Now, now, don’t get excited. I’ve not yet read all of my Korean comic book, 놀부가 기가 막혀!… The grammar’s still a little hard for me at this point, and I stumble on the occasional chunk of archaic language, though I am nonetheless puzzling my way through the first part bit by bit. No, the title of this post refers to other readings I’ve recently completed, and there have been a lot of them. Korea: Tradition & Transformation—A History of the Korean People, By Andrew C. Nahm First and foremost is Andrew Nahm’s Korea: Tradition & Transformation—A History of the …

I finished Perdido Street Station, the stunning and gigantic novel by British author China Miéville. Note that, while it is a genre novel, I didn’t specify which kind. I think it definitely is genre, but not like any genre fiction I’ve ever read before. Miéville’s work has been compared to the writing of Mervyn Peake, which my friend Joleen tells me is quite something. I picked up a copy of the Gormenghast Trilogy (in one huge volume) while I was in Texas, and I plan on reading it by the time the year is out (or, at least one of …

Again, found on Arts & Letters Daily (as have been many of the links in today’s posts, because I’m finally catching up there after missing out on a few weeks of updates), another great bio-sketch of Graham Greene which convinces me I ought to take advantage of how many of his works are in the local library and read at least a few.

Why is it that so many artistic wonders were mad? These people could never function in most contexts, but as musicians, painters, writers, they thrived. There’s another bio out now, on one of my favorite writers, Philip K. Dick. It’s called I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, by Emmanuel Carrère, and you can read a review here. Looks good.

As we trade links and debate the importance of blogging to journalism, or who’s influenced who, tons of trash is posted online. Nobody seems to know how to write. Well, not nobody. But you know what? I think this essay on writing essays would do a lot of the blogosphere some good. Makes me wonder what essay-writing looks like when my Korean students do it in Korean. I wonder…

Bonjour paresse is a newish book in France that is apparently selling like mad. It’s basically a kind of satirical attack on the private sector and of course the bureaucracy (oops, I originally typed bureaucrazy, and it might be closer to the truth) of France, but also the whole philosophy of business and working for companies. The author, one Corinne Maier who works for the French Electricity Company (a state-owned operation), seems to have struck oil. The book is a craze in France, and understandably. Jo Johnson writes about the book thus: You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie …

I found a decent poem here and I think you’ll think it’s decent too, in its dubious yet hopeful middle-class rendition of how money and capitalism apparently works.

I was looking for a break from all the fiction I’ve been reading, and I happened to find a book on the shelf at work. It Called How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Actually, the title is longer than that, but everyone seems to know about this book so I’ll leave off typing the (very long) subtitle. Well, I’m not really fully convinced that the Irish “saved civilization” so far, and I’m two-thirds of the way through, but I suppose Cahill might nab me by the end. I doubt it, but it’s possible. Still, what I am enjoying …

There was a time when I would have thought that anyone would agree that being a literate person is a good thing—literacy, by which mean more than a mere ability to read, I also mean a decent knowledge of what has been written, at the very least by significant writers in the world (however one defines that). But since leaving University, I have discovered that, no, in fact, most people don’t think that waY at all. I should have seen it before; while one of my two siblings shares my bookish interest and some of my reading habits, most of …