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

Kafka on the Shore

A few days ago, I made an unsuccessful attempt at reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago . This three volume memoir is highly recommended by Dr. Jordan Peterson, but unfortunately, I scarcely made it thru a quarter of the first volume. I recognize the importance of the work, but after so many tales of arrests and imprisonment during Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union, it becomes a bit tedious.

Putting away The Gulag Archipelago for another day, I began reading a novel I've been wanting to read for quite awhile - Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Naturally, one would expect a novel with Kafka's name in the title to be more than a little unusual and that's certainly the case with Kafka on the Shore , although I would not use the word "Kafkaesque" in describing this book. If anything, I'd be more inclined to compare this work to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita . Murakami's novel is more surreal and hallucinatory than anything Kafka may have written, with the possible exception of The Metamorphosis.

The story takes several bizarre twists and turns. In an interview posted on his English-language website, Murakami says that the secret to understanding the novel lies in reading it several times. That may well be the case.

The novel can, at times verge on the pornographic. The references to the music of Beethoven and Franz Schubert seems to me to be an attempt to draw one away from the novel's potent sexuality. I suppose the graphic descriptions of sex can be considered a very important element of the novel, but it all became too much after a bit.

Like in The Master and Margarita , cats play an integral part of the story. Murakami mentions the works of Natsume Sōseki who, it can be assumed, was an influence on Murakami's writing. It was my original intention to read Murakami's Norwegian Wood next, but I've decided to read Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat first. That book is more in keeping with the direction I seem to be led.

The Kreutzer Sonata

It's not usual for a writer to mention, within a novel, a book that a particular character is reading or has read. The names of other writers often make their way into novels. I've discovered quite a few writers, coming upon their names in a novel I'm reading. Elizabeth von Arnim, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mayne Reid are three examples.

At one point in 2010: Odyssey Two , Dr. Heywood Floyd attempts, unsuccessfully, to read The Kreutzer Sonata in the original Russian. I was a bit confused by that. I was familiar with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as The Kreutzer Sonata, but I was unaware of any book by that name - and certainly not a Russian novel.

With a little web search, I learned that Clarke was referring to a novella by Tolstoy named after Beethoven's sonata. According to the wikipedia article on the novella,"The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the 'animal excesses' and 'swinish connection' governing the relation between the sexes".

The work was banned by the Russian censors and in 1890, the United States Post Office Department attempted to prohibited the mailing of newspapers containing serialized installments of the translated novella. Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a "sexual moral pervert."

Of course, with recommendations like that, I had to download a copy from Project Gutenberg.

I'm certainly no expert on Tolstoy - I've read Anna Karenina twice and attempted to read War and Peace more than that. I was not familiar with his somewhat bizarre take on Christianity. With The Kreutzer Sonata and the other four stories in the ebook I downloaded, Tolstoy goes full blast, bombarding the reader with his strange philosophy.

Reading the wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novella, I learned of a book by Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua, Second Person Singular , which uses Tolstoy's novella as a major plot device. I'd never heard of Kashua prior to this, but now I'm currently reading Second Person Singular and I'm very impressed with his writing. His other books will (somehow) find their way to the queue.

Dr. Jordan Peterson's Book Lists

Anyone who has been a reader of my other blog is surely aware of my fondness for book lists. Since 2011, I've been keeping record of every book I've read throughout the year, and on January 01, 2012 I began what would become an annual tradition for me - the posting of the list of books I had read the previous year.

In 2015, after having read The Hounds of the Baskervilles and discovering it had been #7 on the top ten best sellers of 1902, I found a copy of said list  of best sellers and began reading those novels.

In 2017 I read the top ten best selling novels of 1917.

In 2019, I came upon The 100 best novels written in English. I was not going to attempt to read every book on the list, but I was curious to see how many of those books I had read, how many I had heard of but not read, and how many were completely unknown to me. I was intrigued by number 25 on the list. This book, Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) became the last novel I would read that year.

On his website, Dr. Jordan Peterson has two book lists. One is an incredibly long list consisting of 51 novels, as well as books on Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Religion and Religious History, History/Systems Analysis, and finally, The State of the World with two of his books thrown in for good measure.

The second list is considerably shorter - just 15 books. He states that this list come about by people asking him what they should read to educate themselves. He went on to say that he found the books on that list to be particularly influential in his intellectual development.

I would concern myself with the novels on the two lists and stay away from the non fiction.

I'm actually surprised by the number of books on his lists that I've already read. There are also a few that I'm surprised to find on his list.

The Maltese Falcon made, not only Dr. Peterson's list of Great Novels, but was ranked #54 on the 100 best novels written in English list. I enjoyed the novel, but frankly I can't understand how or why it made both these lists.

Another novel on Dr.Peterson's lists which I found surprising is The Master and Margarita by Russian writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. Again, I very much enjoyed that novel, enough to read twice, but I can't see it on a list for Great Novels.

Not every book on Dr. Peterson's lists are available for free download - though many are. I've collected 20 of these novels, even those I've read and will read or reread many of them this year.