Tag: Books Read 2015

My 2015 Readings

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Well, it’s 2016. I hope I read more this year than I did last. This list is a little incomplete: there’s some more game stuff I read, some of it in part and some in full. But it’s close enough to a list of all the books I finished, so I’ll go with this. My Library at LibraryThing It’s hard to pick standouts, because there were a lot of great books. Having so little time to read, I focused on things I felt I’d really enjoy. Still, if I were to recommend a few books, I guess I’d go with …

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The Books of September-December 2015

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Well, the reading’s been a bit slow. I had an intense semester, and Mrs. Jiwaku was in the last trimester of pregnancy… and then the baby came. All things considered, I guess I read a fair bit, but it doesn’t feel like a lot. Not as much as I usually read. Then again, it’s been a productive few months, and time with the baby is good. Anyway, here’s what I’ve read since September.

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So Saith Xenophon

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If you’re considering tabletop RPG systems and thinking about how XP (experience points) should work, or maybe just thinking about a fresh perspective on how adventurers might see what they’re doing, you could probably do worse than to read some old Greek manuals on hunting: Do not envy those who push ahead rashly for their own advantage, either in their private business or in public affairs. Remember that the best of them, although well thought of, are envied, while the evil ones are both ill thought of and badly off. For they make off with the property of the private citizens and that of …

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July/August Books

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My last stretch of comments on books was really, really long. 5,400-odd words long, if I recall right. So I’m going to try for shorter and pithier this time. Should be easier, since I read less than I’d hoped I would, but even so… shorter. Pithier. Also: I have been feeling like I have been reading too few books by women, so I did something about it. At least on the fiction side I achieved parity—three female authors and three male ones—but I’m not so concerned about the nonfiction/research books, since you don’t get to choose who writes research books pertinent …

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The Lais of Marie de France

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Though I don’t read it often enough, writing from the Middle Ages almost always gets me… at least, when I can get myself to read it, and, of course, when it’s actually accessible to me.  There’s something truly fascinating about Medieval literature, something fresh about it—probably, I think, because it operates along such different lines from modern fiction. So the other day I read a book that I’ve been meaning to get around to for almost two decades, ever since reading a small part of it for a course—The Lais of Marie de France. Who was she? Well, as with all authors of the time, it’s hard …

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Black Envy, White Envy, and Creativity as an Act of Love

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I recently checked out Hervé This’s Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism. In its pages, This opines about a dizzying array of things, though one must admit he plays fast and loose sometimes with some of the quotes he makes. (The quote from Plutarch that adorns the sidebar of my teaching subsite, for example, he attributes to Aristophanes.) Likewise, the book could have stood to have more specific, practical explanation of how its general and broad concepts might be applied in practice, though I suppose this book represents Hervé This in a sort of manifesto mode. Even so—or maybe because of this?—a …

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The Record of the Black Dragon Year

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The other day I mentioned how I’ve been reading Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Nok (임진록), titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year.  Lee is a scholar I’ve encountered before, mainly as an editor but also as a translator in the excellent 2-volume Sources of Korean Tradition, as well as A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany: The P’aegwan Chapki of O Sukkwon—the latter, a book I own and I think I’ve loaned out to a friend, but which I haven’t read all the way through. In any case, my curiosity about the Imjin Nok is pretty much rooted in the fact that it’s popular …

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Whilst Nature Was Busy Making Cabbages: The Woman in White

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Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting …

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Readings, January-March 2015

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A slow couple of months, really: the job-hunting and housing situation–staying in a small sublet apartment with no place to sit comfortably and read, and only noisy places outside–combined with moving to another city and adjusting to my new workplace, along with all kinds of other things that recently came up, all conspired to make it hard to get much reading done. But I did get around to these books: Memories and Commentaries by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (link) I’m a Stravinsky junkie, and have been since, I think it was the end of high school or early in freshman year …

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