Here’s the annual list of books I read this year. Fewer than I expected, to be sure, but… that’s life. A lot of these happened to be the hard copy books I brought with me, or mailed to myself, when we came to Vietnam in March… which is to say, I was reading them because I wanted to get ’em all out of the way before the end of our time here, so as to have no sent or brought them in vain. I’d hoped to read them all, but I’m a slower reader than I like, and it’s been …
I posted about the book on Julian the Apostate that I was reading back in November, but never got around to posting how the rest of the book went. I’ll pore over what I read this year (less than I’d hoped) once it’s next year, and just highlight some of the fun from Julian for the moment…
When my friend, fellow Poundian, and coworker Jason Silvis left South Korea–I think in 2005–he gave me a copy of William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, I imagine probably because the SFnal elements and the sheer challenge of the book would appeal to me. He had given the book a good hard try, but–at least from the pencil markings he’d made–didn’t get very far into it. Having just finished reading the book, I can see why. It’s a flawed book, even for a first novel, and not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination… or, rather, I …
I’ve recently read some really good books, and am working out just what I want to say about them, but in the meantime, I’ve just started on a biography by Adrian Murdoch’s titled The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World. Julian is, basically, as the book suggests, the last great pagan emperor of Rome, which… well, given my occasional musings on how European history might have been different had paganism resisted being steamrolled by Christianity–perhaps, by more effectively co-opting elements of it, in the way Christianity actually did to paganism–the topic excited me. Two …
Miyako no Sora is the school song of the First High School of Tokyo, the one its students sang in farewell to classmates who had to leave to go to war. One after another they went away, as if beckoned by some great invisible hand, and it seems that for a time the song echoed through the school grounds, morning and night. We learned it from an alumnus of this school, when his company happened to be stationed in the same town that we were. It was a fine tune for sending off young men, a tune with a bright, …