What Book Are You Currently Reading?

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The Tristram part of Le Morte d'Arthur is so long and getting frankly repetitive.

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Gustaf, which of the stories in Dubliners did you like?

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Gustaf, which of the stories in Dubliners did you like?

I liked the one with the pedophile and the one with elections (nerd am I). And the slightly longer one with the party and piano playing. The one with the prostitute was also decent.

The one with the elections and the one with the party and piano playing are the ones that people will usually call the best (John Huston's last movie was a pretty good adaptation of the latter). My favorites are those, the one with the bazaar, and the one with the streetcar accident.

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I finished Baudolino--which is charming until quite late in the going end and then rapidly becomes heartbreaking, as is so often the way with Umberto Eco--and I'm trying to decide between rereading The Brothers Karamazov and starting A Secular Age.

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I just finished The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman. I know Hoffman's work generally has a sort of soft-focus, book-clubby reputation, but I really liked this book overall. It's got a really strong premise and driving concept--an epic novel internally composed of a tightly structured anthology of novellas, each narrated by one of the women in charge of gathering pigeon guano for fertilizer during the Siege of Masada--and the positively heliotrope hue of the prose fits the subject matter and the situations described. Some of the viewpoint characters are more sympathetic than others (I found the first section difficult to get through even though the character who narrates it becomes more sympathetic in other characters' eyes later on, so the book puts its worst foot forward in that respect), but the ones I liked I loved, and several of the big set-piece scenes and monologues--particularly the endings of the second and fourth sections and the beginning of the third--really shine. About the only enduring problem I have with the book is that taking a real figure and involving them in the main plotline and romantic and sexual entanglements to the extent that Hoffman does with a certain leader of the period is one of my personal cardinal sins for historical fiction, but Hoffman could hardly be expected to know that or to write to my specifications even if she did.

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Last night I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. I loved it--I'd say it's the best new book I've read all year, since The Idiot was a reread. The writing style is exactly what I look for in books like this and although the book has some really disturbing things to say about masculinity I'm pretty sure they're meant to be disturbing. John Updike-style dick-lit it's not.

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I'm reading Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic by Régine Robin. Robin appears to assume more preexisting familiarity with the subject matter than I in fact have, but it's still a pretty interesting read.

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Reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens mostly to see what the fuss was all about.

'Nothing much' didn't recommend itself to you as an answer in the first place?

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I just read All That's Left to You, by Ghassan Kanafani, in one sitting. Weird and wonderful--one of Kanafani's multiple first-person narrators is a completely inanimate object. Now back to Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic.

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Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic.

Yey! Finally a brainy book mentioned on here that I've read. Though it was ten years ago.

I'm a little over halfway through. I just got through the bit on Lenin's attempt at constructing and advancing the image of a 'Red Tolstoy'.

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In that case like (at least some of) the aspects of socialist realism that you don't, and don't like (at least some of) the aspects that you do. And if you like brutalism you'd love my now-former university campus. I mean that sincerely--it's the best-integrated and (for someone who doesn't like brutalism) overall least objectionable use of brutalist architecture I've ever seen. It helps that the brutalist buildings are mixed in with Colonial revival, postmodern, and in one incongruous case Gothic revival buildings in an interestingly heterogeneous way.

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'Socialist' 'Realism' was effectively the kitschification (for glorification of political power) of the Russian Realist tradition, which - as bad luck would have it - was actually one of the most interesting and artistically accomplished of the various 19th century Realist tendencies.

That's exactly the process that Robin is discussing. Because of my great fondness for Russian realism I like the aspects of socialist realism that suffered less than others from the kitschification, generally because of the skill of the artist in question rather than because some fields of the arts or areas of subject matter were somehow more immune to it than others (although I have seen it noted that socialist realist paintings of Lenin tend on balance to be less atrocious than those of Stalin, which comes as not much of a surprise at all).

Robin seems to think that what Gorky seemed to mean by his preferred term 'revolutionary romanticism' would probably have been more artistically fulfilled, but that's an effect of the fact that Gorky was a better writer and more honest than a lot of the people surrounding him and a lot of the other people at the First Soviet Writers' Congress to which Robin devotes Part One of the book. (The book focuses mostly on novels. Part Two is about the 'realist obsession of the nineteenth century' and spends a lot of time on Goncharov and Turgenev as novelists--there's a particularly vivid dissection of Bazarov from Fathers and Sons--and Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev as critics, along with the requisite Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.)

Robin spends the introduction talking about her personal background with Soviet film and literature and her genuine childhood love for this sort of thing. She's for the most part semi-sympathetic--more sympathetic to her former self than to the art in question--without being an apologist, although the 'insane dream' sequence at the end of Part One--which I'll type up if anybody is interested in reading it--is one of the most full-throated criticisms I've read in any book of this kind.

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By the pre-kitschified form are you referring to (in visual art) painters like the Ashcan School, and by the post-kitschified form such as Norman Rockwell, or is my understanding of American realism constrained because I've spent so much of my life focusing on European and Asian art?

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Spider in a Tree: A Novel of the First Great Awakening by Susan Stinson. I don't know quite what I expected when I heard that there was a historical novel about Jonathan Edwards's household by a writer previously known primarily for lesbian-themed fiction, but I know that I was not expecting this to be as incredibly good as it is so far.

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I've cracked open The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology.

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Recently I've been looking (don't ask me why; it's a long story, although probably not one that would really surprise anybody here) for Christian-themed lesbian literature, that is, literature featuring lesbian characters who either are believing Christians throughout the narrative or become believing Christians in the course of the narrative and stay that way. As you might imagine, this is an exceptionally niche set of specifications, especially since I consider accidentally running across 'ex-gay' tripe a worse result than finding nothing. So far I've found and read a few recently-published young adult novels that technically fit what I'm looking for but they've tended to be of relatively low artistic quality and don't do much to rectify the generally poor reputation of both lesbian YA and contemporary Christian fiction as a whole. By rights there should probably be some sort of untapped market here.

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I've just started Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian, one of my Christmas presents. It sure is...something. 'The kitchen mice liked to dance to the sounds made by the rays of the sun as they bounced off the taps, and then run after the little bubbles that the rays burst into when they hit the ground like sprays of golden mercury.' 'He decorated the centre of the table with a pharmaceutical jar in which a pair of embryonic chickens seemed to be dancing Nijinsky's choreography for The Spectre of the Rose.' 'But you know I never read anything but Jean Pulse Heartre.' (Biographical note: Apparently the author's wife cheated on him with Sartre.) Those sentences happened. And I'm only in the first chapter!

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Just read the very short Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru by Kenji Miyazawa.

!!!!!!!

What did you think? Miyazawa is one of my favorites.

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Speaking of Japanese literature currently reading Botchan by Umeji Soseki.

Nastume Soseki. Umeji Sasaki is the translator. (Botchan's an absolute delight. If you like it maybe also try Wagahai wa neko de aru.)

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afleitch, I think you'd enjoy some of Miyazawa's poetry. It's circumspectly spiritual in a way that can't really be called religious as such (although Miyazawa personally was devoutly Buddhist) and shows a firm and actually really beautiful grounding in an understanding of the natural sciences--particularly agricultural science, which was Miyazawa's day job.

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Speaking of Japanese literature currently reading Botchan by Umeji Soseki.

Nastume Soseki. Umeji Sasaki is the translator. (Botchan's an absolute delight. If you like it maybe also try Wagahai wa neko de aru.)

Excuse me for my gross error. I do hope to read some more East Asian literature over the next few months.

This is the cat guy right?

Yeah. Wagahai wa neko de aru is I Am a Cat. I'm aware that it's pretentious of me to have used the Japanese title, but it's hilarious in a way that translation doesn't capture (Japanese has a variety of levels of formality for both pronouns and copulas, and the connotation of the word choice here is something like My Most Serene Highness Has the Distinct Privilege and Honor of Being a Cat; that is, exactly how you'd expect a cat to say that).

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In a Glass Darkly, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. I'd read 'Carmilla' before but the other stories in it are all new to me.

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I haven't actually started reading either of these yet, but a couple of days ago I found and bought two modern Japanese novels in a used bookstore in my town. One is The River Ki by Ariyoshi Sawako; I'm not sure what this is about, exactly, but it seems to be a family drama along roughly the same lines as The Makioka Sisters--which is probably my all-time favorite novel and definitely in the top five--and was apparently Ariyoshi's first major work. Ariyoshi, who died young in 1984, seems to have been an enormously popular and respected writer in her lifetime, at least in part because her writing was more topical than that of most of her contemporaries--many of her novels are the equivalent of 'very special episodes' on certain types of television shows, but by all accounts of vastly greater artistic merit. This seems, however, to have changed since her death, and I was never taught her in my major, nor had I even heard of her until I found this book.

The other is an interesting edition of Miyazawa's Ginga tetsudō no yoru, usually translated Night on the Galactic Railroad and occasionally Night Train to the Stars, which afleitch read recently. Miyazawa is a writer I like a lot but I'm mostly familiar with him as a poet; this is the only one of his prose works I've actually read before--efforts to find a copy of 'Kaze no Matasaburō' have met with failure. It's by far his best known work overall, with the only remotely conceivable contender being the didactic poem 'Ame ni mo makezu' ('Not Losing to the Rain'). This edition is unusual in that it's an English translation, given the non-standard title The Night of the Milky Way Train, published in Japan, with Japanese paratext even, as school study material for English learners. There are glossaries before each chapter. I'm very interested to see how if at all the choices that the translation itself makes differ from more general-audience English versions of the text.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I haven't actually started reading either of these yet, but a couple of days ago I found and bought two modern Japanese novels in a used bookstore in my town. One is The River Ki by Ariyoshi Sawako; I'm not sure what this is about, exactly, but it seems to be a family drama along roughly the same lines as The Makioka Sisters--which is probably my all-time favorite novel and definitely in the top five--and was apparently Ariyoshi's first major work. Ariyoshi, who died young in 1984, seems to have been an enormously popular and respected writer in her lifetime, at least in part because her writing was more topical than that of most of her contemporaries--many of her novels are the equivalent of 'very special episodes' on certain types of television shows, but by all accounts of vastly greater artistic merit. This seems, however, to have changed since her death, and I was never taught her in my major, nor had I even heard of her until I found this book.

The other is an interesting edition of Miyazawa's Ginga tetsudō no yoru, usually translated Night on the Galactic Railroad and occasionally Night Train to the Stars, which afleitch read recently. Miyazawa is a writer I like a lot but I'm mostly familiar with him as a poet; this is the only one of his prose works I've actually read before--efforts to find a copy of 'Kaze no Matasaburō' have met with failure. It's by far his best known work overall, with the only remotely conceivable contender being the didatic poem 'Ame ni mo makezu' ('Not Losing to the Rain'). This edition is unusual in that it's an English translation, given the non-standard title The Night of the Milky Way Train, published in Japan, with Japanese paratext even, as school study material for English learners. There are glossaries before each chapter. I'm very interested to see how if at all the choices that the translation itself makes differ from more general-audience English versions of the text.

Let me know who translated it. I've read two translations so far; Roger Pulvers and a really old library copy from John Bester.

The publication date is 2005 and it's translated by Stuart Varnam-Atkin and Yoko Toyozaki, neither of whom I've heard of. A cursory Google search indicates that Varnam-Atkin is some sort of journalist and commentator for a couple of different English-language news outlets based in Japan and that both of them were involving in translating the manga Chihayafuru, which is about a girl who gets really into the card game karuta. (The Wikipedia article on the series uses the phrase 'overuse of CG sakura' in its discussion of the anime adaptation.)

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Floating Clouds (Ukigumo) by Hayashi Fumiko, translated by Lane Dunlap.

!!!!!!!

What do you think?

"A Canticle for Leibowitz". Loved it until Br. Francis died. Not sure what to think of the book's second part.

It's good.  It suffers from a fate common to many well-beloved SF works, heirs getting a second rate sequel written from something in the notes left behind so as to milk some extra money out of fans, but that doesn't affect the book itself.

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman isn't a bad book, and there was a lot more of it to work with than just 'notes' when Miller died, but it's definitely a major step down from Canticle. Canticle was one of the best sci-fi novels of its generation; Wild Horse Woman isn't even the best of its year.

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Floating Clouds (Ukigumo) by Hayashi Fumiko, translated by Lane Dunlap.

!!!!!!!

What do you think?

It's beautifully written and interesting so far (I'm about a third of the way through it).  I assigned it for a class I'm teaching.  I was inclined to do so because of a book written by a friend of mine that talked about this novel in the context of the roles women played in Japan's mid-century occupations and post-war circumstances.  I can see why Hayashi's works were so popular, they're both expressive and quite realistic at the same time.

Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki) is also well worth reading if you can find it.

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Anyway over the past week I've reread The Word for World Is Forest and read a terrible lesbian romance novel called Blindsided and most of the Chester Mystery Plays. I'm also working my way through The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period, by an undergrad professor of mine whom I greatly admire.

The Sea of Fertility tetralogy looms before me like an inevitability in my development as a reader and I really don't know what to do with how drawn to it I feel.