The Books of 2012

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 my list of books (there’s a list below), you’ll find a couple of things worth noting. Some of the books are short; some are game books (which are usually short as well); some are slim tomes of verse. I actually felt like I didn’t get …

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

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 be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

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The Mays of Ventadorn by W.S. Merwin

The Mays of Ventadorn
This entry is part 27 of 59 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

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 his day, and is well-remembered today–I was pleased to discover that my fascination was shared by Merwin.) This book was published by National Geographic Directions, and is part of a series titled The Literary Travel Series, a job for which Merwin is well-suited, having spent …

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Ezra Pound Posts Delayed

This entry is part 26 of 59 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

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 sometime tomorrow or the next day. I don’t really have a lot to say about them at the moment, so maybe that’s a sign more thought is needed anyway. Anyway, more coming soon…  

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Our Twisted Hero by Yi Munyol, Trans. Kevin O’Rourke

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 two ago. I’ve been ill this weekend, and needing a break from grading, so I’ve read two short novels so far, of which this is the second. Our Twisted Hero is quite transparently an allegory of the process of dictatorship — especially the cult-of-personality type …

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It’s Not An All Night Fair by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Translated by C.W. Watson

It’s Not An All Night Fair is a short novel–indeed, more of a short novella–by probably the most famous Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Though I haven’t finished the other Toer book I started (All That Is Gone) that’s becaise it’s a collection of short stories, and I often pick my way through those slowly — nothing wrong with the collection, but nothing compels me to read it in one fell swoop. On the other hand, if I couldn’t finish It’s Not An All Night Fair in one go, it’d reflect badly either on the author, or on me. Happily, …

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Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (And Thoughts of My Father the Story-Teller)

This is only the second biography of Moura Budberg that I have read — the first was Nina Berberova’s biography, which I picked up in Seattle in 2006 and, as it goes with me, took until 2010 for me to read. (In that respect, I’m doing much better with Tania Alexander’s memoir Tania: Memories of a Lost World — I received it back in March, amid a shipment of Pound-related books, and have read it only a couple of months later.) I don’t have a lot to say about the book, but I think as a memoirs go it was well-written, thoughtful, …

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Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stories of God

Those who know me well can guess that my feelings about this book are, but they might guess for the wrong reasons, so I’ll just come out and say it: I have nothing against fiction with deities in it. Hell, I’m reading Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and if you can find a modern English text (except perhaps by Neil Gaiman or N.K. Jemisin) more chock full of deities than that, I’ll be surprised. I was on a Rilke kick back in 2009, when I was traveling through the US. While I’d read Letters to a Young Poet over a decade before …

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Pound and the Occult: Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult

This entry is part 14 of 59 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Depending on where you stand in terms of the literary establishment, my past week’s break from Canto-reading and Canto-blogging was either well spent, or a waste: personally, I consider it very well spent, but Leon Surette gives the impression that the majority of academic literary critics would disagree. Their antipathy towards him is perhaps understandable: they may not be emperors, but they dislike having a dissenter point out their lack of clothes as much as anyone, while Surette does so not just intelligently, but consciously… and not just because they’re dubious about Pound’s occult interests, but also because of what …

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Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

While there are many books I’ve read in the last few years and thoroughly enjoyed, it’s rare that I read something and feel as if I had been missing something amazing for years and years, and felt a desire to kick myself for taking so long to get around to something. Because I feel like I’ve learned something about the world, reading this novel: something desperately important and something we have forgotten, to our own peril. I first read Jack Womack’s word in 2000 or 2001 — I’d say probably the latter, just before I left Canada for Korea — …

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