Last year I did my readings so as to ensure that I would read 50 books within the span of a single Lunar New Year, a kind of interesting challenge for the first time, pushing myself to read more and in a certain way. Of course, I found that the fact I was doing a Lunar New Year list affected how I was reading. Not all of my choices were affected by this, of course — if I’d been maniacal about it, I wouldn’t have joined the Ezra Pound Reading Group at the Uni, because reading Pound is slow and …
Tag: Lunar New Year Readings (2005-06)
Lunar New Year Reads, #50: North, by Seamus Heaney
Relieved exhalation of breath. Seamus Heaney (here’s his Nobel Prize website bio page) is a poet I come to again and again. The first thing I ever read of his writing, though, besides a couple of pieces in an anthology, was prose — essays, I believe, on poetics and poetry. For a few years, I read almost nothing of him, until I arrived in Jeonju. After some time, I ventured to take a look in the English-language texts collection at the Uni where I was working, and what do you know, but they had a lot of his poetry, to …
Lunar New Year Reads, #49: The Painted Bed by Donald Hall
The Painted Bed is a strong, hard book. It is painful, because, as one soon realizes, the title announces its theme, only a few pages into the book, is the deathbed of the poet’s wife, the bed of their sleeping, their dreams, the love and their sex in life, and the site of his wife’s passage into the dark realms as well. The book reads as a slow progression from outright grief, through the aftermath of a wife’s death, then into a kind of frame-cut — a jump to a bigger perspective, all the living and dying and movement of …
Lunar New Year Reads, #48: The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius
This is a Roman novel, which is a first for me: I’ve read Roman poetry, and Roman speeches, but never a Roman novel until now. Well, strictly speaking it’s actually not a Roman novel, but a Carthaginean novel, though it was written in Latin. The translation is a very old one, by William Adlington, which is normal in the Wordsworth Classics series: the texts are very inexpensive, but one must read very old and somewhat difficult translations. The difficulty, though, is apparently reflective in Apuleius’ own handling of the Latin language, one he may have learned as his natuve tongue …
Lunar New Year Reads, #47 (sort of): 소리와 고요사�?� (Between Sound and Silence) by 고창수 (Chang Soo Ko)
This book is, technically speaking, not the #47 book of the year. It’s just that, as I looked through my shelves for something to read, it occurred to me that I’d brought a spare copy to have passed on to a poet-friend (my old teacher, Tim Lilburn) — and read it on the plane ride over to Canada — last summer. It’s probably more like book #22 of my Lunar New Year list, but I’m not going to go back and adjust all the numbers. They can be left to signify my reviews, rather than my readings. Between Sound and …