His introduction, too, is a lively reflection on the translator's art. Don't skip it.

>16 dcozy: Nice writeup on the collection, dcozy. It seems you read a fair amount of poetry. I have intentionally focused more on poetry written by women (which doesn't exclude poetry written by men, I just intentionally swing the scales the other way):-)

btw, I've noticed other bloggers write a short six or eight lines of comment on the books they've read with a link to their blog for a 'full review.' While I'm of the variety of reader unlikely to follow a link to a blog on a regular basis I might follow a link if the comments intrigued me. Thing is, there a gadzillion readers on LT with blogs trying to get everyone to their site, and we nonbloggers could spend all day doing that when we could be reading books...or, in my case, getting some research done. However this should not reflect on you, your writing, or the value of what you have to say; it is only a reflection of the scarcity of available time.

I am just going to have to 'star' your thread now:-)

The Translator by Ward Just

Though little noticed, Ward Just's Forgetfulness is certainly one of the best novels published in 2007. The Translator, which appeared sixteen years before it, is also accomplished. Both are topical: 9/11 and Jihadis come into the eloquent meditation on revenge, remembering, and forgetting that is Forgetfulness; The Translator, too, is drawn from the pages of the morning news, but the news is old: the Cold War, and the war which gave rise to it, World War II, East Germany as it was.

Just's novels may draw on the news, but they never depend upon it as do the newspapers which, once read, can't hit the recycling stack fast enough. In The Translator, along with what now seems ancient history, he gives us enduring meditations on language--his protagonist is a German translator living in Paris--but also on what it means to live one's life away from the land of one's birth.

Though I live almost as many miles from the Paris where Just's translator works as I do from the country where I was born his description of expatriate life as it is lived by those not on cushy expat packages rings true, and I am certain it will for others far from places that used to be home. One of the blurbers for The Translator notes that "Ward Just just keeps getting better." The Translator is a good novel; Forgetfulness is a masterpiece. The blurber's assertion remains true.

Re Message #17:

Thanks, Avaland, for the encouragement and the star. All you'll find at my blog is the same squibs I've taken to posting here after others suggested I do so instead of linking. I do occasionally link to published reviews, which tend to be more substantial than the stuff I post here and on the blog.

#17,19

I may be one of those annoying people who say to go to my library for the full review but I have to say that I only do that out of a sense of brevity in these threads and a desire not to be redundant. I always figured that anyone interested in the books I give a short review on in thises threads would go over to my full review for more and, if not, wouldn't waste too much time with the brief information I give in the thread. Sorry if I have exasperated.

>blackdog, oh, my comments were entirely general and I wouldn't say I find the practice annoying. I just move on past it - but much depends on what I might be looking for at the time.

I think many of us have limited time and wish cover as much as possible. In my case, I do put more weight on the few sentences left on a discussion board then an entire review elsewhere (especially long ones, which I prefer to read after reading the books so they don't influence my reading of the books). Occasionally, if on the fence about a potential read, I might check the average rating but still, I have books with an average rating of 3.5 and I, after reading it, have ended up rating it much higher so even that has not be reliable. I think I look to these posts to find interesting books I may not have heard of, or some intriguing bit about a book I have heard of. But that might be just me. I have come out of near a decade in the bookstore biz and the habits of pre-publication, pre-review reading linger.

Still, as with dcozy for example, I'm intrigued by the selection and variety of her reading and her thoughtful comments; she reads some things I've read, others I'm apt to read, and others I might not, but it all makes me want to come back and check:-)

Yes, LT certainly expands the horizons.....which is a problem for me given the number of books in my library yet unread. I have the same experience with reivews, tending to move books up in my TBR stack based on favorable comments here in these threads or adding a book to my long list of books to purchase. Everyone on the 75er pages seems to point me in new and interesting directions.

It's Golden Week here in the Archipelago, and that means more reading time. Most recently, I enjoyed A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig. Here's what I wrote about it (and posted at the other place):

"Ninety percent of everything," as Theodore Sturgeon remarked, "is crud," and that is, of course, as true of chick-lit as of any other sub-genre. As I think one would have to include Jane Austen among those who have perpetrated chick-lit, however, it is clear that the non-cruddy ten percent can be pretty non-cruddy indeed. In fact—and I write this as a proud holder of a Y-chromosome—I think one has a better chance of finding non-crud on the chick-lit shelf than among the techno-thrillers on the dick-lit shelf. Charlotte Greig's A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy is one of those happy non-cruddy finds, and just as the protagonist, Susannah, matures, in the course of the novel, from, well, a chick (albeit one who is an earnest participant in a philosophy course at Sussex University), to a woman who has realized that ending up with the right man is not going to make everything alright, so the novel moves from the concerns of a chick to something deeper. At first the course readings she does as the pages turn—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard—seem unnecessarily tacked onto the novel rather than a necessary adjunct of its structure, but this changes as the novel progresses; Susannah's reading of Kierkegaard is essential to the woman our protagonist becomes and to the more serious novel A Girl's Guide becomes. Add the spot-on descriptions of university life in the seventies (I was there, but on the opposite side of the Atlantic from Greig) and this first novel by a woman whose day job is folk singer makes an engaging read.

Missing Person by Patrick Modiano

A man has worked in Paris as a private detective under the name "Guy Roland" for ten years, but Guy Roland is not who he is. It is an identity he has assumed, through the good offices of a friend (who may not be a friend), after having lost track of himself. The novel is filled with billiard tables, and like a pool ball the protagonist caroms from one fragment of what he believes to be his past to another as he attempts to reassemble himself. Each encounter unfolds like a dream before fading out at at the end, leaving us with the feeling that the Paris denizens Roland meets have more to tell than they reveal in the pages of Modiano's novel. They, and the Paris through which Roland passes, fade into a fecund and satisfying fog.

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

Ian Rankin is a character in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street. The world in which Rankin's people move—another of Smith's characters describes that world as: "murders, distress, human suffering: all the dark pathology of the human mind"—does not , however, appear. Instead we get a witty examination of the residents of an apartment at 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh, the people they know, and the not terribly dark or distressing foibles that make them—in most cases endearingly—who they are.

The novel was written as a daily serial in The Scotsman, and as such lacks the formal coherence it might have attained had Smith been at liberty to go back and tighten things up, but the bite-size snippets in which the story is told help make it a fun, light read.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Music, art, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, formal logic, philosophy, genetics, mathematics: how could one not enjoy a book which brings together such a grab-bag of subjects and successfully demonstrates that they are, indeed, relevant to one another. I know a bit about music and art, but very little about the other topics Hofstadter weaves into his braid, so Gödel, Escher, Bach was an invigorating mental workout, one enlivened by the wit and whimsy—I don't doubt that these qualities will irritate those humorless types who groan with displeasure at puns—that Hofstadter cannot resist injecting into discussions of issues which can only be counted as serious. The book is nearly forty years old, so I'm uncertain whether Hofstadter's conjectures and conclusions remain valid; they are, without a doubt, stimulating.

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

At rush hour on the morning of Monday, March 20, 1995 commuters on several Tokyo subway lines were gassed, the gas in question being the deadly sarin. The first section of Haruki Murakami's Underground is a collection of interviews with the survivors of the attack, and these interviews can, at first, seem monotonous. After all, each of the victims had more or less the same experience as each of the other victims. It doesn't take long, however, for the cumulative effect of their statements to build up . The full horror of the day becomes evident, and also the scope of Murakami's achievement.

"They are the people who live average lives (and maybe from the the outside, more than average lives), who live in my neighborhood. And in yours," Murakami writes, and he could have been describing those subway riders, but in fact those sentences refer to members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that was behind the attack. Murakami interviews several of them in the second section of the book, and considering their beliefs he is moved to remark: "Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that—by following language and a logic that appears consistent—you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge."

Indeed.

Readers unafraid of fiction that is written according to tenets other than those imposed by the market, those serious enough to understand that there's fun to be found in work that is intellectually and formally adventurous, have been known to genuflect when the Dalkey Archive Press is mentioned, and if one were forced to guess who had published Stefan Themerson's novel Tom Harris, surely that estimable institution would be first among one's conjectures.

"Nearly as mad as the world," Bertrand Russell called an earlier novel of Thermerson's, and the same can be said of Themerson's novelistic investigation of an ordinary Englishman (there's no such thing, of course). Equal parts Lewis Carroll, modernist document, thriller, farce, Henry Green, and philosophical inquiry, it's not a book for those who like their stories told in straight first-this-happened-then-that-happened fashion. It's for those who prefer to be surprised, to laugh, and to think; for them Tom Harris will be a delight.

There is a lot to like about Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, but not a lot to love. One has to enjoy the quiet competence with which McEwan has put the novel together, the way his prose ticks along, and the scenes in which McEwan shows us what it was like to come of age before "sex began in 1963" are well-observed. One assumes that the claustrophobic nature of the novel—almost all telling, very little showing—is an intentional mirroring of the claustrophobia of the times, but the airlessness makes for some oppressive reading. The almost complete absence of dialogue contributes a great deal to this, but to be fair the characters' silence for most of the novel also lends power to their climactic argument on the beach when they are finally allowed to speak in their own voices.

"People", as Henry Miller reminds us in Warren Beattie's film Reds, "have always fucked." McEwan seems not to agree. He apparently takes Larkin's tongue-in-cheek notion that people did not fuck until the advent of the Beatles literally. The complications that McEwan's characters bring to this simple, if powerful, act are not, if one does not take Larkin as gospel, believable.

Likewise, the conservatism of the social and political views that have crept into McEwan's work in recent years are evident. It is a bit tiresome to learn at the end that the character who embraces the liberation of the later sixties was not made happy by doing so; the suggestion is that his more straitlaced opposite number is the one who got it right. One wonders if McEwan's subtle conservatism is one reason for his tremendous popularity. Still, even with those reservations, On Chesil Beach is worth a look, especially for those who enjoyed Saturday.

One hopes that The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is not, in fact, complete. So compelling is her account of growing up in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran (also, for a couple of years, in Vienna), and so skillfully does Satrapi weave the facts of her country with the facts of her girlhood and young womanhood, that one wants there to be more. Paris, where she now lives, is probably less dramatic than Iran, but one is certain Satrapi could make her life in Europe a worthy subject, one which would call forth the accomplished art which, in addition to her words, she uses to tell her tales. There may or may not, one day, be a Persepolis 3, but I am certainly grateful for the two books which comprise this volume, one of the best comic books I have ever read.

"Zuihitsu," or "following the brush," is an artistic technique much honored in traditional Japanese aesthetics, one which, when applied to literary work, can give rise to essays not so different from those produced by the progenitor of the form in the West, Michel de Montaigne. If one's mind is not as well stocked as Montaigne's, however, this practice can produce formless globs of one-thing-after-another. Fortunately Donald Richie's mind is very well stocked indeed, and he is adept at choosing the form best suited to the work at hand. He demonstrates this once again with his Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics: how better to discuss this subject than by using a form such as "zuihitsu" that is an exemplar of what he is writing about. The brief seventy pages of this tractate are an excellent introduction to the tenets which have traditionally guided Japanese art, tenets which, though perhaps languishing, are still alive today.

Say what you want about The New Yorker—it's not the magazine it was under Shawn, etc., etc.—but the people they get to write for them produce some of the best narrative non-fiction around. Peter Hessler, author of Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, is no exception. This collection, based on pieces he wrote for that magazine, is a superb introduction to the Middle Kingdom as it was in the first years of this millennium.

Sometimes books that are made of magazine pieces stitched together are ungainly sacks of odds and ends. This is, perhaps, less the case with books by New Yorker writers since the magazine articles they produce usually want to be books anyway. The deft manner in which Hessler ties the pieces of his picture together with the story of the oracle bone scholar and poet, Chen Mengjia, ensures that his account is coherent and compelling.

If there's anyone who still doubts that male authors can create vibrant female characters Joyce Cary's Herself Surprised should be enough to dispel that misconception. It is a masterpiece of humanism in the way that Yasujiro Ozu's films are: the characters, that is, are human beings and are neither condemned nor exalted for being so, even as they live lives comprised of actions which run the gamut from those worthy of condemnation to those which exalt the doers and all around them. So attractive, in its Moll Flandersesque blowsiness, is the voice of Cary's first-person narrator Sara Monday that one does not feel over-eager to examine the other two pieces of the triptych, narrated, as they are, by others whose voices, one doubts, can be as vivifying. But no, with an artist like Cary at the controls one is certain that those characters, too, will be brimming with life.

I am going to put Herself Surprised on my wish list after reading your review here. I am always attracted to characters who are simple human constructs, neither cardboard perfect nor hopelessly flawed. And the comparison to Moll Flanders put me over the edge, as that was a favorite read.

Also, enjoyed a quick look at your profile and favorite authors. Quite a mix - but that's best, isn't it?

Given the setting of Siddhartha Deb's An Outline of the Republic—North-Eastern India—one might expect the realism which characterizes the novel to be magical. It is not. It is, instead, gritty, the air not electric but dank, the towns and villages not colorful but grubby. All of this makes for an alluring journey into an India most of us will not have visited, a page-turner in which nothing is quite what it seems, and the quarry our protagonist seeks is always elusive. The book is a page-turner, but one in which readers are often brought up short , compelled to savor Deb's prose: he is a stylist of the first order. Think Graham Greene without the religious baggage, Conrad just as he is.

Lenin's Brain by Tilman Spengler

This book has it all: modern European history, humor (but not frivolity), crackpot science, and interesting characters, so why, I find myself wondering, didn't I like it more. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood; perhaps it was that the bulk of the novel was so much less fun to read than the letters of Amanda von Alvensleben, Spengler's most compelling character. I would have liked the novel more, I am certain, if the whole thing had been in her voice.

But that would have been a different book, not this fictionalization of the story of the scientist Oskar Vogt: the man who, having transported Lenin's brain from Moscow to Berlin, cut the organ into paper thin slices—all in the interest of science, you understand.

Javier Marías is a master of the long sentence. His long novel—so long that the exigencies of publishing force him to publish it in three volumes—is crammed with sentences of which Proust and James would have been proud, sentences that approximate the complexity of thought. And the good news is that Marías has a first class mind: his thought, as channeled through his characters, as molded into exquisite prose, as carefully arranged over the long span of the work's many pages, is always intricate enough to fascinate. I look forward to the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow.

There is skulduggery and a bit of violence in volume 2, Dance and Dream, but that's not what keeps you turning pages. Rather it's Marías's skill as a writer. (It's about time, isn't it, for a Spanish author to get the call from Sweden?)

In Jo Walton's Farthing World War II has ended leaving the Nazis in control of most of continental Europe, and the English happy with their island and a handful of African colonies formerly belonging to France. This backdrop, and the fascism and antisemitism that ooze over from the continent and mingle with England's homegrown varieties, are the most alluring things about the novel; the story laid over this backdrop—a Dorothy Sayersesque country house mystery—is less exciting (but then I'm one of those poor benighted souls who is less than enchanted with Sayers and writers of her ilk). Still, as England drifts deeper into the mire, and draws one of the book's key characters into the muck with it, things do pick up—enough so that even those with reservations may want too give the sequel, Ha'penny, a go.

Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas

An essay in novel form. A novel that partakes of the essay. Autobiography. Fiction. Diary. Memoir. Fantasy. As he did in Bartleby & Co., Vila-Matas has given us something entirely fresh. Not recommended for anyone hostile to literature or who believes art has no place in the pages of a book.

(In Engand the book is called Montano. In the USA, Montano's Malady.)

I have written elsewhere, with William Gibson in mind, about the fact that some of the best hard-boiled writing one finds these days is hiding out in cyberpunk science fiction (or in books by pioneers of cyberpunk who've jumped the confines of that sub-genre). If one wants a hit of that sort of thing, and there's nothing by Gibson left to read, one may be tempted to reach for Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

Don't succumb to that temptation. There is the odd interesting idea in the first entry in Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series, but at the end of the day Kovacs is not the arresting protagonist necessary in a novel like this, and the prose, though competent, is never compelling enough to convince us Altered Carbon is worth the energy it takes to turn the pages.

I won't be looking for subsequent entries in the Takeshi Kovacs series.

There is a certain moment in one's youth when one revels in artworks that are crammed with weird stuff. (One is likely to maintain, during this period, that Salvador Dali is the greatest artist the world has ever seen.) That stage comes not long after the period when, if one was growing up in the 1970s, one went to, and inexplicably even derived some pleasure from, disaster flicks such as Towering Inferno and Earthquake. (Sorry. I know you were trying to forget them.) Toby Litt, in Hospital, has given us weird stuff laid over the template of a disaster flick, camera flicking from this group to that, as they attempt to respond to the disaster that has overtaken a hospital. What sort of weird stuff am I talking about? Try this:

"Unable, for some reason, to walk normally, foot in front of foot, the woman's back was arched and she went on all fours, like a person cheating at limbo dancing, supporting themselves with their hands, feet first. Her still huge belly jutted up in the air like the shell of a giant Galapagos tortoise. She was naked, veins Stiltoning her skin, and long hair swishing the floor behind her. But most extreme of all, the part-born baby's head stuck forth between her legs, eyes open, looking straight ahead, driver in an armored car. With her screeching and its stare, the infant seemed more like the head of this hybrid creature, and the mouth some kind of propulsive, flatulent anus."

Like I said: weird stuff, but after a certain point—usually when one is still in one's teens—weirdness for the sake of weirdness ceases to fascinate (and it must be said: in all of Litt's bizarrerie there's nothing quite as alarming as Charlton Heston in Earthquake). Even ignoring the sometimes sloppy prose (see the confusion in number in the first sentence quoted above), and the rather good figures of speech ("Stiltoning") notwithstanding, Hospital is, in the end, a bore.

Reflex and Bone Structure was nominated for the Prix Maurice Edgar Coindreau award for literary crime fiction, but in fact it is not, in any simplistic sense, crime fiction at all. Rather it is a high modernist portrait of a woman / a high modernist portrait of a female figment of an author's imagination, and the mystery lies in the the tension between the descriptions on either side of that slash mark. The book is a masterpiece. Why did no one ever tell me about Clarence Major?

Ever since discovering Mike Davis's City of Quartz, the best book I've seen about my very odd home town, Los Angeles, I've believed him to be among the finest analysts of society working today. In Praise of Barbarians is a collection of his journalism and occasional pieces. Some of them are a bit dated--that's what happens with journalism--but others, particularly the historical pieces which constitute the last section of the book, remain as fresh and powerful as ever. Ancient Rome's slaves and peasants, Davis reminds us, did not cry when the Barbarians entered the city. "It remains to be seen," Davis concludes, "who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac.

Just to let you know that I'm in here reading from time to time --- even if I don't have anything to say. Your comments are thoughtful and succinct. . .

Thanks, avaland. It's nice to know that I'm not posting into the void.

The fourth in Simon Raven's The First Born of Egypt series, New Seed for Old, is, so far, the best of the very good bunch. To say that Raven pulls no punches in his portrait of the English upper classes at play would be to employ the wrong figure of speech; Raven throws no punches at his nobs and snobs, but instead skewers them with rapier-like wit, and though he shows his characters getting up to all sorts of vile deeds the portrait he paints comes off, somehow, as more affectionate than not. Those in search of wit and a pristine style—qualities not easy to find in our time—will relish the novels of Simon Raven.

Cross-posted at the New York Review Books group)

Not published until 1971, twenty-five years after the author's death, and only now appearing for the first time in English (also Russian) translation, Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years is a masterpiece. Structured in four movements, the novel follows four revolutionaries through the horrors of the last century, and watches them grapple not only with physical hardships, but also with their growing realization that the one successful revolution, that in the service of which they have placed themselves, was, even long before the USSR's demise, in fact a dismal failure. That Serge himself was, as Richard Greeman notes in his excellent Introduction, "a revolutionary and an internationalist more or less from birth" allows him to write with an authority that is rare in authors attempting to depict millieu as obscure at those Serge's characters traverse, but the novel is much more than a documentary. It is a work of the highest art.

dcozy, just letting u know that u are certainly not posting into the void. i have been following ur thread for some time --- i source it for ideas for serious literature, and new worlds worth exploring. ur last read is particularly intriguing...

The Inspector Barlach Mysteries by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Here are two taut mysteries from the Swiss man-of-letters Friedrich Dürrenmatt featuring an old police inspector soon to be pensioned off. Best known as playwright, Dürrenmatt's work is often found in the literature section, but truth be told, though he was just, as it were, moonlighting, his suspense novels are better than most of what's found over in the thriller aisle of the book shop. As Sven Birkerts notes in the introduction, Dürrenmatt likes binaries, but they are not simple. The evil characters against whom Barlach matches his wits are indeed evil, but Barlach is not entirely good. Likewise Dürrenmatt's countrymen, the Swiss, are always viewed through a jaundiced eye, but are not entirely reviled. Owing as much to Dostoevsky as to Chandler, Dürrenmatt's entertainments are cracking good reads.

hi dcozy

I red Pech (in English Traps) from Dürrenmatt long time ago, maybe time for a re-read.
Your description of Unforgiving years intrigued me, and there is a Dutch translation, so it is on my wishlist now.

I also enjoyed The Pledge, and wrote a few words about it at: http://onlyablockhead.vox.com/library/post/how-german-is-it.html.

Blood of my Bone by Simon Raven

"Reading a Raven book is like eating a box of expensive chocolates or drinking a fine malt whisky: delicious, wicked, totally compulsive and leading to a permanent smile." So says a reviewer from something called "Today," and I couldn't agree more. I was unable to resist reaching for another butter cream, pouring another finger, even though I finished my previous Raven only a week or two ago. I have one book remaining in the "First-Born of Egypt series; then, I guess, I'll have to seek out those of Raven's books which are not part of his two great sequences. Any recommendations, anyone?

CORRECTION: There are two books remaining in the series. Oh joy!

Dr. Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope

Trollope tossed this little gem off in just three weeks only a year before he died. It is more focused than many of his works (no significant subplots), and atypical in that, as John Halperin highlights in his introduction, Trollope takes on society with a directness we do not normally expect from him. The Victorian years really were a great time for novel writing, and Dr. Wortle's School has made me wonder why, of late, I've spent so little time in that era.

In For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut Takashi Hiraide reminds us that poetry need not be solipsistic and snooze-inducing examinations of one's feelings. In showing us how formally inventive and intellectually rich poetry can be he also reminds us of why we bother with poetry at all. I'll review this impressive handful of fragments later for the Japan Times, and will post links to a more complete review then. In the meantime, get yourself a copy and spend an afternoon with it. Highly recommended.

(Cross Posted to New York Review Books)

The genetic make-up of an organism determines every aspect of its psychology and physiology. The differences between men and women at the genetic level are tremendous and tremendously significant. There is such a thing as a DNA fingerprint which can be reliably used to identify criminals. Social science is scientific. "Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise . . . . Reality is the overseer at one's shoulder, ready to rap one's knuckles or to spring the trap in to which one has been led . . . by a too complacent reliance on mere surprise. . . . Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle" (Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science). To each of the above assertions (and others) biologist Richard C. Lewontin says "It ain't necessarily so," and he does so with such panache and wit, that his eviscerations of these commonplaces, collected in It Ain't Necessarily So, are a joy to read.

It's not often I pick up a book entirely on a whim. As I'm a voracious devourer of book news I usually have a pretty good idea what's out there (if not already on my shelf) that I might want to read. But there I was, wandering around the top floor of a Tokyo Tower Records (that's where they keep the books) and saw Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe. I'd never heard of book or author. What pulled me in? Though I've never been there, I've had a longstanding fascination with India, and have done a bit—but only a bit—of on-a-shoestring traveling myself. As the book is about budget travelers attempting to come to terms with the subcontinent I thought I might get a laugh out of it, and I did. It's light and fresh, and the protagonist's bullshit detector, among all the yogi-wannabes and spinners of theories meant to explain all of India, is wonderously keen, even in spite of his own vulnerability. The ideal book, perhaps, for a beach in Goa.

There are authors I haven't read but who, based on the testimony of readers I trust, and other odd tidbit I pick up here and there, that I am certain I will like. Oddly, I sometimes put off delving into these writers' work, deferring the pleasure which I am confident is there until some undetermined time in the future. In the end, I often break the embargo on these deferred pleasures—Nabakov is one—for the flimsiest of reasons. In the case at hand, I was off to climb a mountain in the Japan Alps. I needed a book for the lengthy commute to the foot of that mountain and back, and for the long night at the climber's lodge, but as I'd be carrying the tome on my back I wanted something compact and bound in paper. And there, on one of the stacks of books with which I surround myself, was The Other One by Colette, and thus I've begun to guzzle the pleasure that I knew—even before reading a word she had written—her work would offer me. An account of a playwright and monster of egotism called Farou, and, especially of the women with whom he surrounds himself, how the women deal with their dependence on him, and the nuances of their relationship—one is Farou's wife, the other, one in a succession of mistresses—The Other One seems to me a small masterpiece. This tale, which could have been a melodrama or a soap opera, is instead told with restraint and the wisdom of one who gets her knowledge of humanity from life rather than from the sorts of melodramas Farou produces, much less romance novels and TV. That the story plays out against the always attractive backdrop of French bourgeois Bohemia makes it even more irresistible. Now that the embargo is broken I can open The Collected Stories of Colette, which has been waiting on my shelf for much too long.

Though Virginia Nicholson claims not to be a historian, but rather a researcher, her Among the Bohemians is a marvelous social history. Nicholson, It seems to me, gets everything right, from her decision to organize the book thematically to the perfect cadence of her prose, to the useful information she provides about the conventions of the society against which the Bohemians were rebelling. Though she has Bloomsbury connections—her father is Quentin Bell—the book is not overly focused on that much analyzed coterie. It is, perhaps, overly focused on England and the English: one would like to know about other Bohemias, just as one would like to know about Bohemia as it existed—as it exists—after 1939. This is beyond Nicholson's brief, however, and it would be churlish to condemn her for these omissions. Instead let us hope she might tackle these areas in future books.

A superb thriller, Olen Steinhauer's The Bridge of Sighs bears comparison to Alan Furst's best books, not only for its European setting, but also for the atmosphere the author is able to convey so powerfully of that setting—in Steinhauer's case an unnamed country behind the Iron Curtain in the early days of the Cold War. Likewise the characters, particularly the protagonist, Emil Brod, are drawn with enough depth and complexity that one believes in them. I will certainly look for more in this series.

Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami

This tale of a young man's summer vacation, a girl he meets, girls he has known, his sporadic efforts to get outside of himself, is light, slight, and no less enjoyable for that. Very early Murakami, it hardly even hints at the weightier works—most notably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—Murakami would go on to produce, but reading it is, nonetheless, a pleasant way to spend an evening.

A man finds himself recruited into the military without knowing how it happened. The military has been called up to deal with the emergency, but what the emergency is he has no idea. Is he content to be a soldier in this mysterious unit, or does he want to return to his old life as a bank clerk? This is equally bewildering for our protagonist, and The Image of a Drawn Sword is, in the end, about inertia, about how we end up in situations without understanding how we got there there, and how bewildered we can feel upon realizing where we have ended up. First published in 1950, Jocelyn Brooke's Kafkaesque masterpiece (he claims not to have read the master from Prague at the time he composed this novel) seems as relevant in our time—the bewildering mess in the Middle East—as it must have been in his.

I'll put this on my to be read table! I just began grad school, again, and I'l be busy until Christmas with Southern lit; but this book does sound very interesting.

I first heard about the book from man-about-LT benwaugh. I notice that he's posted a review of it which is worth a look if you haven't already read it. At 147 pages Sword is a very compressed and very powerful work of art.

Southern lit: who are you interested in? The great locomotive Faulkner? Flannery O'Conner?

Study hard!

Being a Southern girl-- well more like mountain girl-- my exposure to the somewhat backwards and grotesque has always made me feel at home; so yes I love Flannery O'Conner and Faulkner. I took a Faulkner seminar 10 years ago (this is my second attempt at getting my MA in English. The first time life circumstances caused a decade delay). I think my favorites of his are Absalom Absalom, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. As for O'Conner I've only read her short stories, but I will be reading Wise Blood in a few weeks. I'm also a fan Eudora Welty particularly her the book The Golden Apples. Currently, I'm reading, for the first time, All The Kings Men for class. So far I'm intrigued, and I am enjoying the prose especially the solitary reflections of Jack Burden. I'm also teaching The Great Gatsby and just reread it a couple of days ago. It is difficult to convince high school students that reading for pleasure and class are very different. I would love for them to enjoy great literary classics, but the truth is they usually do not. A few will express that they are enjoying the book but most generally groan that it's boring or too difficult. So I try and convince them that they need a certain cultural literacy to be educated, that they need to push themselves to read difficult texts to become better readers, and that they need to get used to the fact that I will probably torture them for the rest of the semester with "classic" American texts. I can't decide if I should do Huck Finn or As I Lay Dying next. I wonder which will push them over the edge?

I'm going to shop around for The Image of a Drawn Sword. At only 150 pages, I could probably read it with out interfering with my other work.
Thanks for the recommendation.

Big fan of All the Kings Men. That book really wormed its way into my thinking. The choices set up by Warren for each of his characters and how they choose was fascinating.

A brooding novel, the sort with no vulgar action, The Devil in the Hills holds one rapt with the atmosphere it creates. It is a simple story of three students who fall in with a decadent older couple and end up spending time with them at their remote country estate. A gun appears early in the novel, and though it does go off once, the convulsive explosion with which one expects the novel to end, and to which a lesser novelist would have had recourse, never occurs. Instead it is the relationship among the friends, the descriptions of Italian city, village, and country life, the beauty of the prose (translated by D.D. Paige) that keeps one turning pages, and convinces one that the author, Cesare Pavese, was, indeed, an artist of the first rank.

It shouldn't be a surprise to find that the author of such key examples of modern short fiction as "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Bicycle Race" is optimistic, personable, and a doting father and grandfather, but somehow it is a bit jarring to learn from J.G. Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, that such is, indeed, the case. From his early life in Shanghai, including a stay at the Lunghua internment camp during World War II, to his later life reinventing science fiction while raising three children as a single father, Ballard's life-story is riveting. The century is still young, but one suspects that this will stand as one of the great literary autobiographies of our time.

The enterprising Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly have committed themselves to bringing out the complete work of manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi. As a result of their commitment we now have volume three of their edition of Tatsumi's work, Good-Bye, which collects work Tatsumi pubished in the early 1970s. Hiroshima, Yasukuni, and the "pan-pan girls" of the Occupation years all make prominent appearances, and make many of the comics collected more explicitly political than those assembled in the first two volumes (though Tatsumi's considerations of the miseries of the working class, featured in those earlier volumes, are certainly implicitly political). Tatsumi's vision continues to be as bleak as we've come to expect, and the rigor with which he writes and draws his accomplished short stories is unchanged. Tatsumi's work, even work decades old, is a welcome change form the airy-fairy fantasy which threatens to dominate, at the expense of this sort of gritty realism, the world of manga.

Everyone's heard the criticisms of Haruki Murakami: he writes the same character over and over, the same book; his prose, as Geoff Dyer has recently noted can be (at least in translation) "pretty poor." And yet . . . I don't think that's the whole story. Even if it is part of the story, one still needs to explain why he is so popular, and popular with a lot of very discerning readers. Thus I have sent myself to read through as much of his oeuvre as I can get my hands on (in English). The Elephant Vanishes is a piece of that quest, and, like all but the very finest collections of short stories, it seems to me a mixed bag: some of the stories are superb, others not so much. That's probably a fancy way of saying, of course, that I like some of the stories better than I like others. In fact, I've noticed, reading this collection and remembering the earlier Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, that it's stories such as "Chance Traveler" in the earlier book, and "A Slow Boat to China" in this one, in which Murakami lays a few fragments of story on the table and allows us to make of them what we will, which, to me, are the most appealing. I also notice that, though no one moves more effortlessly between the mundane and the fantastic, it is in those stories that have a firm grounding in the mundane—spaghetti making and so on—where the fantastic is used to best effect. The stories that are more purely fantastic such as "The Dancing Dwarf" seem to me less successful. Since I'm trying to move through Murakami's stuff in more or less chronological order, and since I finished Hear the Wind Sing not long ago, perhaps I'll move on to Pinball, 1973 next.

(And is it just me, or does Alfred Birnbaum render Murakami's prose into much crisper, livelier English than Jay Rubin?)

I am looking forward to hearing what you think of After The Quake - this for me was the best of his short story collections. In fact, after finishing it I turned straight back to the front and started reading it again.

I first read Pinball, 1973 in, it must have been, about 1990. (I have a vivid memory, probably false, of reading it on sunny day in an apartment in Higashi Murayama City.) I didn't hate it, but it didn't make me a die-hard Murakami fan either. Somehow, however, over the years, in my memory, the book got worse and worse. That, coupled with the fact that the book's author doesn't seem to think very highly of it either—Murakami refuses to authorize a new English translation—convinced me that it was a real piece of crap. It's not, actually. It's an entertaining light read, though of course it's not a wart on Wind-up Bird's ass, I'm looking forward to the day when, having worked my way through the years, I get back to that, Murakami's masterpiece,

The were showing Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood on TV the other night. That's the master's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. I thought about watching it, but then decided against it. My Japanese is good enough to follow movies with contemporary settings, but as Throne is set in medieval Japan I was pretty sure I'd get lost. It did get me thinking about Macbeth, though, so I took it down from the shelf and gave it a reread. What can one say about Shakespeare except that it was, as expected, great fun. Compelling characters, ideas, action, and of course exquisite language: Macbeth, like most of Shakespeare, has it all.

Avram Davidson is a little-known treasure of American literature. The reason for his lack of renown may be that he spent a lot of his writerly energy on genre fiction, or it may be because his style is not quite the thing: it is clear he never read his Strunk & White, or if he did he took their Elements of Style to be an elaborate joke. He manages, in Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends, to violate all their rules, guidelines, and dictums, and in so doing to remind us that the plain style is not the only style. He also manages to amaze us with his subject matter: from mermaids to decapitations, mammoths to mandrakes, there's not a page that isn't alive with wit and learning. A gem.

#74: Davidson sounds just like my kind of guy. On to the list he goes!

About twenty-five years ago I picked up a copy of Daniel Stern's Final Cut at a used books store in the San Fernando Valley. I had never heard of it, but people like James Jones and Anaïs Nin had nice to things to say about it (Remember when they were the go-to people for book blurbs? I didn't think so.) Opening the book I found on the first page: For Byron and the two Elizabeths, with friendship (and gratitude and fortitude) from Daniel Stern, April 1975." Who knows what twisted path brought the book to the book store in the Valley, but still, I always felt a little bad for Stern that his gift had, apparently, been spurned. In any case, the book's twisted path has now wound to Japan where I read and enjoyed this Hollywood novel. It follows the education of a relative innocent who finds himself in a position of power in the industry, and comes dangerously close to becoming of the industry. He learns things about the movie business like: It's very American. The profit motive in one of its strangest incarnations. It only horrifies someone like you because art gets mixed up in it. And where there's art you expect some sort of humanity in the mixture. But exactly the opposite seems to happen. When art gets mixed up with business it leads the way to the worst kind of corruption of both processes. Except, now and then, when you get lucky, and the art come out clean. The business and the people never do."

All of the stories in After the Quake are good: Murakami is a pro, and he remains the best there is (though Paul Auster is a contender) at seamlessly blending the mundane and the uncanny. The stories I like the best are the ones that seem—I stress: seem—to owe the most to the simple one-thing-after-another of the world, and I am generally least pleased by the ones most purely fanciful, though I did enjoy the very fanciful "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" quite a bit.

I, Claudius is a an extraordinarily intelligent historical novel that never, in terms of language, style, or thought, condescends to its readers and is unburdened by the fustian that mars so many attempts to novelize history. If Graves has it right—and I think he does—the ruthlessness of politicians in, or aspiring to, high places is unchanged since Claudius's time.

Tradition is probably too grand a word, so let's just say I see a habit in the making: whenever I visit Los Angeles I will read a Michael Connelly novel featuring his rogue detective, Harry Bosch. This time it was Trunk Music, and, begun in LA and finished on the plane home, it was, as I expected it would be, a well-crafted, competently written police procedural. If you're in the mood for a little escapist fluff (though perhaps Connelly's stuff is too gritty to be called "fluff") give it a go.

"This woman loved Sumire but couldn't feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loved this woman and desired her. I loved Sumire and felt sexual desire for her. Sumire liked me, but didn't love me, and didn't feel any sexual desire for me. I felt sexual desire for a woman who will remain anonymous. But I didn't love her."

There, in a nutshell, is the soap-opera that drives the plot of Sputnik Sweetheart, but to assume therefrom that the novel is merely a soap-opera would be a grave mistake. Rather it is a metaphysical novel about the loss (and discovery) of the self, the loss of youth, creativity, and a pocketful of other things. Having recently read two collections of Murakami's short stories, I am increasingly convinced that he might as well leave the short form alone. Novels are his forte, and one looks forward to the long one he is rumored to be at work on now.

Seeking support for a more less uninteresting (because non-controversial) theory (and also for, I hope, a more interesting one that I'm not quite ready to reveal because it may be half-baked) I set out to move through Murakami's work chronologically. Though I've been far from religious in adhering to publication dates, I am more convinced than ever, having finished A Wild Sheep Chase, that Murakami definitely gets better as he goes. This, the third book in the Rat trilogy, seems to me a so much more ambitious, so much more accomplished than it's predecessors that one could almost doubt the three books are by the same person. I look forward to reading and rereading more.

The only Anthony Powell I had ever read, before stumbling upon O, How the Wheel Becomes It! in a used-book store in California, was his massive roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time. The Dance, which I enjoyed, seemed such a particular achievement that I hadn't gone out of my way to find more by this author, but I'm certainly happy to have discovered this one, a laugh out loud comedy that makes short work of the literary memoir.

Nicholson Baker, in The Everlasting Story of Nory, enters the mind of a nine-year-old girl. This sounds like a recipe for unrelenting twee, but Baker manages to pull it off. Nory—created with the help of Baker's daughter, who he identifies as his "informant," is a typically curious American child living, with her family, in England. As we watch her make sense (and sometimes nonsense) of her world, we are entranced, and taken back, perhaps, to a time in our own lives when the world was a more mysterious, more dramatic, place.

#84 dcozy: Sounds like a worthwhile read. On to Continent TBR it goes!

When one goes back to Raymond Chandler one is never disappointed, and it is this, perhaps, which sets him apart from all but a handful of writers on the hard-boiled shelf. The last novel Chandler completed, Playback, is anything but tired. It is set in "Esmerelda" which anyone who's wandered around Southern California will recognize immediately as La Jolla (and it's amazing how little has changed in that provincial burg). One misses the Los Angeles in which all Chandlers's other novels are set, but thanks to the glories of Chandler's prose, and of his character, Philip Marlowe, one doesn't miss LA all that much. (That I read the novel in a vintage British Penguin green-back only enhanced the experience.)

Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution by David Loy is a pithily written and provocative book that seems to be aimed at two audiences--groups of readers between whom, one guesses, there will be little overlap. First, it seems to target those whose life on earth is one of suffering: pain occasioned by the "lacks" (to use Loy's term) that define their being: lack of wealth, lack of fame, lack of sex, etc. The other audience Loy appears to be addressing would be those with an investment in Buddhism, those who would be bereft if, in the twenty-first century, Buddhism withered away and died, and so want to find a way to make it relevant to our times. I say the groups are unlikely to overlap because one very much doubts that any of those wannabe Donald Trumps or Britney Spearses would even notice if Buddhism disappeared, and it is just as unlikely that those with well-worn meditation cushions who purchase books such as this one are actually consumed with suffering because they lack money or fame. Surely even those who have only progressed a step or two on the path will (like many of those not on the path at all) have other things on their minds than getting rich and famous. I'll write more, and, I hope, more deeply about Loy's Notes for Buddhist Revolution in a forthcoming review in Kyoto Journal.

I continue my traversal of the work of Haruki Murakami. Dance Dance Dance, a sort of pendant to the Rat Trilogy, confirms me in my opinion that Murakami gets better as he goes. It's actually a richer novel than the three which introduced the main characters and some--but only some--of the themes that are treated in greater depth here.

#88 dcozy: Have you read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and if so, what did you think? I have it home from the library but have not had a chance to read it yet. I did read his What I Talk About When I Talk About Running which I enjoyed very much.

I liked Kafka on the Shore when I read it a while ago. I'll reread it again in the not too distant future, and will write more about it then.

I'll have a look at What I Talk About, though the reviews have been decidedly mixed.

#90 dcozy: Thanks for the input regarding Kafka. As far as the other book goes, I do not have anything to compare it to as yet since it was the first Murakami book that I had read, but give it a try. It is part memoir and part philosophy all rolled into one book.

So deeply entwined with the DNA of American literature is The Scarlet Letter that I, an American reader, had believed that, thirty or so years ago, I had read it. I'm now fairly certain (but not entirely certain) I hadn't. If I had I think I would have remembered what a marvelous novel it is (but then again, if I had read it thirty years ago, perhaps in my puerility, I wouldn't have been able to grasp the scope of its achievement). The novel stands with Huckleberry Finn in its quality and its brilliance as a window onto the American neurosis.

#92 dcozy: I completely agree with you about The Scarlet Letter. I had never read it until my freshman year of college and I had a wonderful American literature professor who just brought the book alive for the class. It is now one of my all-time favorite books and one I read just about every year.

Hi dcozy and Stasia
I agree with your comments regarding The Scarlet Letter. It truly is a remarkable book.

So ladies, I'm one who read The Scarlet Letter in school, re-read years later with my children and, while I found it easier to read, I also found the book stilted and hard to read. On the other hand, I have always liked Hawthorne's short stories very much, and I enjoyed The House of the Seven Gables earlier this year. I have The Blithedale Romance on my sofa for reading, so all is not yet lost.

I wonder if it was the prose style that Prop2gether found stilted? If so, it might be because we modern readers have been schooled to like the plain style and to be suspicious of anything more ornate. Hawthorne's style, in opposition to modern convention, borders on the baroque at times, but I must say I found it quite wonderful. I quickly fell into its rhythm and found it appropriately elegant garb for Hawthorne's very sophisticated thinking.

Just joining this group and wanted to let you know that I'm a big fan of Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years too. If you haven't already read it, try his The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which is different, but equally good. And thanks for all the great book ideas I've gotten by reading through your thread.

Thanks for your note, rebeccanyc. I have The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and am looking forward to it.

>dcozy, Nory was the last Baker novel I read. I love his fiction - so clever. I think he's written some nonfiction since then which I'm less interested in.

Species of Spaces, a collection of non-fiction pieces by Georges Perec author of what is certainly among the finest novels of our time, Life A User's Manual, is a delight. Especially appealing are Perec's considerations of the quotidian. The Essay (that's not quite the right word) "Species of Spaces," for example, is a taxonomy of the spaces in which we live (and record) our lives. Among the spaces Perec considers are: The Page, The Bed, The Apartment, The World, and Space. In the section on bedroooms, Perec asks a few questions:

"What does it mean to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours? Is it when you've put three pairs of socks in a pink plastic bowl? Is it when you've heated spaghetti over a camping gaz? Is it when you've used up all the non-matching coat hangers in the cupboard? Is it when you've drawing pinned to the wall an old postcard showing Carpaccio's 'Dream of St. Ursula'? Is it when you've experienced there the throes of anticipation, or the exaltations of passion, or the torments of a toothache? Is it when you've hung suitable curtains up on the windows, and put up the wallpaper, and sanded the parquet flooring?

Add to that the cod erudition of "A Scientific and Literary Friendship: Léon Burp and Marcel Gotlib" and the good fun and occasional seriousness of all the other pieces and it adds up to an evening or two unmitigated pleasure.

I have not heard of Georges Perec before. Based on your review, I will definitely have to be on the look out for his work. Thanks for the recommendation!

#96-I don't think it's necessarily Hawthorne's style in all his works, as I did read and enjoy The House of the Seven Gables and I have always enjoyed his short stories, even when first read in high school. It may just be the story isn't one that worked for me. I also enjoy other writers of the same literary period, so I'm going with the idea that the story just wasn't for me. In any event, I find other views always worthwhile and sometimes will pique my interest into rereading something to see what I may have missed. Just thought you should hear from a non-fan of a particular work--and why it didn't work for me.

Prop2gether:

You're certainly right that dissenting views of books should always be welcome. Thanks for posting yours.

You must read The Browser's Ecstasy if you want to read about one of our most curious pastimes, or should I say passions: spending hours deciphering symbols on paper. It is a phantasmagoria—some fiction, some non-—on the theme of reading, and it is always a privilege to share the thoughts, and the exquisite prose, of Geoffrey O'Brien. The book can stand on the short shelf of books about reading along with gems such as Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books.

#104 dcozy: More books about books! Wonderful - my favorite category of books. Thanks for mentioning them.

"Well, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track. Viewed from more of a distance, though, the thread running through them is perfectly clear."

Well, maybe not perfectly clear, but except for that last clause, the above is a good description of Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a book that is chock-full of bizarre happenings (also the mundane life that Murakami chronicles so well), but in which the bizarrerie never seems haphazard or just there for effect. There is a thread binding it all together, one well worth following.

Early in his career Murakami was criticized by elders such as Kenzaburo Oe for what Oe took to be his lack of intellectual gravitas. Perhaps the younger author was paying attention. In this book Murakami takes a serious look at evil in many guises—from the personal (relations between a husband and wife) to the world-historical (Japan in Manchuria). This, his masterpiece to date, makes one eager for the release of the big novel at which he is currently rumored to be at work.

A novel as charming and elegant as one expects a certain kind of French novel to be, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an exploration of how people, by hiding from life, deprive themselves of the pleasures it has to offer. The characters are deftly drawn: the intelligent twelve year old's pretentiousness and the secretly intellectual concierge's bitterness are both absolutely believable (I found myself getting angry at the concierge for disparaging academic pursuits, until I reminded myself that the author, Muriel Barbery, has it right: someone in her position probably would despise what she might perceive as meaningless piffle. That there is a character in the novel named Ozu, and that he is a distant relation of the master, only adds to the novel's attractions.

In the midst of reading lots of more or less work-related stuff I decided I needed a break, and what better than a book by my current favorite pop-novelist, William Gibson? Count Zero is more purely science fictional, and noticeably less well-written at the sentence level, than the later work, but still, it provided a welcome break from weightier tomes.

I needed a break, too, at the beginning of the week, so I concentrated on some young adult and juvenile literature. Now I am hitting the harder books again, but I think all of us need a "mind break" then and again.

I have not read any of Gipson's work. I tried reading Neuromancer but did not get very far. This next year, I am planning on spending more time reading scifi and fantasy, so maybe I will give it a go again, as well as trying Count Zero.

alcottacre:

I think Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are much better than early work such as Count Zero. They also are arguably not science fiction at all, though, so if SF is what you're looking for, they may not be what you want right now.

I will give the two you mentioned a try. Maybe it will get me used to Gibson's writing style before plunging into his sci fi stuff. Thanks for the recommendations!

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

This is definitely minor Murakami, and it is, as many critics have noted, loosely written, but still, it was fun to read. Those interested in Murakami will enjoy it for the glimpse it gives of this very private writer's life, and those with an interest in fitness will appreciate the view Murakami gives of marathoners and triathletes in the wild. One wishes some enterprising publisher would publish more of Murakami's non-fiction in English.

The most formally adventurous of the Ward Just novels I have read, In the City of Fear is a narrative in which very little happens on stage, and a great deal happens off. The stage is Washington, DC; never quite making an appearance, but nonetheless always present is the Vietnam war. The city and the war that hangs over it are painted almost entirely through conversations among players in the American capital. There is no action per se, none of the cloak-and-dagger stuff which often drives the plots of Just's books. In this one the adventure is in the relations between the characters, their city, and their time.

Thomas Mallon, writing in the International Herald Tribune, says, of Lee Israel, author of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, "it's hard to resist admitting Israel to the company of such sharp, gallant characters as Dawn Powell and Helene Hanff, women clinging to New York literary life, or its fringes, by their talented fingernails," and I think the critic has hit the nail on the head. Just as we deplore what Israel is doing—first forging literary letters and peddling her forgeries, then stealing literary letters and peddling her booty—we can't help admiring her grit. Neither can we fail to delight in her prose: she is a master stylist of the hard-boiled school. She could, one feels, have held her own with the likes of Dorothy Parker, not only on the page, but also (she's a serious drinker) at the bar. It's hard to see where Israel can go from Can You Ever Forgive Me, but one hopes she gets a chance to show us.