My Library at LibraryThing One might think that the animated parade above of the covers of the fifty-some books (plus a couple I’m partway through at the moment, which I’m counting since they were and will continue to be huge reading projects) is not bad for a year’s reading… but if you look closely at […]
Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll […]
While I must admit to having read none of Merwin’s poetry, I found myself quite curious about his book, The Mays of Ventadorn; since encountering the most famous of the songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, I have always considered him my favorite troubadour. (And while this is not unusual–Bernart was something of a rockstar in […]
Those reading along will note that I missed last week’s Ezra Pound post: I got busy, and am still working my way through the source text I want to discuss. To add to that, I’m currently traveling and though I’ve read and thought about Cantos XXXI-XXXIII, I won’t be able to post about them until […]
I haven’t read a lot of Korean fiction lately. Of course, I haven’t read a lot of fiction lately, so that is part of why. But after a conversation in which this book came up, I decided to pick it up and try again, after having set it down twenty pages in, a year or […]