The October, 2024 Reading List

 

The time has come again to post a list of books that I've read this past month. With ten books, October leads the year in total number of books read per month.

Two of these books were recommended by the folks at the Commentary Magazine daily podcast; one of those being written by a podcast regular, Christine Rosen - The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. The second book - Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Lévy.

In her book, Rosen discusses the cultural and emotional difficulties stemming from our addiction to modern technology.

Israel Alone focuses on the isolation of Israel and the tragedy of October 7, 2023 starting with Lévy’s eyewitness account the day after the attack by Hamas terrorists.

Two of the books on the list were written by one of my favorite modern writers - Haruki Murakami. The 1985 novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the 2004 novel, After Dark.

I wrote about three of the books making the list in a previous blog post - Arthur Koestler's Trilogy .

The three remaining books making the list were written by this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang. 

A review of her first novel, The Vegetarian can be found by following this link. Four of Han's novels have been translated into English; three made my October reading list. In addition to The Vegetarian, I managed to finish The White Book, described as "an exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white", and Human Acts , a story one boy's death during the Gwangju Uprising of 18 May 1980 in South Korea.

The list:

The Extinction of Experience    Christine Rosen

Israel Alone           Bernard-Henri Lévy

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World    Haruki Murakami

After Dark                  Haruki Murakami

The Gladiators           Arthur Koestler

Darkness at Noon       Arthur Koestler

Arrival and Departure  Arthur Koestler

The Vegetarian             Han Kang

The White Book            Han Kang

Human Acts                  Han Kang               

Arthur Koestler's Trilogy

 

In the early 1980s, I came upon a copy of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon in my public library and until recently, I believed that, in spite of the fact that I couldn't remember story details, I had read the novel. I wanted to "reread" the book recently and discovered that the book is part of a trilogy on, as Koestler wrote in a postscript to the third novel, "the conflict between morality and expediency".

If I was to "reread" Darkness at Noon, I wanted to read the the other novels in the trilogy as well. The first novel in the series is The Gladiators which portrays the effects of the Spartacus revolt of 73 BC in the Roman Republic. The novel was certainly interesting, but I would not classify it as a "must-read". If I were to grade it on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the book, perhaps a 6.5 at best. One odd problem with the book is the mentioning of the Romans eating "corn". At first, I thought Koestler's translator was using the word, as it is sometimes used in British English, as a generic term for cereal grain. However, at one point, the word was translated as "maize" which is strictly "Indian corn". Maize was not available to the Romans before the Columbian exchange in the late 15th Century. I put that error on the translator.

It didn't take long into my reading of Darkness at Noon to admit that I did not read the book in the 1980s as I had imagined. Unlike the first book in the trilogy, I would classify this book as a classic and a "must-read". The novel is set between 1938 and 1940, after the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. I would put this novel along side Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Albert Camus' The Stranger.

The third novel in Arthur Koestler's trilogy is Arrival and Departure. This was Koestler's first novel written originally in English. According to wikipedia, Arrival and Departure "is often considered to be the weakest of the three. " I wouldn't agree. While not exactly reaching the level of Darkness at Noon , I believe it is better than The Gladiators. The time line and theme of the third book in the trilogy is much closer to the second than is the story of the Spartacus revolt.

If one has the time and inclination, then read the entire trilogy. If you don't have the time, read Darkness at Noon. As I said, that one is a "must-read".