For anyone who’s read Graham Greene before, what I’m going to say should come as no surprise at all, but what a writer! I’ve just finished my first trip into his world, via Jeonju University library’s copy of The Quiet American. I saw the movie last year at the Jeonju International Film Festival, I believe it was, and what a movie that was. I imagined that perhaps it had even outstripped the original book, when I saw it, for all the depth of character and the depth of political and cultural texture. But the book is even more powerful than …

I just finished the novel about two minutes ago. Not gonna go too deep into this except to say that this author Russell Hoban, who wrote this book I just finished, Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, is a far different man from the person who wrote the mind-blowing SF novel Riddley Walker. That’s not to speak ill of the fellow and his work, because both novels are absolutely excellent. It’s just that they are such very different works. Riddley Walker, which I haven’t read in a couple of years (and which, I believe it was Adam, kindly sent me from Texas, and …

Sappho. Translated by Mary Barnard, Foreword by Dudley Fitts. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1956 (renewed 1986). (link) Let me begin with a quotation, and it shall be nearly all I need to say: You may forget but Let me tell youthis: someone insome future timewill think of us If you like powerful, simple verse, this book of translations is for you. Mary Barnard’s Sappho has a voice that rings across 2600 years with the crisp and particular clarity of poems by a woman friend one has left behind in one’s home country while traveling, who sends letters with poems …

On Sunday night I read the short novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. It wasn’t anything I spent money on, I actually got it at the place where it will shortly turn up once again: at a local bar, where English books are left for anyone who is interested in them to borrow them. This book is alright, I suppose, and while I don’t understand why the book won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1928. To me, it seems a somewhat unremarkable novel in almost all respects. Perhaps he affected American literature so profoundly that the …

The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis (1946) Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow (1994) In the last 24 hours I’ve finished these two books with rather radically different views on similar issues. I’m not sure how much I have to say about the different views except to say that I am certainly more comfortable in Morrow’s understanding of the world than Lewis’s, and that Morrow is certainly more respectful of different views than Lewis. Lewis tells a story of a visitor to Hell and Heaven. Though the traveler goes by bus from one realm to another, the mode of his writing …

Neal Stephenson is still cool. Thanks for the link, Marv.

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 …