The March, 2024 Reading List

 

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with this blog knows that I am an avid reader; I am constantly looking for recommendations for books to download. When a book recommendation does pique my interest, I'll go to a particular website that is basically an online library where almost every book imaginable is available. I'll come upon the name of an author and download everything the author has published in English. As a consequence, I have more e-books than I can read in my lifetime. The e-books will be filed away, to be retrieved later.

Just before finishing 1Q84by Haruki Murakami I went to my digital library for an e-book to put into the queue for March. I don't recall exactly when I downloaded Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck - the file properties says Feb.14- and I couldn't remember where the recommendation for the novel came from. I did a web search for Erpenbeck and the reviews I found for her work were very impressive. Visitation was the first book I read this month. Sadly, I was disappointed.

From a review on themodernnovel.org:
"Erpenbeck really does an excellent job of showing German history of the twentieth century in such a short book. The valuables hidden in the lake when the Soviets arrive and buried when the architect leaves the area are equated with the burial of the bodies of local Jews found in the forest. Erpenbeck has written not a Holocaust novel nor an East German novel but a German novel, warts and all, showing us that Germany has buried its past but, like the bodies of the Jews or the valuables hidden in the lake, everything come back to the surface sooner or later. Everything except the gardener, who disappears."

If you're looking for a fictionalized account of German history of the twentieth century you be better off reading Günter Grass.

Next on the list for March is The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon. This is #17 in Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti series. It's no secret that I'm a fan of the series.

From time to time, I'll get book recommendations from the books I'm reading. That was the case when I reread,last year, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I discovered the book was a favorite of Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe. It was also the case when I came upon a character in a book by Haruki Murakami who had a copy of Oliver Twist in their library. At one time, both books would have been considered classics in literature, but have fallen out of favor due to the racist views of Twain and Charles Dickens.

Oliver Twist became book # 3 for March. Dickens' antisemitism may have been typical for people of his social class in the 19th Century, but it makes reading his books today difficult. In Oliver Twist, Fagin is particularly despicable - so is Bill Sikes for that matter; but in the case of Fagin, Dickens is forever reminding us that he is a Jew. Dickens could have just as easily portrayed Fagin as a villain without the antisemitism.

Ring by Koji Suzuki is the first in a series of Japanese mystery horror novels by the writer. His second book in the series will be the first in April's reading list.

#5 on the March book list is Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. Wikipedia describes the novel as..... "a Bildungsroman that tells the story of Japanese railroad engineer Tsukuru Tazaki". Haruki Murakami continues to live up to my expectations.

Next on the list is The Three-Body Problem by Chinese Sci Fi writer Liu Cixin. The book is the first in a trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past. The book has recently been released as a Netflix movie and was highly recommended by the folks at the Commentary Magazine podcast. I have to say that I can't add my recommendation. Most of the book went right over my head and I had difficulty following along. It's unlikely that I'll finish the trilogy.

Reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki as a bildungsroman brought to mind another novel which falls into that category - Demian by Hermann Hesse. I read Demian fifty years ago, so needless to say, I remembered very little of it. It was so long ago that I'm not 100% certain I actually finished it. I have two translations of the book in my digital library; the 1965 English translation by Michael Roloff & Michael Lebeck and the 2013 translation by Damion Searls. I couldn't decide which version I should read so I read the two simultaneously. I have to say I prefer Searls translation. According to Wikipedia, there are three additional English translations, although I was unable to locate a free ebook version of those. There is, however, an English translation from 1923 by N. H. Priday available as an audiobook at Internet Archive.

The next book on the list was also a recommendation from the Commentary Magazine podcast. A Brutal Design by Zachary Solomon is a nightmarish, dystopian novel. It starts off Kaffaesque and then quickly branches off into a world that is a cross between Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Now, for the list:

Visitation    by Jenny Erpenbeck
The Girl of his Dreams    by Donna Leon
Oliver Twist   by Charles Dickens
Ring    by Koji Suzuki
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage  by Haruki Murakami
The Three-Body Problem  by Liu Cixin
Demian   by Hermann Hesse (Tr. Michael Roloff & Michael Lebeck)
Demian   by Hermann Hesse (Tr.Damion Searls)
A Brutal Design   by Zachary Solomon

Reading List For June, 2022

A new month has arrived and so the time has come to post another monthly book list. This list contains twelve books - the most since the March Reading List.

I didn't post a review for every book on the list (there are links for those I did review), but I have to say that I found all 12 of the books read in June to be worthy of recommendation.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I enjoyed the 3 novels written by Japanese writers - Kenzaburō Ōe, Shusaku Endo, and Naoya Shiga. The genre is a favorite of mine.

 A pleasant surprise for me was my discovery of the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz. One of his novels was recommended to me by the website where I get most of the books I read - 1lib.ph. The wikipedia article linked to gives Mahfouz' most famous novels as The Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gebelawi (also known as Children of Our Alley). The last two books on this list are the first two books in The Cairo Trilogy . The third book in the trilogy will be the first book I'll read in July. (Children of Gebelawi will be the 2nd book I'll read in July.)

So now, the list -

The Silent Cry     by Kenzaburō Ōe
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn   by Mark Twain
Created Equal: The Painful Past, Confusing Present, and Hopeful Future of Race in America   by Dr Ben Carson
The Caged Virgin   by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Mortality   by Christopher Hitchens
Scandal   by Shusaku Endo
Einstein's Dreams   by Alan Lightman
The Founding Myth:Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American   by Andrew L Seidel
A Dark Night's Passing   by Naoya Shiga
Black Water   by Joyce Carol Oates
Palace Walk   by Naguib Mahfouz
Palace of Desire   by Naguib Mahfouz

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Growing up during the early days of television, I was often entertained by Hollywood movies from the 1930s and 1940s - I suppose copyright laws at the time made the repeated showing of these films on television lucrative.

One such movie was the 1939 film, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn starring Mickey Rooney.

By the 1960s - thanks in part to films like the one mentioned above, Mark Twain's novel had gained the reputation of being a "children's' book". For that reason I had never read the novel, thinking it would be too immature for me.

I'd recently come to read (and in some cases, reread) the works of writer Kenzaburō Ōe. Reading over biographical sketches of Ōe as well, I learned that the Japanese writer credited The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  as having a major impact on his life. Upon learning of the novel's influence on Ōe's writing, I decided to read the novel when I finished reading Ōe's The Silent Cry .

The novel is certainly not a children's novel.

Thankfully for my reading experience, the Mickey Rooney movie version isn't a 100% faithful adaptation of the novel. Many parts of the novel were a surprise to me. This is especially true of the ending.

The biggest criticism some modern readers have for the novel is Twain's frequent use of "the N word". Some have called the book racist on that account. I'm not one of those critics.

Some, like myself, see the book as satire and an indictment against racism.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, and at times may be difficult for 21st century readers to follow. This is true regarding the dialog of both the white and the black characters. Many of the characters - of both races - don't come off as being particularly intelligent. A good deal of the humor comes from Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, the "Duke" and the "King" being basically doofuses.

The language may be a problem for many readers, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is really one of the Great American Novels.

The Silent Cry - Kenzaburō Ōe

As I mentioned in my last post, the last book I managed to read in May was A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe. I was not quite finished reading his novel, The Silent Cry ; it wouldn't be going onto May's list but would be the first book read in June.

The novel tells the story of two brothers in the early 1960s who travel to their ancestral village in order to rearrange their lives and sell part of their remaining property to the owner of a large supermarket chain.

Although not a sequel, by any means, the novel shares elements with Ōe's earlier work; as in A Personal Matter , the protagonist is the father of a mentally disabled child. In both novels, there are suicides, alcoholism, sexual infidelity and dreams of Africa. I didn't, however, find The Silent Cry as "disturbing and shocking" as the earlier novel.

Kenzaburō Ōe is not an easy read - I would classify him as a modern day Japanese Dostoevsky.

Ōe has often sighted Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of his favorite novels. On that recommendation, I've begun reading the Twain novel.