Rebeccanyc's 2012 Reading, Part 1

Hello, everyone. Glad to be back. Thank you all for visiting my thread in 2011, and I hope to follow more threads more regularly in 2012!

Well, I think I may finish one more book tomorrow, but it won't be a favorite, so I can now post my best of 2011 list. In the next post, I'll include that book in my analysis.

These are more or less in reverse order of when I read them.

Best of the Best (fiction)

In Red by Magdalena Tulli
Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
A Change of Climate and Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago
The Red Riding Quartet: Nineteen Seventy-Four/Nineteen Seventy-Seven/Nineteen Eighty/Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, The Vet's Daughter, and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Best of the Rest (fiction)
God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène
Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono
Once upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Devil on the Cross, A Grain of Wheat, Weep Not, Child, and Matigari by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
They Were Counted/They Were Found Wanting/They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy
The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy
Red Shift by Alan Garner
Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The Skin Chairs, Sisters by a River, and The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
The Prospector by J.M.G. LeClezio
Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov
Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
She Drove Without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Conquered City by Victor Serge

Favorite Non-Fiction
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
Classic Crimes by William Roughead
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Just Kids by Patti Smith

Now, the analysis.

Out of 97 books read:

84 fiction (87%)/13 nonfiction (13%)
32 female authors (33%)/65 male authors (67%)
42 by authors not from the USA or the UK (43%)

Countries represented (19)

Europe
Russia 6
Hungary 4
Germany 3
France 3
Portugal 2
Austria 2
Eastern Europe (Yiddish) 1
Denmark 1
Poland 1

Africa
Kenya 4
Senegal 2
Cameroon 1
Congo 1

Asia
Japan 2
India 1

Australia 1

South America
Peru 4
Argentina 2
Cuba 1

46 authors were new to me this year (i.e., I had never read anything by them, not that I'd never heard of them) (can't calculate percentage because I didn't add up the number of different authors)

Authors I read multiple books by (13)
Hilary Mantel
Jaimy Gordon
Barbara Comyns
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
David Peace
Andrey Platonov
Luc Sante
Miklós Bánffy
Mario Vargas Llosa
John le Carré
Edgardo Cozarinsky
Karl Marlantes
Joseph Roth

So, what do I make of all this?

I would have read fewer female authors if I hadn't become enamored of Barbara Comyns and continued my love of Hilary Mantel; I read multiple books by both of them. In 2012, I probably need to make an effort to read more books by women -- Belletrista, here I come!

My global reading was focused mostly on Europe, especially Russia, and the higher numbers from Kenya and Peru reflect individual authors (Ngũgĩ and Vargas Llosa). With the Reading Globally group focusing on China, the Balkans, and the Middle East in 2012, and the Author Theme Reads group concentrating on Japan, I should be able to expand my reach, but would like to make an effort to read more from different parts of Africa.

I am very excited about some of my new discoveries of 2011, especially Barbara Comyns, José Saramago, Alejo Carpentier,and Edgardo Cozarinsky, all of whom I learned about through LT. I hope to read more books by them, but also to discover more new exciting writers through LT.

More thoughts may come later.

Welcome back!

Hello! dropping in to leave my star

Welcome back!

I cannot wait to see what your 2012 reading plans are, Rebecca! Glad to see you back again.

Thanks, everyone, for stopping by.

Favorites of 2011 and analysis of 2011 reading/plans for 2012 now up in posts 2 and 3.

I love your analysis, Rebecca!

Hi Rebecca, I love following your reading and reading your reviews which always tell me a lot w/o telling me too much.

Thanks, Stasia and Bonnie!

I may steal your analysis format and do one of my own if and when I ever start a thread.

I adapted it from one suggested by Barry/baswood in Club Read 2012, so I can't take credit for it, Stasia.

Hi Rebecca, I'm a frequent lurker on your thread, I like your analysis of books read in 2011 - and I loved Dr. Zhivago when I read it years ago. It's my favorite Russian novel.

I like your breakdown of yr. reading, I'm slowly working my way through that jungle. The new-to-me category is an especially interesting one -- I know that number has gone way up since joining LT. Mantel was n-t-m this year but Comyn's is an old love from my early obsessive days of Virago reading.

Rebecca - will take a keen interest in your erudite selections again in 2012. Happy new year.

#14: OK, well I will just steal away then!

Hi Rebecca--I'm looking forward to peeping over your shoulder at all the good books you will read this year!

Happy New Year, Rebecca!

Happy New Reading Year, Rebecca!

Happy New Year, Rebecca! I enjoyed your year end summary and analysis, and I'm eager to see what you have planned for 2012.

Happy New Year, Rebecca! I'm coming back to reread your analysis up top. Hope 2012 is full of blessings for you, not the least of which are good reads!

Thank you, Deborah, Stasia, Ellen, Darryl and Tui, and happy new year to you too -- and to all!

Thumbing my nose at the Book Buying Ban cabal, I went to the 20% off sale at Book Culture today. However, subconsciously, I must have been influenced by those who shall remain nameless who noted that their own TBRs have the best selection of books around, because I came away with far fewer books than I usually do. There were many I picked up, but realized I wouldn't read them for some time, and decided not to buy them today. However, I am contemplating a sizable Amazon order, so I haven't lost my book buying touch completely. Here's what I bought.

Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
Woolgathering by Patti Smith
Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter
Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

Oh, let me know what you think of the Eco book, please and thanks! I have the Cleopatra sitting 1/3 read beside my bed.

Hi Rebecca, I'm looking forward to following your threads in 2012. I guess we'll also regularly meet in the RG-group.

Not sure when I'll get to it, Tui, but will definitely post in this thread and on Club Read once I do.

Only five books from Book Culture's New Year's Day sale??? She's definitely lost her touch.

I actually find more interesting and unusual books at Crawford-Doyle, even though it's orders of magnitude smaller.

I will be interested in seeing what you think of both Proud Beggars and Cleopatra, Rebecca. No matter what Darryl says, I still think it was a nice haul :)

Hi Rebecca. Look forward to reading yiour thread in 2012.

Alan

What Tui said about Eco... I've heard so many critical things, and also that the book is just hyper-erudite, so much so that unless you also happen to be a professor of semiotics with a literary bent, you will never pick up half the references. That said, I do have a NetGalleys version, so I have no excuse for not trying it...

Delurking to say

1) Happy New Year to you, Rebecca

2) about the Eco which I am currently reading (in Italian - what was I thinking?? I have to look up every 2nd word!): yes, it is hyper-erudite (#33: thanks for teaching me a new English word!), but as far as I can say after 170 of 500 pages, it is less so than Foucault's Pendulum. I am looking forward to reading your thoughts on it.

Thanks, Stasia, Alan, Suzanne, and Nathalie. It is a long time since I read Eco, probably The Island of the Day Before some 15 years ago, but I did enjoy Foucault's Pendulum which I read even longer ago. Not sure when I'll get to the new one, but I was intrigued largely by the title, since I've been to Prague and visited the Jewish cemetery, which I presume is the one he refers to.

1. Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery

In the teeming slums of Cairo, three men enjoy a friendship -- and life. One is a former college professor who, for reasons unknown, has chosen a life of extreme poverty, leavened by hashish. One is his sort-of dealer, a poet who was born into "respectable" poverty and has sunk lower. And the third is a low-level civil servant who pays his colleagues to do his work and considers himself a revolutionary, although one who is always on the lookout for women. For a while the book explores their lives as, mostly cheerfully, they interact with other characters, including the denizens of a local brothel and people who are even poorer than they are, until (not much of a spoiler alert) one of them commits a mostly meaningless murder. Then the fascinating character of the police inspector enters the novel, and the three friends, in the most kindly way, toy with him.

Although the plot, such as it is, revolves around whether the inspector will solve the case, the novel is really about the meaning of life, the vast gap between the rich and the poor and between the powerful and the powerless, and above all, the importance of dignity. Cossery is a wonderful writer, and much of the book is very funny even as it portrays people whose poverty is horrifying and almost unimaginable. I will be looking for his other work.

Nice review. I'll be interested to hear if Cossery holds up in other titles. He might be a name to add to the ever-expanding list.

#36: I will have to see if I can find a copy of that one. Thanks for the review, Rebecca!

Just in case anyone might miss me, I'm going to be away until early next week with only my iPhone, so probably won't be posting much. See you all when I get back.

Somewhere warm, I hope!

Safe travels, Rebecca!

I was looking at Proud Beggars on the NYRB website and thought it looked good. Your review confirms it -- another book on the WL!! (sigh)

Have an enjoyable trip, Rebecca!

Thanks, all. Family obligation, not fun!

Rebecca - I like the look of Proud Beggars and will try to hunt it down. Enjoyed your review as usual. Egypt is a place very close to my heart as I lived there for around 8 months in the 80's in my first work assignment. I was based in Alex but fell in love with the place, the people and with travel generally. Those were probably the first tentative steps that brought me to Malaysia 7 or 8 years later.

Well, I just added Cossery's book to my wishlist because of your review. You do pick the right books, Rebecca!

Cleopatra and Mao's Great Famine are both already on my list. I'll be interested to hear if The Prague Cemetery is indeed about the Jewish cemetery. I found it very moving when I visited and added a few pebbles. When were you in Prague? I was there in '88 and for a three month stay in '90 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Very interesting time to be there. Eco may be erudite, but I don't feel as though it is contrived, at least in the books I've read. Other authors sometimes seem to take great pains to appear erudite just to be highbrow or thought literary.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul, Monica, and Lisa. Lisa, I was in Prague (and Krakow and Budapest) in either 1991 or 1992 (at work so can't check) and it was very interesting. I was particularly interested in how the different countries treated their Jewish sites. That must have been fascinating to be in Prague for three months.

Anyway, I'm back, but have to spend today catching up at work, so won't be able to catch up with everyone's threads and post my own reading until at least tomorrow.

2. The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis

At the beginning of this intense novella, Hadoula, a 60-ish woman living on a small Greek island in what appears to be the late 19th century, is watching her ailing infant granddaughter while her daughter sleeps. As she watches, she mentally reviews her life, and that of her parents and family, a life of hardship, especially for girls and women. Life has improved in some respects, in that the brigands and the Turks are gone and peace reigns on the island, but the men and women still have to scratch out a living from the rocky earth and the ever-present sea. Many of the young men have left for America, and parents are left to somehow find husbands and dowries for their daughters. Sons disappear, some go to jail, and daughters are a burden. And, as she muses and dozes, Hadoula unconsciously makes a fateful decision that sets into motion the rest of the book.

What stands out for me in this story is the vivid depiction of a time and a place in which the residents know every inch of ground, every risky path across the rocks, and every hidden cave on their remote island, and in which the past is still present in ruined castles and chapels, family is central, and nature is always at hand. As the translator notes in his introduction to the edition I read, at the time Papadiamatis was writing, in the 1890s, the Greek islands were 50 times further behind Athens than Athens was behind Paris and London. Despite some qualms about dialect the translator sometimes uses the somewhat melodramatic nature of the story, I couldn't put this book down, especially as it builds to its not unexpected conclusion.

Interesting place and time -- one I've never read about in fiction, so I'll have to hunt this down...

Have never been to Krakow, though it's on my bucket list. Budapest is a place I want to go back to. I'm lucky that I have a Hungarian friend living there who took me around when I was there then & with whom I could stay again. She took me to some cool places waaay off the beaten track. I was there during a very hot week in late May and ended up spending time at the swimming baths on Margaret Island and the Szechenyi baths. Prague, I've been to several times; I would LOVE to spend weeks there, but what intrigues me is the way the center is such a Baroque jewel, vs. the outskirts. Oh, and I wanna go back to Vienna. And go to N. Romania. And... Sigh.

The Murderess look another fascinating book you have unearthed Rebecca. Will add to my hitlist as I am hoping to take the tribe to Greece in the next couple of years.

The Murderess is available in an NYRB edition, which is how I found it several years ago in my favorite bookstore, which carries a lot of NYRBs, and I unearthed it for the Reading Globally Turkey & the Balkans theme read.

Suzanne, the main reason I went to Krakow was to visit Auschwitz. I only saw a little of the city itself so can't comment much, but it is famous for having a huge (maybe the largest in Europe???) central square. It was very very hot when I was there, and there wasn't a single person selling bottled water, or ices, or anything cool, or anything at all. The market economy hadn't reached Krakow at the time I was there.

Hello Rebecca, I've at last caught up with your old thread and your new one, and will try to keep an eye on what you are reading as you seem to read lots of interesting things that don't get mentioned very much, as well as a few that I have read and loved in the past.

So glad I stumbled on your thread! I'm highly intrigued by your book choices and I'm happily browsing through each one, adding several to my mental wishlist. I can't wait to see what you'll be reading this year.

Rebecca, I spent three months in Krakow in 1981. It was a different time --- I was there when Martial Law was declared in response to the Solidarnosc strikes. I could write a small dissertation about all that I learned. It's a beautiful city (the central square is amazing) and I want very much to go back. I know Poland has changed tremendously in the intervening decades. I also visited Auschwitz; it had a huge impact on me.

The Murderess sounds very interesting and is now settled nicely onto my wishlist.

Ellen, that must have been fascinating! What an amazing time to be there! What brought you there at that time?

#48: If you're interested in how those countries treated their Jewish sites, you might be interested in Ghosts of Berlin, which is about how Berlin has treated city monuments and other sites post-Holocaust. (I took a whole class on "Hitler and the Holocaust in German Memory" in college that dealt with how Germany has memorialized the victims of the Holocaust and treated sites that had a connection to Hitler--interesting stuff.)

Thanks for the pointer about the Ghosts of Berlin book, Carlym; I'll take a look at it. What struck me in the places I visited in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s was how some places were essentially cashing in on the Jewish tourist potential by fixing up desecrated cemeteries (I think there is an argument to be made for leaving them as they were to show what happened during the Nazi period) and other sites, and also by how much denial there was (for example, I was told in Prague that Czechs just moved into apartments, complete with furniture, in the traditional Jewish neighborhoods without wondering where the previous inhabitants had gone and I was told at Auschwitz that the Polish neighbors had "no idea" about what was going on there). Some of this could have changed by now.

#56: My dad was teaching at the Jagiellonian University and I took a semester off from college and joined him. He stayed the full year but, when Martial Law was declared, the American Embassy urged all of us without a clear and specific reason to be there to, um, get the hell out. So I waited in Warsaw for five days until I could get a seat on any flight to the U.S. I was 21 and had lived my whole life sheltered in a small town in central Florida. I wish now that I had stayed the rest of the year, but the tanks in the streets and the soldiers with machine guns standing on street corners --- well, it was a bit scary.

Two of my many, many clear memories:
1. walking the streets of the city, seeing a line, and getting in it. It didn't matter what was at the front of the line. It might be meat, it might be toilet paper. But if there was a line, you wanted to be in it.
2. Entering a "department store" and seeing vast stretches of empty shelves. One shelf, however, was filled with umbrellas. That's what they happened to have received a shipment of in recent days.

I was incredibly privileged as a U.S. citizen. A U.S. dollar was powerful. That was my first real introduction to the concept of privilege.

#47 I realized I made a mistake in listing my Prague visits. I was there in '88, '90, and then three months in '95. On each visit, I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but it is such a long way. I did visit Dachau, Theresienstadt, and Lidice. If you don't know the story of Lidice, you can read about it here. What wikipedia doesn't mention is that the Rosarium was created when countries around the world, especially Great Britain, donated roses in commemoration. June 12 will be Lidice's 70th anniversary. See the Czech site too.

Ellen, have you read "The Line" by Olga Grushin? It is a novel about exactly what you say: walking the streets of the city, seeing a line, and getting in it. It didn't matter what was at the front of the line. It might be meat, it might be toilet paper. But if there was a line, you wanted to be in it. I waited in a line once to get into a grocery store and it turns out that all that was there were cans of Mandarin oranges. It was a good day as fruits and vegetables were very hard to get.

Off to investigate The Line -- I already know I want to read it!

Ellen, that is so interesting, and Lisa too. I did not know the story of Lidice, or the connection to the assasination of Heydrich, so thank you for the links. When I took my trip to Eastern Europe, I wasn't sure if I could face going to Auschwitz, so I didn't tell anyone in advance that I might go from Prague to Krakow instead of directly to Budapest. When I got to Krakow, I found there were bus tours to Auschwitz or you could take the train. Although I didn't want to go with a tour group, there was something about taking a train to Auschwitz that gave me the creeps, so I signed up for the tour and then asked the tour leader when the bus would be heading back so I could walk around on my own. One of the interesting things about the way the Soviets organized the "exhibitions" there was that a visitor would never know that the vast majority of people killed there were Jews -- Jews had just one building and there were others devoted to other "national" groups. Apparently, during the Soviet era, one of the perks for outstanding workers was a trip to Auschwitz so that the workers could appreciate how the Red Army defeated the Nazis.

Another interesting book about lines is Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue. It is devoted entirely to dialogue among unnamed people waiting in a line. While a little odd, and definitely experimental in format, it was fascinating.

And, on the subject of extermination camps, one of the most breathtaking pieces I've read is "The Hell of Treblinka" by Vasily Grossman, which is included in the NYRB collection The Road. He was one of the journalists who accompanied the liberating Soviet troops and, while some of the details are wrong (and the accompanying notes to the NYRB edition point out what we have learned since), I have read nothing about the Holocaust that can compare with with his heat of the moment reporting.

I find books about the Holocaust almost impossible to read. Even The Book Thief left me gutted for days afterward. I doubt if I would be able to handle going to someplace like Auschwitz or Dachau.

I was 7 the summer that my parents took me on our first car trip around parts of Europe. We were living in London at the time and our first stop was Amsterdam, where we visited Anne Frank's house, and my parents bought me a copy of her diary. (I had started reading proper books that summer, and within two years was reading adult novels, so not as much of a stretch as it sounds.) After Denmark, the next stop was Germany. My parents had to pull off the road, because I did not want to go to the country that had murdered Anne Frank (I had read the diary by then, so I was reading rapidly even then...) and I had a major temper tantrum/meltdown in the car. Even my brother, who was only three at the time, claims to remember that particular tantrum. Needless to say, I lost. Near the end of the trip, we were in Munich, and my parents took us to Dachau. Am not sure what they were thinking, but I certainly remember it. It is a weird feeling to think of concentration camps as tourist destinations. But then, the World Trade Center in NY was a tourist destination by Saturday after the attacks, the very day they let people go past the barricades on Canal St. I know this because one of them was foolish enough to ask me where the best vantage point was to take a picture...

I'd love to see Krakow for its history -- it was a center of civilized discourse in the middle ages -- and would try to go to Auschwitz. But....

I didn't feel I was there as a tourist; I felt I was there to honor history and the dead. I felt that way elsewhere in Eastern Europe too and at the old (and "repurposed") synagogues in Toledo, Spain. I could feel the ghosts.

But I still haven't gone down to the WTC site -- I remember it perfectly clearly all on my own.

Although I don't feel like a tourist, I know what you mean, Suzanne. I was quite upset when people were walking through the Holocaust Museum and chatting away as though the museum were something they just wanted to check off in their guidebook. It seemed so disrespectful.

Interesting discussion regarding visiting places of historical "interest" (I need a different word there). My trip to Auschwitz was part of the orientation for the group of Fulbright Fellows who were in Poland for 1981-82 (the month-long orientation was based in Krakow, even though the Fellows were assigned to various cities for the rest of the year). One thing I recall vividly is that it was a beautiful autumn day: the air was crisp, the sky was a cloudless blue, and there was a light breeze. And yet, inside the compound, I remember feeling the sinister presence of evil - and it felt like the sun could not completely penetrate into the yard. I know that sounds melodramatic (and remember, this was 30 years ago and I was only 21 at the time), but I swear that land, that space, is haunted. Like you say, Rebecca, I could feel the ghosts. If asked, I would firmly state that "I don't believe in ghosts," but that day, in that place, I had no doubt.

I have another book by Vasily Grossman: Everything Flows. Now I'll be on the lookout for NYRB The Road (essays by Grossman, I see), along with some other recommendations emerging from this great discussion.

Grossman is an amazing writer, and you shouldn't miss Life and Fate (which I believe Lisa is reading now).

Yes! I'm on page 230 (out of 880). It's excellent.

Rebecca, I definitely wasn't suggesting that you were there as a tourist; more that there are many people for whom visits like this aren't an occasion to pause, think and remember, but, as Lisa suggests, another stop on the itinerary; somewhere they can say, oh yeah, I saw that. Some know they should be solemn, but can't muster up the emotions; others feel no connection to it at all. Oddly, in Japan, someone I was at grad school with was very judgmental about the Hiroshima bomb (that's another site that is hard to visit) and angry at Americans, had pics in an album from a European tour that included Dachau where the group of students was mugging for the cameras in ways I won't describe. Battlefields are another kind of difficult place to visit -- the one from WW1 where I worked as a guide was one where people kept finding bones, bits of metal and even unexploded ordinance 60 plus years later. But visitors would still run around pretending to shoot each other. I know you can't (and I don't want to be able to) mandate emotions, but not all visitors are informed or thoughtful about sites of this kind, especially ones that are associated with the relatively recent past and really do feel haunted to anyone with a sense of history and imagination.

I'm on page 230 (out of 880) That's a monster. I still haven't actually read the Vasily Grossman that I have on my shelf, but I may not be able to resist picking up Life and Fate on my "Thingaversary" trip to my favorite bookseller (this Friday).

3. The Colors of Infamy by Albert Cossery

I became an Albert Cossery fan after reading Proud Beggars. While this novella, his last book, written in his late 80s, treads some of the same ground as that earlier novel, it was still a delight to read because of Cossery's wonderfully vivid satiric writing and his engaging portraits of people who live far outside the bourgeois life style. In The Colors of Infamy, Ossama, a professional thief plying the upper class regions of Cairo unexpectedly finds a letter detailing the corruption of a government official in a wallet he lifts. He then consults with his "professor," a master thief who is disguising himself to evade the police, and they in turn consult a journalist, recently released from jail and living in a mausoleum in the Cairo City of the Dead, to determine how to make best use of this letter. That's the plot.

But what this novella is really about, like the earlier work, is how the poor can live with dignity in a horrifically corrupt and brutal world. As Cossery writes at the beginning of the book, "Ossama was a thief; not a legitimate thief, such as minister, banker, wheeler-dealer, speculator, or real estate developer; he was a modest thief with a variable income, but one whose activities -- no doubt because their return was limited -- have, always and everywhere, been considered an affront to the moral rules by which the affluent live." The response of Cossery's characters to this world, perhaps romanticized and impractical, is to live a simpler life and find delight and amusement wherever they can.

I found it interesting to read this book, with its definition of who the real thieves are, after recently reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross which also characterizes business owners and government officials as the biggest thieves and robbers. While both works are satiric and pointed, Ngũgĩ 's is more bitter and political, while Cossery's is more light-hearted and ironic.

Papadiamantis...

I wonder what you would say if you could read it in the original untranslated greek. Papadiamantis has his own version of the greek language, he's a word-coiner and a syntax-murker if I ever read one. In that sense I would compare him to Joyce.

#73, trandism, I don't have the book in front of me, but I recall the translator, in his introduction, discussing how difficult Papadiamantis was to translate and perhaps that's for some of the reasons you mention. Alas, I know no Greek, so have no chance of reading the original text. Have you read this book? Have you read other works by Papadiamantis and, if so, are there any you would recommend (obviously, ones that have been translated into English)?

4. To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson

This fascinating study, both broad and detailed, of the ideas and actions that led to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, is almost as interesting for its flaws at its successes. At once intellectual history and biography, literary criticism and economics, it examines the lives and thoughts not only of people who are famous, if not notorious, such as Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, but also of those who are lesser known (at least to me), such as Michelet, Babeuf, and Lasalle. In essence, Wilson traces the revolutionary tradition from the ashes of the French revolution through the Paris Commune to the dawn of the Russian revolution.

Subtitled "a study in the writing and acting of history," the book starts in 1824 when Michelet, a young French historian, discovers the work of Vico, an Italian who wrote a century earlier, and was inspired by his vision of examining history through the lives and social culture of ordinary people and the interplay between people and their society. Michelet is most famous for writing a comprehensive history of France in which all the important people through the ages come to life, and also for being so caught up in his work, especially when he came to the sections on the French revolution, that he became engaged in contemporary issues including the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. Wilson goes on to discuss the decline of the revolutionary tradition in France and the beginnings of socialism, ranging from France to Britain to the US.

But the heart of the book is the material on Marx and Engels, especially on Karl Marx who seems to both fascinate and repel Wilson. He provides a detailed personal and intellectual biography over the course of many chapters; we see Marx developing his ideas as a young man, collaborating with Engels, forcing his wife and children to live in squalor while he begs for enough money from Engels to keep writing, excoriating his political enemies, struggling in his life as an exile, and thinking and writing, always thinking and writing. A chapter, in the middle of all this, on Hegel and "the myth of the dialectic" is as complex and confusing as the dialectic itself.

The weakest part of the book is the third and last section, on Lenin and Trotsky. The biographical information about their early lives is fascinating (although, as noted below, it comes from Soviet-supplied material), but the discussion of their ideas and especially of their actions is not nearly as clear, detailed, or compelling as the earlier sections. Perhaps they were too close to Wilson, both in time and in the political issues of the day.

And so I come to the flaws. Some were noted by Wilson himself in an introduction to a later edition of the book (the original was published in 1940 just after, as noted in a foreword to my NYRB edition, the assassination of Trotsky and the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact). Wilson concedes that his portrait of Lenin is "too amiable" and is based on Soviet-censored family memoirs and other materials (and that he should have written more about the ongoing development of socialism in France). As the foreword author also notes, if this book were written today, the arc of history would end not, in hope, at the Finland Station, but instead in the gulag of Siberia. The other flaws, words and passages that took me aback, are probably due to the time Wilson wrote: the use, twice, of the word "nigger," and the occasional discussions of ideas or actions that are "typical" of Jews. I recognize standards were not the same in 1940 as they are today, but I thought they would be more advanced than that for one of the leading critics of the day and a leading publisher; I found them shocking and disturbing.

All in all, I was swept along by this book: by its scope, by its depth, by the new people and new ideas it introduced me to, by the breadth of Wilson's research and interpretation, and even by the complexity of his writing. History -- how we look at it and how that determines how we look at the possibilities of the future -- is the real subject of To the Finland Station; it is indeed "a study in the writing and acting of history."

A fascinating review, Rebecca. I picked up the book at a yard sale a year or so ago, but haven't started it yet.

I wonder how it will fit with the Tom Stoppard trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" which also deals with the intellectual thought before the Russian Revolution, mainly in and around 1848. It's the most depth I've ever gotten to about the political and intellectual history before Marx and Engels, and besides being well done as a drama, it introduced me to Herzen, Bakunin and other Russian thinkers of the times.

Great review Rebecca -- I read TtFS in college and remember being alternately amazed and disgusted and frequently confused, which sounds about right and makes me feel better, reading your own experience. At 20 I wasn't so sure of my judgment.... plus he was SO SO highly regarded then.

Wilson was very much a white male etc. of his time. Have you read Mary McCarthy's novel 'about' him. Let me think, I can't remember the title off hand. I'll return with it in a minute.

Ah yes A Charmed Life.

Thanks, everyone.

No, I haven't read the Mary McCarthy but I did read a collection of Wilson's stories, Memoirs of Hecate County a year or so ago, and the first line of my review was that the best thing I could say about the book was that I bought it at a remaindered price! I'm not sure I'm interested in him enough to read a "novel" about him.

Great analysis of Wilson's flawed masterpiece Rebecca.

It's not a pretty picture, but it was an amusing and entertaining book in some ways, or at least, that is how I remember it. He lived in Wellfleet when he wasn't in NYS and it was 'required' reading for me as the Library Director when I lived and worked there - had to know about all the local lumieres, of which there were many!

5. Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse by Jay Rubenstein

I was intrigued when I read a good review of this book, since I had started reading some medieval literature last year, so I decided to get it. And it does indeed present a fascinating chronicle of a period and series of events I knew next to nothing about. Rubinstein, who received a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, tells the tale in a narrative fashion, supporting it with quotes I never imagined existed from contemporary writers, people who were actually on the crusade.

The story begins in the early 11th century. Vague millennial and apocalyptic ideas were circulating in Europe after 1000 years of Christianity, the caliph of Egypt ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 1009, pilgrims increasingly started traveling to Jerusalem, and a priest named Peter the Hermit began preaching about the need to recapture Jerusalem, not only so that Christians could freely worship there but also because it would bring on the "Last Days" and the Apocalypse. The pope, Urban II, took up the cry, seeing a large military campaign as a good way to solve some of his political problems at home, and it was further enhanced by other preachers who roused crowds around Europe, but mostly in France. Various princes responded, each for his own reasons, and soon there were several nobles raising their own armies to make the trek to Jerusalem. Needless to say, before setting off to fight the unbelievers in the east, many took the time to turn on the unbelievers closer to home, namely the Jews, and the pre-crusade period saw a large increase in pogroms (not yet called that) and massacres.

So the armies, along with large groups of ordinary people, set off, on several routes across Europe, planning to meet up at Constantinople, where the story really takes off. Rubinstein describes the intricate politics once they got there, with some of the leaders seeking to make deals with Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, for his protection, and indeed they helped retake Nicea from the Turks for Alexius, although it is unclear whether the Niceans wanted to be retaken. Then it was on to the country of the "Saracens" and brutal battles and sieges ensued as the crusaders slogged their way over many months to Jerusalem. While it was interesting to learn about siege technology, the cruelty, and joy in cruelty, of both sides, but particularly the crusaders, was horrifying, and some of their behavior shocking. The 20th and 21st centuries have no monopoly on the disgusting actions of warriors in battle.

Mixed in with all this is the idea of holy war, that the Christian god is supporting the Crusaders, and that therefore they must behave in "Christian" ways (which doesn't seem to preclude cutting off the heads of the Saracens, or worse), so that their god will show them miracles. Surprisingly some miracles do seem to happen, while others are clearly faked. In addition, lots of people, priests and others, had all sorts of visions in which they were visited by various saints and even Jesus, and they believed these literally and used them to influence the leaders; some of the visionary visitors even suggested war tactics! Rubinstein takes a lot of time to discuss what he considers to be apocalyptic beliefs among some of the priests and other clerics accompanying the armies, and the political maneuverings among the different nobles leading the armies, both with each other and with the holy war contingent. He often discusses different versions of the events, as told by various contemporary writers, and tries to tease out the truth. This, along with the narrative of the crusade itself, is the crux of the book, and I found it remarkable how Rubinstein was able to pull all these threads together into a compelling story while also providing an explanatory framework.

As I finished the book, I realized I would have gotten more out of it if I hadn't read it over the course of a month, interrupting it with other books. There were a lot of people to keep track of, and I had to keep checking to remember who they were. It is interesting to look back at this period, now nearly a thousand years ago, from the perspective of today, particularly to see that political maneuvering has a very long history. And while it is easy, and perhaps unfair, to make direct connections, the kind of holy war the crusaders were undertaking, their hatred (and fear?) of the Saracens, has both echoes and repercussions today, and it is my understanding that there are some strands of the evangelical movement in the US that still believe the Apocalypse is coming. It hasn't, so far!

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be away from LT for a week. I hope to have some good books to report on when I get back, but it will take me a while to catch up with everything.

Great review of Armies of Heaven. I have added it to my wishlist.

This sounds like a winner, Rebecca. Love your play on words with "the crux of the book" too.

Rebecca, I'll just have to come back and reread everything you've written. You seem to be having an amazing January!

Great review Rebecca. On some trip or other I stopped in at the Musee de Cluny and was fascinated to see that pilgrims and those who followed the crusades often wore BUTTONS that identified them w/such and such a group..... one can't help but think of people collecting Olympic buttons and so on.

If I ever want to leave Russia and WWII for more doom and gloom, the Crusades seem to be the place to go. Excellent review. Intolerance does seem to breed intolerance, doesn't it? And the fate of Jews in the path of the crusaders are an example. Did Rubenstein talk at all about the women left behind during the Crusades? Or the women that followed the army?

Eeeek, all these book bullets!!!

I'm going to have to read Albert Cossery, pull To the Finland Station out of whatever nook or cranny it is concealing itself and read it, and tackle Armies of Heaven. Somehow, the First Crusade tends to get lost in the shuffle; the second (with Eleanor of Acquitaine), the third (with Richard the Lionheart) and the fourth (the sack of Byzantium, a fellow "Christian" nation) tend to grab the headlines.

Re Cossery, I admit I like my political points made with irony rather than bitterness. Especially when they are relatively ordinary political gripes -- corruption, etc. (Genocide deserves all the vitriol and bitterness it's possible to muster.)

Hope you enjoy your week away!

88> I feel your pain.

Excellent review, Rebecca. As is true with the very best literary reviews, I learned something from reading the review (even if I don't get to the book, itself, which I hope that I do!).

Well, I'm back, and of course overwhelmed by work and things at home. I hope to post reviews of the books I read while I was away in the next few days: This Body of Death by Elizabeth George, An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori, The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, and The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. I'm reading Cleopatra by Stacey Schiff and am about to start, for my subway read, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. I also hope later this week to catch up with everyone's threads.

#87, Lisa, the interesting thing is that most of the Jews killed were not "in the path" of the crusaders, but were the Jews at home in Europe. The crusaders kind of warmed up on unbeliever killing with the handy folks nearby. And no, Rubenstein didn't talk about the women left behind. There were women that were actually mixed in with the soldiers, not so much as camp followers, although maybe some were, but out of the fervor of their desire to be there for the recapture of the holy land.

Thanks, Suzanne. I don't really know anything about the other crusades either. Someday, I may read more about them, but too much on the TBR right now.

>90 rebeccanyc: That is interesting, and depressing. I'll have to keep an eye out for Armies of Heaven. I'm feeling a bit swamped at the moment, but I would like to read Cleopatra too. I've heard good things, but I've been wondering about the historical authenticity given the lack of sources. I look forward to hearing your take.

6. This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

Although I've been reading, and obviously enjoying, Elizabeth George's Lynley/Havers mystery novels since she started writing them in the late 1980s, I hadn't read any in a few years. And, while I'll probably continue to read them, I had several serious reservations about this one, her latest to appear in paperback.

First of all, it is way, way, way too long. And I don't just mean pages, all 953 of them. Too many characters, too many subplots, too much description and digression, and a strange plot device to boot. It could easily have been half to two-thirds the length if George's editors had the nerve, after some 15 bestsellers, to take her in hand, and it would have been a much tighter, better book. It may be admirable when a genre writer strives for greater scope, but it has to to work. Second, after a series writer has introduced beloved characters, it behooves that writer to give his or her readers of a sufficient dose of those characters in each novel. This too could have been solved by tightening up the book. Finally, I could smell some of the plot conclusions a mile away -- I mean towards the beginning of those 953 pages. I won't introduce spoilers to give them away, but that's disappointing in a writer who can be as talented as George can be, with the proper editing (self- or outside), that is.

7. An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori

Czernopol is really Czernowitz, a town at the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire that was famed as a crossroads where Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews mixed and lived in relative harmony until it became part of Romania after the first world war and gradually began coming apart under the stresses of the interwar period. (It is now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine.) It is during this interwar period that this novel takes place, told by a boy/young man, writing mainly as "we" to represent all the children his family, but written as an older man looking back at those vanished years.

The ermine in the title is Major Tildy, a one-time hussar in the Austro-Hungarian army now attached to the Romanian army in Czernopol. The story begins with his entrance into the town on horseback, completely enthralling the children who look upon him as the perfect romantic knight and become fascinated with him and his family. including his wife who is one of two daughters (one by his wife, one by his mistress) of the mysterious richest man in town. He swiftly gets into serious trouble, challenging several people including, ultimately, his superior officer, to duels to defend the long-lost honor of his sister-in-law, and winds up in the local insane asylum for most of the book, until his dramatic reappearance at the end.

Thus, the novel becomes an examination of the character and characters of Czernopol, and von Rezzori's brilliant and witty writing introduces the readers to people as varied as the gleefully gossipy old widow who looks after Major Tildy's wife, who has become a drug addict; the urbane and sophisticated prefect of the town who woos one of the children's aunts and who eventually is instrumental in getting them enrolled in a school run by the delightfully freewheeling Madame Antonovitch; a drunken professor and his massively and happily unfaithful wife, the aforementioned sister-in-law; a classmate who vividly mimics his hard-working father, a storekeeper, and his man-about-town older brother; a resident of the insane asylum who may or may not be writing lovely German poems; and too many more to mention. Von Rezzori interweaves their stories with the growing awareness of the children, and occasionally of the young man individually, of the realities of life and what is going on around them.

Into this world of tradition and controlled chaos, wit and cynicism, comes a shadow, the beginnings of the Nazi era. But even before the swastika scrawlers slink into the book, there have been hints of antisemitism. And the antisemitism portrayed in this book is varied. Not only is it the vile, overt antisemitism of Feuer, a local German, and some of the newspapers, that leads ultimately to a minipogrom, but it is also the everyday kind, which even "respectable" people breathe in with the air, discussing whether people they know are really Jews, viewing them stereotypically as peddlers and cheaters, and creating an environment in which a Jewish child knows that she would not be welcome in the narrator's family's house. But there is still a third kind of antisemitism, expressed by the narrator (and perhaps by the author who, disturbingly, was a radio announcer in Berlin during the second world war, surely a job that must have required the permission of the Nazis, if not party membership), and that is the unconscious, and almost admiring, kind, in which the narrator speaks of "the preformed characteristics of an ancient race" and reports that they discovered (his italics) "that people are sometimes also Jews" not that "Jews are also people". Perhaps this is the best that could be hoped for from someone of his time and place.

In the end, this is a story of a lost and largely beautiful world that coincides with the narrator's loss of childhood and the world's shock at the horrors of the Nazi era, still yet to come. As the narrator looks back, he seems to agree with the prefect, Herr Tarangolian, that it is better to be "witty" than "just." This is an extremely witty, sometimes funny, beautifully characterized, and deeply insightful novel, both psychologically and sociologically, and yet it rarely loses its love, apparently typical of Czernopol, of a joke. And what of Major Tildy, that the representative of the past, of the rigor and honor of the Austro-Hungarian army? Released from the insane asylum, he reaches a tragic and almost farcial end.

8. The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

I read this deceptively simple novel about the Haitian revolution, the first and only time enslaved Africans liberated themselves in the Americas, and its aftermath in almost one setting. Through the eyes of Ti Noël, who is a young slave at the beginning and an old free man at the end, and with lush but spare prose, Carpentier portrays a period of great harshness and turmoil, from the period of slavery through revolution and upheaval to the reign of Henri Christophe who effectively re-enslaved the people and to his overthrow and beyond.

The reader first meets Ti Noël as he picks a new stallion for a his master, a horse bought for breeding, and then accompanies his master to a barber, staying outside and observing wax heads with wigs in the barber's windows and skinned calves' heads in a neighboring shop. What a preview of some of the themes of this novel in just the first two pages: sex and violence, and the interactions of animals with humans. Needless to say, although Ti Noël's master, a French plantation owner, respects his skill in selecting horses, he considers him a work animal, just like the horses.

Soon, Ti Noël is working with Macandal, a slave who remembers and tells others about the wonders of former African kingdoms (the Africans enslaved in Haiti came from a variety of places and a variety of tribes) and the powerful gods there. After a horrific accident in which he loses an arm, Macandal flees to the mountains where the plot is set in motion: he gathers plants, both healing and poisonous, studies with a witch, and secretly plots with slaves on plantations around the country. And so the revolution begins.

For the most part, there are few historical characters in this novel, with the exception of Henri Christophe, who later crowns himself the first king in the western hemisphere, forces Haitians with cudgels and whips and overseers to build his palaces and his supposedly impregnable citadel high in the mountain clouds, and emulates Europeans until he recognizes the powers of the African gods, transmuted into voodoo, just before his death. Nevertheless, Carpentier's research into Haiti, his imagination, and above all his gorgeous writing bring to life Ti Noël, Macandal, and the other fictional characters, the often harsh but nevertheless beautiful landscape of Haiti, the vivid reality of the the African gods, the barbaric treatment of the slaves and attitudes of their owners, the sexual sleaziness of some of the French, and the thrill and horror of the revolt. Not all is "real" in this book: one of the characters, when burned at the stake, transforms himself into a variety of animal forms and lives on in the Kingdom of This World, for example. But this is so interwoven in the novel that the reader, at least this one, accepts it.

To cover a span of probably 40 years in less then 200 pages in a way that seems full and complete is remarkable enough. To do so in such a vivid, entrancing, compelling, and complex way is Carpentier's gift.

9. The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I've spent several days trying to figure out what to say about this novel, which has been hailed as a modernist masterpiece. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to read it, because it left me baffled and somewhat cold. On the surface, it is the the story of a club of writers who have given up owning books or writing on paper, and who give themselves names that are nonsense syllables and meet once a week to tell each other stories, but stories based on concepts, not character or plot, or anything we think of as being necessary for a story. And the stories they tell range from science fiction about the creation of a world of automatons, to a riff on Hamlet with the Role becoming a reality, to a medieval tale told in a variety of ways about the Feast of the Ass and people not being who they seem, and more. Clearly, Krzhizhanovsky is commenting, both in the stories and in the concept of the club, on the soul-deadening and brutal Soviet world, but I just never warmed up to the book.

wow, what great reviews you do. Really interesting and comprehensive.

Sold on the von Rezzori. And Cossery (or at least, his novel) has just arrived from the library!

Thanks for such interesting reviews, Rebecca.

Sounds leaden - weighted down by its own idea, I mean, as many concept-driven novels are..... the great thing about a novel is its insistence on liveliness of some kind..... it's a requirement of the form, subtle and unavoidable.

Well, the other LT reviewer really loved The Letter Killers Club, so maybe it's me. I do have another Krzhizahanovsky on the TBR, a collection of stories called Memories of the Future, and now I'm a little nervous about trying it.

PS Thanks, ffortsa and Ireadthereforeiam!

Rebecca, your reviews are fabulous. Thanks for putting in the time that you do on them.
The Kingdom of This World has been *gulp* added to the list.

10. Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff



The turbulent times of the last century BC and the varied cultures, wars, and characters of the period spring to life in Stacy Schiff's fascinating biography, making Cleopatra, as compelling and remarkable a woman as she was (and not in the ways you may imagine), almost a hook for a book about the classical world at a time of dramatic change. Schiff is a wonderful writer who packs a lot of detail and research into a very readable writing style; while there are, alas, no contemporary sources for Cleopatra's life, she has delved into both the classical authors who wrote within a few centuries of the period as well as modern scholarly works, and is careful to discuss differences among these close-to-primary sources and how she believes politics may have influenced what they wrote.

The outlines of Cleopatra's life are well known, that she inherited the throne of Egypt as a teenager but had to outsmart her brother to claim it, met and became lovers with Julius Caesar and subsequently Mark Antony, and ultimately killed herself. In the course of the book, Schiff makes the claim that Cleopatra has been misinterpreted all these centuries, maligned as "the wickedest woman in the world" and the seductress who caused men to throw away their kingdoms, because it is easier and more comfortable for people (read: men, mostly) to think of powerful men being undone by a woman's sexual power than by her intellectual and political power. And she provides strong evidence for this.

In the last century BC, Alexandria, where Cleopatra reigned, was a cosmopolitan city, a center of intellectual life (the famed library was there and people knew that the earth was round, that the moon controlled tides, and much more that was lost to the west for centuries), art and the decorative arts, music and entertainment, great wealth and excesses of hospitality, and people who appreciated and expected all of these. As Schiff writes, "it was a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people watching was best there." As a side note, some of the most interesting aspects of this book for me were the differences between the Roman system and culture and the Alexandrian system and culture, and the turbulence of the times, with civil wars in Rome and shifting loyalties among the varied rulers who were part of the far-flung Roman empire

Furthermore, women had for centuries had rights in Egypt that were unheard of in the west, among them the right to make their own marriages, to be supported after divorcing, and to inherit and hold property. And Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from Macedonian aristocrats who had ruled Egypt for centuries by the time she was born and the inheritor of a strong tradition of Ptolemaic queens: she was educated and groomed to rule. All evidence suggests that she was an extremely competent, politically savvy, and ultimately beloved queen, who as ruler of Egypt had powers almost unimaginable today: not only did she determine military strategy, oversee all commerce, issue currency, receive petitioners of all sorts, put on fabulous entertainments, travel among and gain the support of the Egyptian population who, through a bureaucratic taxing system of immense proportions, essentially worked for her, but she also aligned herself with goddess Isis and was worshiped almost as a goddess herself.

Schiff portrays Cleopatra as an extremely intelligent and politically accomplished woman, yet writes: "The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all. We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty."

Great review, Rebecca! I've been intrigued by this book since it was reviewed in The NY Times.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through this one, Rebecca. The politics were fascinating!

Wonderful review! I'm fascinated by the city of Alexandria, past and present.

Thanks, Laura, Tui, and Lucy. I too find Alexandria fascinating, and more so since I've read this book. I couldn't help thinking how modern it sounded, and what fun it must have been to live there (if you had enough money, of course). Another thing I forgot to mention in the review was that there was a sizable Jewish population in both Alexandria and the rest of Egypt at the time, and that they were well respected, partly for their ability as soldiers.

I wish I'd been around to hang out in the great library of Alexandria... A reasonably decent era for women, assuming you had wealth -- at least, in the context of the times!

ETA: I, too, really loved the book.

I spent a happy year (well ten months) in Alex in the late eighties and was enchanted by its faded elegance and air of history, its sights, its smells, its savours. The people are wonderfully approachable - no discernible jewish population remaining of course but a noticeable Koptic minority all living in apparent peace - I stayed in a small village about 10kms out of town called Agami in a delightful seafront villa and we got to travel into town every Friday on our days off. Memories indeed.

Sounds lovely, Paul. As far as Jews leaving Alexandria, I really enjoyed André Aciman's memoir Out of Egypt, but it's so long since I read it I don't remember it very well.

Yes, I read that too. I gobble up anything about the old (and now the new) library.

Libraries are great full stop.
Some greater than others :)

Some years ago, I read a book called Libraries in the Ancient World; it wasn't very engagingly written, but it was informative. I may have to take a look at it again.

I think we had to read at least part of that book in a history of libraries course I took back in library school.

11. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki

This is a deceptively simple, yet haunting, novel that I've found myself thinking about since finishing it yesterday. On the surface, it is the tale of three students, one narrating his story in a present of around 1912, and another reflecting in 1912 on his days as a student, and his friendship with another student, some decades earlier. The helpful introduction, in my edition, by the translator describes the Meiji period in Japan, from 1868 to 1912, as a time of turmoil in which western ideas were being introduced, transforming the Japanese culture and way of life.

It is a story of deception, betrayal, friendship, family conflict, alienation, illness, and death told in a way that illustrates these without for the most part overtly calling attention to them. From the beginning, there is a sense of foreboding, as the 1912 student meets an older man, whom he calls Sensei, or teacher, who regularly visits the grave of his friend, known as K, but will not share with the student, or even his wife, why this is so important to him. The two get closer, and then the student leaves Tokyo to spend time with his family and dying father. While he is away he gets a long letter from Sensei, which forms the last part of the book, in which he tells the story of his student years, his friendship with K, and how he became the man the student met after K's death.

The reader is filled with apprehension as the story develops, knowing, in a way the student is too immature to realize, that Sensei's secret is grim and that the ending will not be good. The writing is extremely subtle, so that the reader, at least this one, almost has the feeling of experiencing the development of the characters the way they themselves do, yet is propelled through the almost monotony of everyday life to find out what happens. At the same time that the story is in some ways quite modern, it seems very rooted in a particular time and place, and I found it interesting to learn about some of the older Japanese customs and beliefs, some of which feel quite alien, like the practice of letting children (not babies) be adopted by other families who can provide them with greater financial and educational resources, the significance of suicide, and some Confucian (or Buddhist???) ideals.

According to the translator, "kokoro" means "heart," but in a broader sense than we understand it. She explains it means "the thinking and feeling heart" as opposed to "pure intellect," and indeed that is a theme of the book, something the characters struggle with. I read this book for the Author Theme Reads group's Japanese year, and it makes me eager not only to read more by Sōseki but also more by other Japanese authors so I have more of a context for what I'm reading.

An excellent review, Rebecca and one for my wish list. I share your interest in reading more Japanese authors and have found the Author Theme Reads group to be a rich source of recommendations.

Great review of Kokoro, Rebecca. I'll probably read it next week.

Well, you have enticed me with that review, Rebecca. I am drawn to Japanese authors--perhaps because the ones I have read seem to write with a careful kind of contemplation, like a verbal tea ceremony.

12. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

There was a lot I really liked in this first novel. Ivey vividly depicts both the beauty and the harshness of the 1920s Alaska wilderness, from the ice on the river to the wildflowers to the snow-covered mountains to the leaves, the snowflakes, and the animals that inhabit the land. She also captures the sadness and isolation of Jack and Mabel, a couple who have left their home and family in Pennsylvania to homestead in Alaska because of their heartbreak over a stillborn child. And she provides a compelling picture of what it was like to try to farm in that hard land, and how neighbors can be a necessity and a lifesaver, although her characterization of some of those other people lacks depth.

I even was captured by the reworking of the old Russian fairy tale of the snow child; like the couple in that tale, Jack and Mabel build a snowgirl who is transformed into a real girl. Or is she? Is the girl, Faina, who gradually allows herself to come into their house a magical sprite, who goes away each summer and returns each winter, or is she a real flesh-and-blood girl whose parents died and who can live off the Alaskan land? And that is why I ended up being disappointed in the story, even as I was impressed by Ivey's writing skills. It seems to me that Ivey was trying to have it both ways. Now, maybe that was her intention, and I should appreciate the ambiguity, but I found it frustrating. Even though something is magical, I feel that the magic should be "believable," or maybe I mean consistent, in the context of the story. And, for me, this wasn't.

If the manner of surviving in Alaska is of interest to you, I would recommend another book of a very different type, Drop City, which starts out in the commune years in California but ends up describing surviving and not surviving in Alaska. Jim and i both enjoyed the book immensely.

Thanks for the recommendation, Judy. I did enjoy learning about survival in Alaska, but I'm not sure I'm interested enough to read another book about it, especially since I'm not a big T. Coraghessan Boyle fan.

Oh, that's a pity. I was quite surprised by how good this book was, especially after the commune collapsed and people headed north.

13. GB84 by David Peace

I didn't know anything about the British coal miner's strike in 1984-85 when I started this novel, but I read up on it a little and was extremely impressed by how Peace was able to integrate the key events of this bitter, destructive, bloody, and significant strike into a work of fiction. As with his Red Riding Quartet, which I also read on the recommendation of arubabookwoman, Peace writes from many points of view, with little explanation, so it is often difficult to know what is going on. In the case of both the Quartet and this novel, I believe that to be intentional, because the people involved often had little idea of what is going on.

In the main part of the text, Peace delves into the lives and actions of high union officials, secret police operatives, people formerly involved in putting down the rebellions in Northern Ireland, rich people with influence and seeking influence within the Thatcher government (including one unpleasantly referred to as "the Jew" throughout), scabs (aka "working miners"), and many more. We see plots within plots, and intransigence on both sides. Thatcher was trying to make an example by breaking the powerful coal union, and the president of the union, "King" Arthur Scargill, was equally ideologically determined on the left (the union officials in this book refer to each other as "comrade"). The book makes clear the amount of money the government put into breaking the strike (paying thousands of policemen to confront thousands of pickets) and that for those on the frontlines, the level of violence and secret activity made it feel like civil war.

What truly gives the book humanity is the running narrative, at the beginning of each chapter, by two miners telling their day-by-day stories of what was happening to them, on the picket line, in their families, with the union chapter, in their communities, as less and less money came in and more and more people were beaten up by the cops. The contrast between life as it was lived by the miners, and the scheming and politics at the highest levels of the government and the union vividly demonstrates the horrifying lack of concern both of these organizations had for the people involved.

As with the Red Riding Quartet, some of the violence in this book is shocking, and Peace's style of writing is probably not for everyone. But this was a stunning book.

The literal meaning of "kokoro" is impossible to capture; it's about someone's inner essence. There are phrases that can come a bit closer to parts of the meaning, such as saying someone has a good heart and a good soul -- the heart and soul combined is what is meant. The Meiji Restoration was a fascinating time in Japan -- it seemed to promise so much but then ended up in the Taisho era with militaristic dictatorship. During the latter decades of the 19th century, you can almost see the struggle between various ideas that were imported, from western democracy to Prussian military discipline. They didn't coexist very readily...

Must re-read some of my Japanese lit on the shelves sometime. Really want to re-read The Makioka Sisters, and read some more Tanizaki.

Boyle is uneven, several of his novels I've just quit in mid-stream, but I like that he is always up to something different and some of them work. Drop City ranks for me along with Water Music(first novel) the two best. Having.... um.... kind of lived this life briefly, and knowing a great number who really went back to the land in a serious and whole-hearted way here in Vermont, lo, getting to be these forty years ago, I can report that it is excrutiatingly accurate.

East is East was amusing too - having spent some considerable time in various writing /artist retreats.....

#123, Thanks for the additional information about the meaning of "kokoro" and Japanese history, Suzanne. I am only beginning to read Japanese literature, thanks to the year-long focus on Japan in the author theme reads group, so everything I'm reading is new to me. As I read more, I hope to have more of a feeling of the context for it all. And I had no idea that knowledge of Japanese was among your many talents!

#124 Lucy, I have to confess I haven't read a novel by Boyle in more than 20 years, when I briefly dated a man who was a Boyle fan and read Budding Prospects and World's End. Since then I've tried to read some of his stories in the New Yorker and have been underwhelmed.

>122 rebeccanyc:, wow, that sounds quite a fascinating book! Ill look into it.....even if I am supposed to be going an a library book diet. So many on the shelves glaring at me.

Whoops, not Water Music but World's End -- I did like that one. Water Music I did not care for, did not finish.

14. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš

I've had this book since the 1980s, when I bough a series edited by Philip Roth called Writers from the Other Europe, and I decided to read it now for the Reading Globally theme read on Turkey and the Balkans, since the author (at the time he wrote the book) was a Yugoslav; now I suppose he would be considered a Serbian. On the surface, the book, billed as a short novel but really a series of stories connected by theme and occasionally by characters, is not about Yugoslavia, as all but one of the stories take place in revolutionary Russia and in its aftermath of the 1930s Stalinist show trials, but it obliquely sheds light on the kind of darkness that has fallen on all too many people and places, not only in the 20th century but also, as the chapter/story "Dogs and Books" makes clear, in medieval and other times.

The chapters/stories are essentially condensed biographies of fictional characters portrayed so vividly they could be real historical characters. Each is involved in some way in the revolution, and each ultimately falls victim of the 1930s purges. The fascination of the book lies in Kiš's writing,both classically descriptive and modern, his ability to characterize these people, portray the insanity of the Stalinist system, and occasionally make the reader laugh. (The medieval story deals with the inquisition and pogroms against Jews.) In the introduction to my edition, Joseph Brodsky writes, "Only the names here are fictitious. The story, unfortunately, is absolutely true; one would wish it were the other way around." I will be looking for more of Kiš's work.

15. The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

It's hard for me to know what I liked best about this delightful and absorbing novel: the wonderful characters, both important and minor, the setting of a 14th century British nunnery, the sly, biting wit, or Warner's subtly brilliant writing. Perhaps it is that Warner creates a world that is both very different from ours today and a lot the same. The nuns worry about money, and how to pay the bills; people have petty jealousies and violent dislikes and secrets and resentments; after disasters, workers charge more; contractors do shabby work and then come back and fix it, and so on. The fact that this is happening in the community of the Oby convent in the 14th century, in a rural area, dependent on farming, that has some contact with larger towns, including one that is the seat of the bishop who oversees the convents, does not seem surprising in the least. Warner also beautifully depicts the natural world that was so much a part of 14th century life, without the kind of nature descriptions that seem over the top.

Not much happens plotwise in this novel: prioresses die and new ones are elected; relationships within the convent change; in the time of the plague, they acquire a priest who isn't a priest who remains with them for most of the rest of the novel; visitors come and go; nature rules over all; the local people who support the convent sometimes support it more and sometimes less; a prioress goes to visit her relatives for a christening; a boy grows up in the convent, the child of one of the nuns; a clerk appointed by a bishop to keep an eye on the convent discovers a new style of music and is entranced by it; the priest, when dying, becomes obsessed with a poem a woman had entrusted to him many years earlier; the bishops come and go. Basically life happens and the reader is immersed in it.

Most of all, Warner has a deep insight into people and their motivations and a wonderful ability to convey ideas in a completely natural way. There are so many wonderful moments that I can't begin to describe them all, but here is an example of Warner's writing: "But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed, and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster." p. 49

As a side note, I found it interesting to think about the role of convents in the lives of these women. It was certainly a step up for many of them; although they had to give up sex, and life wasn't easy for anyone, they didn't have to deal with the demands of men and children, which could be particularly harsh in those times. They were both in the world and out of it.

I love Townsend Warner but I haven't read this one. On the list it goes. Thank you for a great review. I have thought, although a good deal less elegantly, in the same vein about how time seems to move ever faster....

Congrats for the #1 hot review of the day, Rebecca. I loved her Lolly Willowes.

Rebecca, my family lived in Japan for several years & I spent summers there while in college, working & studying the language. Then went to grad school (in the countryside as depicted by Kawabata in Snow Country), a notable disaster, and went to work at an English language daily in Tokyo. Oddly, my fellow copy editor there was a lovely older guy named Phil who turned out to be Tokyo Rose's ex-husband. Didn't love Japan, but remain fascinated by the language and the very different nature of communication when you are working with ideograms. For instance, the first time I saw Shanghai written in characters, it was possible to tell that the origins of the word had something to do with water, because of the characters used. It's such a rich and yet in other ways confined landscape. Japan gets around some of the constraints by having two phonetic alphabets, however, on top of the characters they stole from the Chinese!

#130, 131 Lucy, Tui, Thanks. Until a year or so ago, I had had Lolly Willowes on the TBR for a long time, and when I read it, I was sorry I hadn't read it sooner. Last year, I read Mr. Fortune's Maggot and, while I admired Warner's writing, I didn't love it as much as LW. The Corner That Held Them is very different from LW, but I loved it just as much or more. I also have a copy of Summer Will Show but haven't gotten around to it yet.

#132 Suzanne, That's so interesting about the Japanese language and ideograms, and although I knew you've traveled and lived around the world, I'm not sure I knew about the Japanese sojourn.

It was a long ago... and unlike the various European stints, not really a period I look back on affectionately or fondly.

Btw, did I tell you I hate you? After reading your comments about the Corner that Held them, I had to order it from Amazon. Because I decided I couldn't wait until the end of the month when the sole library copy available was returned. Harumph.

Sorry about that, Suzanne . . . I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, especially now you've told me that you broke down and bought a copy . . .

16. Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son by Sholem Aleichem

I read this charming and yet subtly pointed tale, which I bought in 1974 when I was taking a Yiddish literature in translation course, for the Club Read challenge to read a book published (in this case in English translation) in the year I was born. Mottel, who is about 8 or 9 years old, tells the story, starting in the Russian village of Kasrilovka and ending up on the lower east side of New York, with much wandering through Europe in between. He is a mischievous boy who loves to draw and who above all is an extremely astute observer of the people around him, not only his mother who is always crying (after his father dies at the beginning of the book), his brother Eli who is always scheming and never smiling, and his sister-in-law Brocha who has huge feet and is always talking, but his extended "family" (especially the wonderful young man known as "our friend Pinney") and everyone else he encounters. This is not a happy time for Jews in Russia, as pogroms are frequent; getting to America is harder than anyone expects; Ellis Island is a prison for a time; and life in New York is full of opportunity but takes some getting used to; but Mottel is full of life and eager to live it to the fullest. He is a delightful creation.

Having really loved Aleichem's Wandering Stars, which I read last year, I approached this book with anticipation, an was somewhat turned off by the translator's note. Tamara Kahane, who translated the edition I have, was Aleichem's granddaughter and notes in her introduction that "my primary task was to make him (Mottel) human and real to the English reader . . . I have therefore ruthlessly sacrificed strange rhythms and exotic expressions . . . To those who know Yiddish and the works of Sholom Aleichem in that language, I proffer my apologies for I know that they will be dissatisfied." Although I don't know Yiddish, the Wandering Stars translation seemed to capture what I think of as the feeling of Yiddish, and at first I was disappointed with the translation of Mottel as it seemed a little flat, not lively enough. But gradually, and especially as the family set off for America, I became captivated by Mottel and was no longer annoyed by the translation.

How off-putting to have the translator tell you what she left out! I don't read Yiddish either (nor do I speak more than a few words here and there), but it is a 'tasty' language, with a lot of texture. A pity the translator felt she couldn't capture that in English or trust her readers to adjust to it if she could.

It was a little disconcerting, but I chalk it up to the times. The translation was made in 1953 and I think the translator was eager to try to show that "exotic" Eastern European Jews were just like everyone else and didn't talk funny. I saw on Amazon that there is a new translation, by the woman who translated Wandering Stars. While it would be interesting to compare them, I don't think I"m interested enough to buy it (although it's combined with a book I haven't read, Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son).

I may try it if it's available for Kindle - and not too expensive.

17. Vesuvius by Gillian Darley

I picked up this intriguing-looking little book from the counter of my favorite bookstore when I was buying something else, and I am glad it was little because it wasn't as intriguing as I had hoped. Darley looks at how others have looked at Vesuvius, from the classical era to the Renaissance to the romantics to the budding scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries to today, from artists and writers to diplomats and impressarios and tourists. While this is mildly interesting, although more than I wanted to know, I would have preferred a different book, one that talked about the geology and the impact on the people who lived and live near Vesuvius, including the ones who even today are building their houses further and further up the slope of a still active volcano. So I can't really criticize the book; it just wasn't completely to my taste.

That's just nuts, building on an active volcano. Land was probably cheap though.

Well, it's nuts, but if you're poor you don't have much choice. Of course, if there's a really big eruption, Naples itself could be the next Pompeii.

This thread is becoming something of a wander in paradise. I'm simply relieved that I own the Writers from the Other Europe collection - same vintage as yours - and The Corner that Held Them so that I don't have to chase them down. Cleopatra: A Life is on order, the von Rezzori is wish-listed, and all the others are just going to have to wait. Now if only I could read as fast as I can buy!

I've added The Corner That Held Them to my tbr list. As always, great reviews!!!!

Rebecca- I had to stop by. I just finished What It Is Like to Go to War the other day and knocked out a quick mini-review. And while looking over some of the "real" reviews, I saw yours. Fantastic job. I should just direct everyone to yours and be done with it. I'm glad to see how much you love Matterhorn too. I'm wondering what Marlantes will do next?

Lizzie and Linda, I'm blushing. Thank you! And you too, Mark. As for Marlantes, it took him decades, I believe, to write Matterhorn, and both it and WIILTGTW seem to come straight from his heart as well as his brain, so I have no idea whether he has more to mine from his Vietnam experience or has other ideas of what he'd like to do. I know some people on LT have heard him speak, so if one of you is here, feel free to chime in if he said anything about what he might do next.

Interesting question, Mark... his work has come out of this experience. Can he feel strongly enough about something else (or is there more) to keep writing? Even with the non-fiction book (I've yet to read Matterhorn, he has firmly established himself on the literary map, IMO.

Marlantes has the writing chops and is one smart cookie. I think he could write something off topic. We will see.

*speed lurking*

18. The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

In this thought-provoking novel, Ugrešić explores what it means not only to be an exile and not only to be an exile from a country that no longer exists, but also to be an exile from a country that has been shattered, by war and what we learned to call "ethnic cleansing," into multiple smaller nations. The protagonist, a native of Zagreb now living in Amsterdam, has been hired to teach a two-semester course in the literature of the former Yugoslavia at the University; her students come from all over the former Yugoslavia and have enrolled in the university largely because of the advantage of having a student visa. The title of the book comes from the nickname the students give the factory at which many of them work, a factory that makes S&M clothing and paraphernalia and which in turn is named after an S&M club. However, the "ministry of pain" is really a metaphor for the various kinds of pain the protagonist and the students experience, from "Yugonostalgia" to much deeper traumas.

The best parts of the book come early, as the protagonist engages with the students and delves into the meaning of exile, her feelings about "home," and the complexity of language. As she notes about Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, which apparently differ mostly in a few words, the students "knew that "our" languages were backed by actual troops, that "our" languages were used to curse, humiliate, kill, rape, and expel. They were languages that had gone to war in the belief that they were incompatible, precisely because they were inseparable." In the second part, she goes home for a visit to her mother and her former parents-in-law, and that visit too is interesting. After she returns to Amsterdam, she begins to spiral downwards, changes the way she teaches the students, visits the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, loses her job, and moves into a new apartment. For me the book then became less compelling. I admire what Ugrešić is trying to do, but in an intellectual way, rather than being truly absorbed in the story. I do think this book makes brilliant use of language, and paints a stunning portrait of dislocation.

19. The Emotional Life of Your Brain by Richard J. Davidson with Sharon Begley

I heard the author of this book interviewed on my local public radio station and thought it sounded intriguing enough to buy. Although written in a relatively chatty style, it includes considerable scientific data and information about experimental work.

Davidson is a psychology professor who has focused his research on learning how the brain is involved in emotion. This was not a popular idea when he started work as a graduate student in the 1970s, as most leading scientists though of emotions as "neurological fluff" when compared to memory, problem-solving, perception, and other attributes studied by cognitive psychologists; there were also few tools to look at what was happening inside the brain. Although Davidson conducted experiments for decades that began to show how emotion is indeed something that happens in our brains, the emergence of MRIs has enabled scientists to pinpoint the parts of our brains that become active when we are experiencing different kinds of emotions.

In this book, Davidson identifies six dimensions of "emotional styles" that can be mapped to particular areas in our brains and the communications among them; everyone falls somewhere on a continuum for each of these dimensions. The six dimensions are resilience (from fast to recover to slow to recover), outlook (from positive to negative), social intuition (from intuitive to puzzled), self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque), sensitivity to context (from tuned in to tuned out), and attention (from focused to unfocused). He is careful to note that there are benefits at both ends of each spectrum, that society benefits from having people with varied emotional styles, and that the issue is not where someone falls on each continuum, but whether some aspect of emotional style is creating problems in his or her life. To give an example, one's degree of resilience (recovering quickly from a setback) depends on the communication between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Davidson goes on to stress that the brain is plastic; not only does it change in response to how we use it and what is going on in our lives, but we can also consciously work to change where we fall along the continuum of each emotional style.

Another aspect of this book involves Davidson's lifelong commitment to meditation, and his interest is studying the brains of people who meditate, including those who meditate a lot, like Buddhist monks, and those who are novices to meditation, like volunteers he involved in studies, to see how the brains change in response to meditation. He is in the early stages of this research, but does believe that meditation changes the strength of different pathways in the brain.

I find neuroscience fascinating, and although I shy away from self-help books, there was enough science in this book to make me take the quizzes to determine my emotional styles and consider the idea of trying meditation once again, although I've never quite taken to it in the past. The book is a relatively quick read, but there's a lot of interesting information in it, not just about emotional styles and meditation, but also about how scientists figure out how to structure and interpret experiments.

I will plan to read that Ugresic tome, as there are too few voices of her kind out there, particularly coming from the Balkans. There is Slavenka Drakulic, of course, who has a lighter tone, but off the top of my head can't think of many other narrative non-fiction writers from the region whose works are translated. I do plan to read S: A Novel About the Balkans by Drakulic sometime this year.

Hi Rebecca, just delurking to say I loved both of your reviews today. My father's family is from Yugoslavia so I will keep the The Ministry of Pain in mind for my library trips. I really liked your review of The Emotional Life of Your Brain. I hadn't heard about this book and see it was just published. The comments about meditation and being able to change where you fall along the continuum of emotional styles were particularly interesting to me. I might have to buy this one. Thanks for the recommendations. :)

Suzanne, it isn't a tome; it's only a little over 200 pages. And it's a novel (although probably at least semi-autobiographical), not narrative nonfiction. I've had it for several years and read it now as part of the Reading Globally theme read on Turkey & the Balkans. I'm not sure whether I have the stomach of S: A Novel about the Balkans, but I do have Drakulic's Two Underdogs and A Cat: Reflections on Communism, which has the advantage of being brief.

Pat, thanks for delurking, and with such a compliment, too!

Yes, when I wrote tome it was due to brain fatigue -- meant to say book, since didn't know whether it was a novel or not and apparently don't even have enough energy today to click on a link to see if it was memoir or fiction! Piffle.

Need another hour of sleep.

Very interesting reading you're doing, Rebecca. I'm a psychologist and I think I would like both your most recent novel and The Emotional Life of Your Brain.

Thanks for stopping by, Suzanne, even without that hour of sleep we all missed the other night! And Ellen, The Ministry of Pain certainly does paint a portrait of someone reacting to trauma, although the protagonist herself is not as completely aware of her problems as she thinks.

20. Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

Sanshirō is a young man, about 22 years old, who travels from his country village to Tokyo to enroll in the prestigious university there in about 1909. The novel opens on the train carrying him to Tokyo, on which he has two encounters, one with a woman, one with an older man, that foreshadow much of the rest of the book. Sanshirō is obviously both intelligent and ambitious, but he has a lot to learn about both people, especially women, and the comparative sophistication of Meiji era Tokyo, the period when, as in Kokoro, the other book by Natsume that I've read, Japan was absorbing western ideas.

Very soon after his arrival in Tokyo, Sanshirō meets several people who will be part of his life for the rest of the book: his gregarious fellow student Yojirō, who is always plotting something; a scientist known to his family, Nonomiya; a professor, Hirota, who is somewhat detached from the world; and especially Mineko, an entrancing and yet mysterious young woman. Sanshirō, who is otherwise largely an observer, of people, of the streets and streetcars of Tokyo, of the sky and the clouds moving across it, becomes obsessed with Mineko, although I have to stress I do not mean "obsessed" in the way we think of the word today. He thinks about her, thinks about how he can get to see her -- but when he does see her, he is unable to do the right thing, to say what she would like to hear, to interact with her in a way that could move things forward. He is intimidated by her modernity at the same time that he is fascinated by it.

In addition to the Mineko thread, Sanshirō also becomes involved in an attempt to get a Japanese professor of western literature at the university, receives letters and instructions from his mother, along with information about a girl back home who doesn't interest him, and finds his way around Tokyo and the university.

As in Kokoro, Natsume's writing is very subtle. Just as Sanshirō observes the world, the reader observes Sanshirō and experiences what he is experiencing, even if at times the reader, or this one anyway, just wants to slap him and say "talk to her, already." It would be difficult to call this a coming of age novel, because Sanshirō still has a long way to go at the end of it, but he definitely is learning. I enjoyed this book and found it an excellent tale of a young provincial man gradually getting to know the wider world, as well as an intriguing portrait of a particular time and place.

As an aside, my edition had a lovely and informative introduction by Haruki Murakami.

21. The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan

I would not have bought or read this book if I hadn't read Jay Rubenstein's Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse earlier this year. And I have to confess that I more or less skimmed through it. Frankopan is a scholar of and fan of Alexios, the Byzantine emperor at the time of the first crusade, and in this book he argues that it was Alexios's plea to Pope Urban II that led the pope to call for the crusade and that Alexios oversaw at least the staggered scheduling of the arrival of different armies in Constantinople, their provisioning, and some of their initial targets once they reached Asia Minor. He gives short shrift to much of what happened during the crusade itself. I don't know enough (nor do I care to know enough) about the politics of the era to know if Frankopan has placed the emphasis properly. It is clear to me that Rubenstein's focus on the apocalyptic thinking behind some of the crusaders' actions doesn't conflict with Frankopan's focus on Alexios, and I found that earlier read much more interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking.

22. Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman

Wow! Like, I presume, many of you, I had never heard of Edith Pearlman until this collection won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction this year. As Ann Patchett says in her introduction, this "should be the book with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure."

Pearlman's writing is deceptive. It isn't showy; nothing too dramatic happens. People live their lives, confront problems, struggle with moral dilemmas, find love, learn about themselves, learn about others. learn to live with or leave their families. They have flaws and frustrations; sometimes there is something a little off, a little unconventional about them; sometimes they're just the people other people don't notice much; sometimes their families can't see their true nature. They can be in a fictional suburb of Boston, postwar Europe, Israel, South America. They are, above all, human, and Pearlman is brilliant at bringing out their humanity, their individuality, unobtrusively revealing their character, quietly but unbelievably insightfully moving their stories along.

Many of these stories are stunning -- "Allog," "Chance," "Home Schooling," "Granski," "On Junius Bridge," "Relic and Type," "Jan Term," and "Self-Reliance" among them. Others are merely wonderful. And some, of course, as with any collection, don't quite live up to the others. But all in all, I am amazed that I never knew about this wonderful writer before and delighted that, with the NBCC award, she may finally get the recognition and readership she richly deserves.

Thanks for that review, Rebecca. I have not been familiar with Edith Pearlman but have been reading about her in recent news. Your review clinches it: I must seek her out.

Me too.

I'm also following your crusades reading.

Thanks. That's probably about it for crusades reading for me; I only read the second book because I found the first one so interesting, but I don't have any inclination to dig deeper.

Thanks for allowing me to add the Pearlman book to my pile. My library has it and no waiting list either because, as you point out, she's pretty much unknown at this point. Excellent review.

23. The Sea and Poison by Shūsaku Endō

I am very impressed that Shūsaku Endō wrote this book, not only because it deals with the horrifying vivisection of US prisoners of war by Japanese doctors at the end of World War II, but primarily because he is a Japanese author tackling what must have been, and probably still is, an extremely fraught subject. What he is really addressing is the moral question: how could anyone, but especially doctors who have sworn an oath to protect life, agree to participate in this?

Endo tells the story through the eyes of several of the doctors and nurses who end up participating in the vivisection, but the principal character is Dr. Sugaro, a young intern at the time who, despite reservations, was involved in the "operations," and who, when the book opens, is practicing almost in seclusion in a shabby home office outside Tokyo. Then, through flashbacks, we get a picture of the time and motivations of the other characters, primarily the principal doctors, "the Old Man," Dr. Hashimoto, and his assistant Dr. Shibata; a sickening sycophant, Dr. Asai; another more sophisticated intern, Dr. Toda; and two nurses, the chief nurse Oba and a younger nurse with a difficult past, Ueda.

The end of the war is near and the Americans are bombing the city of Fukuoka day in and day out. It has been reduced nearly to rubble, and the doctors and nurses at the nearby medical school have become numbed to the death and destruction. Most of them are also numb to the suffering of their patients, many of whom have advanced cases of tuberculosis, especially those in the welfare ward, although, despite teasing, Sugaro feels compassion for an elderly woman who is scheduled to undergo unnecessary and probably fatal surgery because the doctors feel she is expendable. At the same time, the internal politics of the hospital lead "the Old Man" to focus his efforts on becoming to become Dean of Medicine and Asai and Toda are scheming with him. Even before the military proposes the vivisection "experiment," the patients are not at the forefront of the doctors' or nurses' minds. Nobody seems that enthused about the war, either.

Through flashbacks to the earlier lives of some of the participants, especially Toda and Ueda, Endō explores their psychological inability to refuse to join in. Toda lacks a conscience and cares only what society thinks and what he can get away with; Ueda has experienced her own traumas (through which we see the Japanese treatment of the Chinese in areas they occupied prior to the war) and has a hard time thinking about the point of view of other people. Throughout, Endō focuses on the idea of what is morality and how we will be judged, as well as some Buddhist perspectives on suffering. He also introduces the idea of the other; Hashimoto has a white (German) wife, who does things the Japanese find unusual for a woman in her position, and the whiteness of the US bomber pilots who are the POWs is also noted.

I have only scratched the surface of this brief but chilling and complex book. The sea is ever-present, a force beyond human control, and the poison of going along with the group is insidious.

Wow, that sounds like a chilling read. I'll have to consider adding it to the wishlist. Reading Unbroken last year really opened my eyes to some of the horrific conditions in Japanese POW camps during World War II. It can be tough to take in.

Excellent review of The Sea and Poison, Rebecca. It is definitely going on the wishlist. I just read a review by lilisin of When I Whistle, also by Endo. I will look for both.

I enjoyed your review of The Sea and Poison, as I mentioned on your Club Read thread; it's a book I was also impressed with when I read it last year. Like Linda I also read lilisin's excellent review of When I Whistle, and I'll probably read it in the next month or two.

As much as I feel the questions this book asks are important, I'm going to avoid it, because of the horrors you allude to in the story. Knowing they are real, actual history would only make it worse.

ffortsa, The details of the horrors are only a small part of the novel. It is mostly psychological and sociological.

24. The Jokers by Albert Cossery

Can it be I'm getting tired of Albert Cossery? There is no reason why I should like this book less than the two I read earlier this year, Proud Beggars and The Colors of Infamy: Cossery's wit is just as satiric and ironic, his writing just as good, his portrayal of character and place just as sharp. But it's starting to seem like he's writing the same book, even though the plot is different. In this case, the group of male friends who eschew seriousness and like to find humor in everything are scheming to bring down the governor of an unnamed Egyptian city (that seems to be Alexandria, not Cairo) through a campaign to praise him excessively. As one of the characters muses about a revolutionary who does not share the protagonists' perspective, "He didn't want the police to take him for a joker -- that was all he cared about. . . . He needed those criminals to respect him. How pathetic for a rebel! Even he couldn't break out of the vicious cycle of power. . . . He was more of a prisoner than a prisoner in his cell because he shared the same myths of his adversary . . ." Had I read this novel first, I am sure I would have been as enthusiastic about it as I was about the others, and I did enjoy it, but just not with the same thrill of discovery.

By the way, the literal translation of the French title is "violence and derision," which has a much sharper tone than the one given it in English.

Rebecca, thanks for posting your reviews of Sea and Poison and The Jokers. I very much enjoyed them both (the reviews, that is). I have Proud Beggars on my TBR list and your review's references back to it make me want to read it sooner rather than later. Also, last month I read Silence by Shūsaku Endō. I think he is a pretty amazing and courageous novelist.

Woo, good reviews, Rebecca! I particularly enjoyed the ones for Sanshiro and The Sea and Poison. I look forward to reading the former and Kokoro, and now I'll be taking a look at the Endo book, too.

Thanks! Anyone interested in my Japanese reads should come on over to the Author Theme Reads group. The group is focusing on Japanese authors all this year.

>174 rebeccanyc: your recommendation serves as a reminder that there is more to LT than just the 75 group! I sometimes forget :)

#175 Ha ha ha! I actually spend more time in other groups than in the 75, as many of you have probably noticed.

25. Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge

Those looking for the drama in the sinking of the Titanic should look elsewhere, but those who love good writing and are interested in a modest coming-of-age story paired with a portrait of the self-centered, selfish, idle rich will enjoy this subtle and ironic novel. The ending -- which of course we all know -- is both understated and impossible to put down. Bainbridge tells the story through the eyes of Morgan, a young man who was raised since childhood as a nephew of J.P. Morgan but whose birth and earliest life were not quite as glittering, as his father vanished before his birth and his mother died.

At the very beginning of the book, despite the unsettling experience of having a stranger collapse with a heart attack into his arms, Morgan seems to be a typical rich young man with nothing to do but get drunk with his pals and go to dinner parties with their parents. Gradually, after he boards the Titanic for its maiden voyage, the reader sees that he has a more troubling past and even something of a mind of his own and a conscience to boot. He has had to work, despite the wealth that is his to spend, and has played a small role in the design of the ship (steerage bathroom fixtures) (J.P. Morgan was a part owner of the White Star line, which owned the Titanic), and he has even explored some socialist ideas in the past. On the ship, he hangs around with his pals, meets and learns from some interesting characters that he would not ordinarily meet (e.g., an ambitious Jewish dress designer, a mysterious and cynical man of the world, a singer apparently scorned by her lover), pines over an apparently cold woman who later turns out to have another side (Morgan is cautioned by the man of the world that he knows nothing about women), and takes an interest in continuing to work and be productive.

Very little happens in this novel until the iceberg intervenes, but Bainbridge brilliantly illustrates the self-indulgent lack of awareness of the upper classes as they idle away their time, their careless attitudes towards the people who serve them, and their complete disinterest in, if not distaste for, the passengers in steerage. The lackadaisical, if not criminal, attitude that resulted in the lack of enough lifeboats, the lack of attention to iceberg warnings and to a fire in the coal stores, and the emphasis on maintaining enough speed to achieve a maiden voyage record, is clear as well. Bainbridge's writing sparkles. Well before the ship starts sinking, it is a world of every man for himself.

Without fanfare, but completely compellingly, Bainbridge depicts the hours between the hitting of the iceberg and the disappearance of the Titanic below the waters of the North Atlantic. It is the high point of the book.

Good review, Rebecca! Of course you've made me have to read it now, to find out what happens to Morgan. He might not have gone down, right?

>177 rebeccanyc:: ooh, that does sound like a good one Rebecca. Great review! I also noticed it was a Booker Prize nominee. Well, I went right over and made a note of it on my "Literary Prize TBR" spreadsheet. Yes, I have a spreadsheet (that probably doesn't surprise you ....).

Thanks for stopping by, Tui and Laura. Now, Tui, you wouldn't really want me to let you know the answer to that question, would you? And, yes, Laura, no surprise there!

Interesting review of Every Man for Himself, Rebecca. I have not read anything by Bainbridge and may need to rectify that.

The only other book by her I've read, Linda, is The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which I found wonderfully written but quite puzzling.

No, that was a rhetorical question.

Your review got me too! It's going on the list, especially as I love Titanic (and shipwreck) books.

Great reviews as usual. I'm especially enjoying your Japanese reviews. I haven't gotten to an Endo yet (though I've previously read several novels of his), but I did read Light and Darkness by Soseki Natsume (which I haven't reviewed yet. I read The Sea and Poison last year, and I concur with your evaluation of it as an excellent book.

I bought a novel by Albert Cossery based on your earlier recommendation, but haven't read it yet (nor do I remember which one it was at this time).

Are you involved in the Patrick White group (in honor of his 100th birthday this year)?

Thanks for stopping by, Deborah. I always enjoy your reviews, too. I did join the Patrick White group and have one of his novels, Riders in the Chariot, on my TBR. I bought it because it's published here in the US by NYRB and I generally like their selections, but it's quite a tome, so I'm going to aim for the summer, when I generally am a little less busy and have more reading time, to read it.

Some wonderful reviews Rebecca. You read so many books and writers I have never heard of.

I too am in the Patrick White group and need to dust off one of the novels to read in the next month or two.

Caroline, I find many interesting authors and books through LT! And others because I frequent a bookstore that often has books by writers I've never heard of on its new books table.

Rebecca--Riders in the Chariot is the one I just finished. I thought it was magnificent. When I read some of his novels years ago, my favorite was The Eye of the Storm (which I reread about 10 years ago). Riders in the Chariot has now replaced that as my favorite. Right before I read Riders in the Chariot, I read The Vivisector, which I liked enough to make me immediately read another Patrick White, and now that I've finished Riders in the Chariot, I've immediately begun The Solid Mandala.

The Pearlman stories were the first Kindle book I borrowed last year, and I loved 'em. The collection was shortlisted for some other awards last year, so I'm glad it finally won one!!

I may have to read that Endo novel. I'm curious about group dynamics in Japan, which can be scary. And you're right that this is still a controversial topic. Does it read at all like something written as an explanation, if not as an excuse?

#189 That gives me something to look forward to, Deborah. Thanks.

#190 It didn't read as an explanation to me, Suzanne, in the sense that it didn't really explain how people could decide to carry out these vivisections to begin with. It did give some insight into why people went along with it, with varying motivations, both those they were aware of and perhaps those they weren't, such as numbness after years of war and revenge after all the bombing. It put their behavior into the context of human failings, but I don't think it was intended as an excuse. As part of the Japanese theme read, I've just finished The Woman in the Dunes, which disturbed me more as I was reading it than The Sea and Poison; I'm still collecting my thoughts before I review it.

26. The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abé

I found this Japanese classic extremely difficult to read: so disturbing, so claustrophobic, so infuriating. And yet, I suspect all this is as the author intended. Literally, it is the story of a man unwillingly trapped in a disintegrating house in a sand pit with a woman who has been living there for some time, condemned to continually remove sand so it doesn't overpower the house and then the neighboring village. He struggles, attempts to escape, feels alternately anger at and compassion for the woman, and philosophizes about sand, sex and love, and the meaning of life. Metaphorically, it is an existential look at the lives we all live.

I also found it intriguing to think about why it is called "the woman in the dunes" when the woman is never fully developed as a character, and the male protagonist is the focus of the story. To me the woman was almost symbolic, as it is in a way the woman/the pit/the hole in the ground that traps the man, even though it was the male villagers who put him there. A little Freudian, no?

Finally, I found myself struggling to appreciate this book, and on some levels I could. The world the author creates is believable if bizarre, as are the changing moods, attitudes, and actions of the protagonist. The author's depiction of sand and its movement is fascinating and mind-stretching. The way he develops the plot and makes the reader feel as trapped as the protagonist is masterful. The line illustrations, by his wife, are charming and add to the tale. But overall it is so grim and, as I said, so claustrophobic, that reading it was, for me, an unpleasant experience.

Excellent review of The Woman in the Dunes, Rebecca. This is a book that I have been wanting to read for some time now.

I heard someone read from the beginning of The Woman in the Dunes at the "save the library" readathon last May, Rebecca, and I must say that it struck me that way. Left me with little interest in reading it...

I would like to read some more Tanizaki this year, though.

I was underwhelmed by Every Man for Himself Rebecca, but your review has made me think of the novels good points. It is the only Bainbridge I have read and I think I was expecting a more dramatic read based on the subject matter. The subtle interplays between characters and classes didnt go unnoticed, but didnt make the novel for me either.

Well, it's definitely an understated book, which may not be what people looking for a Titanic book are looking for. (I know about the Titanic, but I haven't read any other books about it or, gasp!, seen the movie, so I had no expectations.)

>192 rebeccanyc:: I think you just took one for the team, Rebecca. Uh uh, no way, thanks awfully but...

I'm slowly catching up on threads, but I wanted to say that The Woman in the Dunes is probably my favorite novel written by a Japanese author. I just posted this comment on Rebecca's Club Read thread:

It's been awhile since I read The Woman in the Dunes, but I could identify with the plight of both characters, and I loved Abe's evocative writing and the sense of claustrophobia and perpetual danger. The woman was annoying to me at first, as she could not explain to the man why she simply accepted her fate and did not try to seek a way out. Later, though, I realized that she is so much like many people I've encountered who are in similar real life situations, who passively settle for a miserable existence without trying to better themselves, which made her character one I could appreciate to a greater degree. I can't remember the details of the story as well as the sense of being in the sand pit with them, and the emotions it brought out in me were as vivid as any book I can remember reading recently. I'll definitely re-read it this quarter, as it's been at least five years since I read it the first time, and see if it has the same impact on me now as it did then.

27. Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U

This was a fascinating book, although it was not the book I expected based on the title. Burma is the center of the story, but Thant Myint-U takes the reader on a tour, geographic, historical, economic, and cultural, of the surrounding regions in China and India, regions that are very far from the political centers of their respective countries and that in various ways have functioned as frontiers. At the beginning and end of the book, he talks about the potential role of Burma as the gateway for China to the Indian Ocean (without going through the narrow Malaccan straits) and as the pathway for India to Southeast Asia.

But the heart of the book is his travels through Burma, the Chinese southwest, and the Indian northeast. In these sections he delves into the history and culture of ancient kingdoms and contemporary ethnic groups, the long and partially continuing isolation of these border areas from the mainstream of their country's culture and economic development the formidable geography, the vital importance of the major rivers coursing down from the Himalayas, politics, military events and strategy, the Chinese need for oil, religious and linguistic diversity and similarity, and much more. For me, this provided insight into areas and history I knew nothing about and broadened my awareness of the complexity of the region.

Thant was born and grew up in the US and did his graduate work in England, but his family returned to Burma to visit during his childhood summers (he is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant). One of the parts of the book that interested me was his awareness of people's appearances: whether they look "Burmese" or "Southeast Asian" versus looking "Chinese" or "Indian." There was a long history of Indian presence in Burma, and he finds people and communities in India's Northeast (a region, connected to the main part of India by what's called the "chicken neck," that still is largely under military control because its various ethnic groups, who formerly had their own kingdoms there, don't feel they are Indian) similar in many ways to the Burmese.

The Chinese are building roads, railways, and pipelines through Burma, and Burma is poised to become the crossroads between China and India, as the title states. But as the author writes, "Burma would not be connecting the parts of India and China most familiar in the West, the maritime Asia that runs from Bombay to Shanghai and Tokyo, via the beaches of Thailand and Bali, Singapore and Hong Kong -- the Asia that is developing fast, the Asia of high-tech manufacturing, glittering fashion shows and luxury tourism. Instead, Burma would be connecting the vast hinterlands of India and China, much less visible, poor and with a spine of violent conflict running right through." Furthermore, it is not clear how the Burmese themselves would benefit from this.

I have one quibble. I love maps, and enjoyed looking at the maps at the beginning of the book. But the contemporary map was printed so the spine of the book goes right through Burma, making it impossible to see some of the most important locations in the book.

Rebecca, nice review of what sounds like a fascinating book, and very timely as well.

Thanks, Judy. I've had another book by him on my TBR for years, River of Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma, and now I have to figure out where it is.

*waving* at Rebecca

Rebecca fascinating book and fascinating review as always. Burma is one of the few countries in the region I have yet to visit - I think I would find the restrictions on movement through the country a tad oppressive. If it opens up a little I would love to go there.
Agree with you on maps - love to pore over them and if the spine of the book cuts through it you can't very well do that.

Have an enjoyable weekend.

I just put the two Thant Myint-U books on my watchlist at the library -- can't put holds on 'em yet because the cruel librarians limit me to 10 holds and 99 books out... Odd, that is.

Have you read Finding George Orwell in Burma? I really liked that. Have just downloaded a Kindle sale book, Myanmar/Burma; have no idea of whether it's any good, but it's part of the 100 books for $3 or less this month.

The other amazing Burmese book that I've read is from the Land of Green Ghosts; it's a five star book, IMO.

#204 I've had From the Land of Green Ghosts on my shelf for a couple of years. With a five star recommendation, I need to move it up the pile.

Excellent review of Where China Meets India, Rebecca. I had read an equally compelling review of it several months ago, so I'll add it to my wish list.

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia!

I'm not familiar either with Finding George Orwell in Burma or Land of Green Ghosts, but I'll definitely take a look at them. I did read a chilling and somewhat gruesome novel about the Burmese opposition, The Lizard's Cage several years ago, and it was that book that prompted me to buy the first Thant book, the one I haven't read. There is no doubt that the military regime was/is a horror in many ways, but the book I just read adds some complexity to the story of Burma and also makes the point that sanctions may not be the best option for changing the lives of the Burmese people.

28. Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

In this poetic novel, which I bought after I heard the author interviewed on NPR, Jeet Thayil tries to do two things: immerse the reader in the feeling of Bombay opium den, and in opium intoxication itself, and at the same time depict the changes in Bombay from the 1970s to the present. He has achieved the first goal admirably, conveying the attraction, the culture, the people, the hallucinatory dreams, the seediness, the atmosphere, all in hypnotically beautiful prose (Thayil is a published poet who was, in fact, an opium smoker in Bombay in the 70s and later). He introduces compelling characters, from the lovely and smart prostitute Dimple who prepares the opium pipes, works in a brothel, and is emphatically not what she appears to be, to a Chinese refugee from the travails of Maoism in the 50s, to the complex Rashid who runs the opium den, to a customer of Rashid's who also works for a gangster, to artists and writers,and many more. Thayil paints a picture of a world that could have existed in much the same way for centuries.

He is less successful, in my opinion, in developing a plot that takes Bombay into the modern hurried, international, business-focused era (he rejects the transformation into Mumbai), as first young foreign travelers descend on Rashid's and them political unrest and most importantly heroin disrupt and ultimately destroy the opium culture, sending some of the characters into a caricature of rehab. He clearly means the culture of opium use to symbolize the old Bombay, slow and based on personal relationships and cooperation, and heroin to symbolize the transition to harshness and individualism. It doesn't quite work, at least for me.

The strength of the novel is in its portrayal of the opium world, starting with a one-sentence, six-page, prologue; its portraits of people who have, each in their own way, lost a great deal; its meditations on death and reincarnation, responsibilities to parents and children, religion, sex, and loss; and its poetic language. I found the book difficult to put down, even as I became dissatisfied as it moved on to its conclusion.

The novel frequently uses Hindi words/slang. Most can be figured out from the context, but some remain obscure.

Just thumbed your review of Where China meets India. It's going on my wish list since the library doesn't have it. Although we do have From the land of green ghosts and Finding George Orwell in Burma . . .

Thanks, Ardene! It only came out in the past several months, I think.

29. How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish

I hesitate to even list this book here, as I can't say I read it; I really only skimmed it because it annoyed me so, although I kept hoping it would get better. Fish, a professor of both English and law, who describes himself as a connoisseur of sentences, has a tone I don't like, but more importantly he compares his methods for learning to write to musicians practicing scales. He believes that if budding writers copy the form of various kinds of sentences, which he enumerates, they can later start to add in content. Maybe if I read the book more carefully I would have appreciated Fish's argument more, but the best parts of the book were the quotes from writers who are far, far better than he is. (Note that I'm 'm partially copying the last sentence of A Tale of Two Cities, one of the lines Fish recommends as an example.)

ah, a VOA book. Gack. (Voice Of Authority)

Hm. Fish has an interesting, if ancient idea, much like setting young painters down to copy the masters, learning as they do. (I don't paint, but I do put together jigsaw puzzles if they depict great art, and I do learn to see the art better.) Sorry the VOA got in the way. I may still take a look at it. For a non-writer, I have quite a collection of books on writing.

Fish, a lawyer who describes himself as a connoisseur of sentences

Although I am not overly familiar with the inflammatory writer, he does have a bit more in the way of credentials:

From Wikipedia:

He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1999 to 2004 he was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at The John Marshall Law School from 2000 until 2002. He also held joint appointments in the Departments of Political Science and Criminal Justice, and was the chairman of the Religious Studies Committee. During his tenure there, he recruited professors well respected in the academic community and garnered a lot of attention for the College. After resigning as dean in a high-level dispute with the state of Illinois over funding UIC, Fish spent a year teaching in the Department of English. The Institute for the Humanities at UIC named a lecture series in his honor, which is still ongoing. In June 2005, he accepted the position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, teaching in the FIU College of Law. In November 2010 he joined the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, a start-up institution in Savannah, Georgia. He has also been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science since 1985 ...Fish's 2001 book, How Milton Works, reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton.

Thanks for that info, Lisa. That does give him more credibility, but I still didn't like the book! Now I wonder whether he even is a lawyer or just a professor of law, so I think I'll change my description.

To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

I don't like him either. ;-)