January 2010 Monthly Reading Life Review

This month I thought I would do something a little different for my month end post.

Reading done right has magic powers.    As I looked at the books I read in January I noticed that I have posted on more older works than I have in the past, one from the 11th century and one from the 18th.     I also read a number of novels set in the past and in diverse locations.  So everybody is invited on a grand around the world sea cruise.   Let us pick up our fellow travelers first.

The first port stop to pick up passenger is the courts of Angor, the great Mogul Emperor, with Salman Rushdie as our tour guide.    Staying a bit longer in India  and advancing a couple of hundred years we departed from the banks of the Ganges river to cross a Sea of Poppies with Captain Amitav Ghosh at the helm.    We have one more stop to make in India-some call center workers during One Night at the Call Center want to get out of the office very badly and I do not blame them.   Our next scheduled stop is Tokyo.

Stepping into the way back machine we go to 11th century Japan to hear some of the Tales of Ise and pick up a Samurai and his lady.  Skipping ahead a bit we make a stop in Tokyo to meet Naomi and Jiji.    Naomi's first question is "where are the ships stores".     From Tokyo we cruise along way to Johannesburg South Africa in the 1980s.   We pick up a very nice family there and the father wants to tell what he calls My Son's Story.   From there we cruise on to London.    A very large slightly odd gentleman in his 60s along with a very well dressed young man in his 30s come on board just having finished A Tour of the Hebrides.    We cannot help but notice that the younger man seems to write down everything his companion says.    We also take on Jeannette who for some reason wants to go at once to the kitchen so she can advise the head chef that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.   Every body on board settles into shipboard life for the long trans-Atlantic portion of the trip.   James Boswell charms everyone but seems most interested in Naomi.    Dr Johnson at once engages in a conversation with our Samurai poet, he being the person Dr Johnson can learn the most from.     Our guests from South Africa confuse the captain by asking in what portions of the ship are they allowed to go.    The call center workers go wild when they find out all drinks and food are free.    So far none of our other Indian guests have left their cabins.

Our first New World stop is Birmingham Alabama in the 1930s where Harper Lee introduces us to a wonderful family.   The father in the family will end up friends with Dr Johnson but gives up on comparing professional notes from their work as Attorneys with Boswell.   His children cannot help but stare at some of the other guests.   Only one stop to go and that is Kingstown Jamaica in the 1840s.   We cross the Wide Sargasso Sea, taking on as a pilot through some very treacherous waters, Jean Rhys who introduces us to Mr Rochester and his wife Antoinette who he sometimes calls "Bertha".    Dr Johnson is completely taken with Antoinette and has to lecture Boswell about his colonial attitude toward her and the Indians.   Dr Johnson knows his friend Edmund Burke was right when he said that the cultural roots of Indian are much older than England.    Everybody is a bit confused as to why half way through the cruise Mr Rochester announces his wife will be confined to the cabin from now on.

Everyone is on board now.   It is up to the power of our imagination if we want to join this cruise are not.   Some of our guests are unpredictable.   The Emperor Angkor insisted on at least 50 cabins for his harem favorites, guards, foot tasters etc.    The  Indians other than the call center workers keep mostly to themselves.    The call center workers all consume mass quantities.    Boswell was a bit annoyed when Jeanette had no interest in him.    Many very diverse foods were served from collard greens and ham hocks for our guests from Birmingham to boiled sea weed with cod roe for Jiji.    The Emperor invites Johnson to his court to be his adviser.   Johnson says he will be honored to come as a guest but only if the Emperor will be his friend and not his patron.   Boswell has to be advised that it is a very bad idea to try to sneak into the cabin of one of the Harem girls of the Emperor.
  

Here is what I read in January 2010

1  The Tales of Ise by Arihara no Narihira

2  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3  The Yellow Light Bookstore by Lewis Buzbee

4  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

5 One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat

6  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

7  Sea of Poppies by Amitar Ghosh

8  The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

9 My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

10  Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

11  The Journal of a Tour to The Hebrides by James Boswell

January 2010 was a great month.     I read first  works  by four writers  new to authors  me I will for sure return to.   I revisited two old friends.   I added Jean Rhys to "my read everything they have written list." 

Reading Challenges

So far this year I have completed 9 reading challenges

I am still reading for 28 challenges-I expect to complete between six to ten  more challenges in February, with any luck.   Some new challenges will be started as the year goes on  and I will join some of them I am sure.   On July 30, 2010 I will be joining the Japanese Literature  4 challenge.    I fully intend to complete all these challenges but will not be stressed if I do not.   It is the journey that matters to me. I will give a more detailed challenge update next month.

 Notes to Manila readers-if any body in the GMA wants to work out a book swap please contact me-also we went to Cafe Juanita in the Fort Yesterday with some friends and it is the best restaurant we have yet been to in the GMA

As always I give my sincerest thanks to those who read my posts.   

Three Great Reading Challenges

This week I am joining three new reading challenges that offer the potential for edification as well as a chance to learn about some great books through my fellow challenge participants.

POC Reading Challenge

Last year I read and posted on 51 books by People of Color (POC).   I am understanding this to mean people of non-European ancestory.   I plan to continue with this in 2010 with a focus on Japanese, Filipino and Indian authors.   Last year I discovered several new to me authors who are POC that I have added them  to my "read everything they have written list".   I am joining this challenge in support of the project of diversified reading and in order to learn about some more great new to me authors.

The Rules for the POC Reading Challenge are on the challenge blog-There are reading lists and links for books reviewed.    There are various levels of commitment.   I will commit to level 5-16 to 25 books.  

Scottish Reading Challenge

Wuthering Expectations is hosting another challenge I found irresitable, The Scottish Literature Challenge.   The rules are simple-read one book by a Scottish author (written before 1914 or so) in 2010.  A unique feature for this challenge is the host, Amateur Reader, has promised to read any book that participants read (if he has not read it before).    He has done a lot of work providing reading suggestions.   I have in fact already read and posted on Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.  I hope later in the year to read a work by Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott and if I can work it in Tobias Smollett but I have completed the terms of this challenge.  I hope to read a lot of good reviews of Scottish books.

Jewish Literature Challenge 2010

The rules of the Jewish Challenge 2010 (runs from February 27 to Sept 10, 2010) are simple and explained on the link to the challenge.   The challenge post also gives us lots of reading ideas.  

(To challenge hosts, I cannot post all the badges for every challenge I am reading for in 2010 on my blog as it will slow down my load time.)

"The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" by James Boswell

The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell (1785, 260 pages, reprinted by Penguin Classics, 1984-Included in the same book is Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands)

I have been following Wuthering Expectations by Amateur Reader for some time now.   When he announced he would be hosting a Scottish reading challenge I knew at once that this was my spark to revisit an old friend, James Boswell, and a master of The Reading Life, Samuel Johnson.      I have read a lot of Boswell and some, though not nearly enough, Johnson.   I know everyone in the challenge will know who James Boswell and Samuel Johnson are but I want to explain who they are in my mind.

James Boswell (1709-84) was the son of a judge on the Scottish supreme court.   He grew up in Edinburgh Scotland and studied law, at the insistence of his father, at the university of Edinburgh.    Boswell was not a great attorney.   His first client was hung for stealing sheep.

Boswell loved the fast life, talking to the famous, the high and the low life of the big cities, and spent his life either trying to please his very harsh father or rebelling against him.  He also wrote the best biography ever written in any language, The Life of Samuel Johnson.

He  published a travel book about Corsica that was a best seller.   He met the greats and not so greats of Europe.   David Hume who scared him to death with his steadfast rationality and Voltaire  who tolerated the visit.   When Johnson passed away Boswell rushed his account of their joint trip to the Hebrides Islands into print so he could stake a claim to be the biographer of Samuel Johnson.  

Samuel Johnson is more read about than read.   He has a very good claim to be the greatest literary critic of all times.     He produced, with the help of some Scots, a massive dictionary of the English Language that the English liked to boast was superior to the one created for French by an army of scholars working several times as long.   He wrote speeches for famous politicians.   He wrote two wonderful poems, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and "London".    He wrote a series of periodical essays that are unsurpassed anywhere.    His personality could be harsh but he was an extremally generous person.   In conversation he "spoke for victory" and did like to dominate with the force of his intellect.   To me, he is the sort of man who could have written the great wisdom texts of the world.

Boswell and Johnson had often talked of making a joint tour of the Hebrides Islands of northern Scotland.    (The Wikipedia article linked above gives a lot of interesting historical  data on the Hebrides).    Travel in those days was an adventure and the Hebrides Islands were at the time a very poor area ruled by near feudal lairds.   Most of the residents spoke only Scottish Gaelic and according to Boswell went barefoot most of the time.   

A lot of the  fun of reading Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides is in the conversations between Johnson and others, including Boswell.   Boswell was a very keen observer (with some big blind spots) of social situations and we learn a lot about life in Scotland from his observations.   To me most of all it is a tale of a friendship between two very (Very) different sorts of men and a wonderful account of the pleasure of traveling.   Boswell said in his advertisement for the third edition of the Journal that the works of Johnson will be read as long as the English Language is spoken.   So far he has been right (lots of his works can be read for free on line).

I am a bit of a loggerheads how to post on the body of the journal.     After some reflection I decided I would try to illustrate the flavor of the book by looking at some passages.

Most biographies of  the times were hymns to great men.    Boswell was one of the first to give small details that let us know a person.

"I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures in Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles.   When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club"

Johnson is notorious for his joking comments about the Scots who were considered somewhat backwoods by Londoners.   

"To Scotland however he ventured: and he returned in great good humor with his prejudices much lessened."

Johnson never failed to learn from his experiences and he saw the world with open eyes.  He did not  see the world through his prejudgments.   (The same cannot be said of Boswell.)

In one very touching scene (Sunday, 15th August 1773-the journey took place from mid-August to mid-November 1773) Boswell and Johnson stop in at Boswell house.   Boswell's wife is a bit intimidated by Samuel Johnson (pretty much anybody would be).   Johnson got along very well with the Boswell children and left making a good impression on Boswell's wife (who had good reason to dislike many of Boswell's other friends).   Boswell's youngest daughter loved Johnson and saw through the gruff exterior.    One of the frequent topics of conversation of Boswell and Johnson was the emigration of Scots to America.   Johnson felt the emmigration had the potential to weaken the nation.  (Johnson  was basically in favor of independence for America based on the ground that England could not hold a colony so far away that did not want to be held and secondly a free America would evolve into a strong trading partner and potential ally.   He opposed slavery on moral grounds-Boswell's views on this are not so sanguine.   He supported the monarchy because he felt huge problems occur if there is no clear way of changing leaderships when a ruler passes out of power.)

Here is a passage that shows the clearness of Johnson's thinking.   Johnson thought through things for himself whereas Boswell liked to have "proper" views on things and worked backwards from his theories to the facts. 

"I said, I believed mankind were happier in the ancient feudal state of subordination, than they are in the modern state of independency.  Johnson:  to be sure the chief was:  but we must think of the number of individuals.   That they were less happy, seems plain: for that state from which all escape as soon as they can, and to which none return after they have left it, must be less happy:  and this is the case with the dependence on a great chief or great man".

Here we learn a lot about how Johnson got to be a man of great wisdom:

"Dr Johnson has the happy art of instructing himself by making every man he meets tell him something of what he knows best."

Johnson loved learning things almost as he loved reading, eating and talking!    Johnson also walked the streets of London (often for miles on end) in the company of men like Richard Savage in the early days when he could barely afford lodging.  He was very far from an ivory tower intellectual.  

On 30 August 1773 Boswell and Johnson encounter a very elderly lady living in a  primitive  peat hut along with fifty sheep.   Thier descriptions of the encounter are utterly hilarious.     Dr Johnson wanted to go into her hut (Johnson was 62 or so, huge for the time and Boswell was in his early 30s and looked a bit of a dandy).

"Dr Johnson was curious to know where she slept..She answered with a tone of emotion, saying (in Erse through a translator) she was afraid we wanted to go to bed with her.   This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a being was truly ludicrous.   Dr Johnson and I afterwards were merry upon it.   I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman's virtue.  'No Sir,' said he "She say "There came a wicked young fellow, a wild dog, who I believed would have ravished me had there not been with him a grave old gentleman, who repressed him.  "No Sir (Boswell replies) There was a terrible Ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a civil decent young man, who I take it, was an angel sent from heaven to protect me"."

There is another wonderful scene where somehow the pretty young wife of a minor Hebrides laird ends up sitting on Johnson's knee and kissing and hugging him.  

One of the best set piece in the journal involves the visit of Boswell and Johnson to see Boswell's father.   Boswell's father (a widower) was about the same age as Johnson and also very much, he was the equivalent of a supreme court judge,  a stern authority figure.  (Literary biographers of Boswell have pointed out at length Boswell's need for a substitute father figure that would be more accepting than his real father).   Boswell warned and begged Johnson not talk about either the Church of England or Cromwell as Johnson and Boswell's father had totally opposing views and both were used to having what they said accepted just because they said it.    Johnson resists the urge at first but he soon cannot help but ask Laird Boswell "what do you think of Cromwell and do you not agree the church of England is way superior to the church of Scotland?"    Boswell does not give us any details but he says he prayed they would not fall on each other!    From that day forth the father  would refer to Johnson as "Ursa Major".

Almost anywhere in this work you can find wonderful passages.   The book is the very model of a travel narrative.   We learn lots of interesting facts about the Islands and we greatly enjoy the company on the journey.   The prose is not hard to read and does not feel arcane.   You can feel the real friendship between Boswell and Johnson.   We also encounter some other names students of the 18th century will spark too.  We get a good look at country inns, sea voyages, and life in the Hebrides in the 1770s.   This book is also kind of a snack, the full meal is the massive Life of Samuel Johnson.   As Amateur Reader very rightly said it is amazing that a man with all the weakness of Boswell could produce this work.

Here is a statement from Boswell that we all can agree with

"everyman should keep minutes of whatever he reads. Every circumstance of his studies should be recorded; what books he has consulted; how much of them he has read; at what time; how often the same authors; and what opinions he formed of them, at different periods of his life. Such an account would much illustrate the history of his mind".

In closing I want to repeat that this is a fun book to read, not a chore to be completed for a class in the 18th century travel book.    In a month or so I will read Johnson's quite different account of the tour, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.  (I do not want to read them back to back, just my quirk here.)

In addition to the Scottish Challenge I am reading this book for

Typically British Challenge
Flashback   Challenge
Memorable Memoir Challenge.

I want to thank Suko of Suko's Note Book for directing me to Cooltext.com, from which I made my banner for the challenge.    Amateur Reader has put a lot of thought into his reading suggestions for which I thank him.   I think later on I will read my first Robert Lewis Stevenson book and my first Sir Walter Scott since high school!.   I am also going to try to read the collected periodical essays of James Boswell.  (Published in two volumes under  the title The Hypochondriack in 1925)

"Naomi" by Junichiro Tanizaki

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki (1924, 237 pages, translated from the Japanese by Anthony Chambers, Tuttle Publishing) is not a great Japanese novel, it is not a great 20th century novel, it simply is a great novel.  

Naomi was first published as a serial in a Japanese newspaper starting in 1924.  (I do not think there is any newspaper editor in The USA or Europe that could have published this work at that time without risking arrest.)    It is set in Japan in the early 1920s in Tokyo.   It is narrated by a male engineer named Joji.   At the start of the work he is 27.   It details his obsession with Naomi, who is 15 when he first meets her.   (It appears the age difference and the age of Naomi was not contrary to statute and custom in Japan at the time.)   Joji meets her where she works as a waitress in a coffee house.   He is mesmerized by her beauty.    Her family is quite poor and has a less than stellar reputation.   Joji offers to take her off her parents hands and raise her and they readily agree to relieve themselves of a burden.     Joji is very devoid of experience of romantic encounters of any kind but deeply desires Naomi.   He is a very decent man and he knows it is best that they live together as friends only, sort off, to start.   He sends her to school, buys her nice clothes and hires an English tutor for her.    He also loves giving Naomi her bath.   Naomi begins to realize the power she can obtain over Joji.   The bathing ritual goes on for a long time.   There is no sex at this point between Naomi and Joji but the bathing ritual is clearly very erotic for both of them.  We can feel the power of Naomi growing.   Joji begins to develop a fetish like obsession with Naomi's skin.   He begins to keep a log of the development of her body as she matures into a woman.    Naomi who was once an undemanding young woman begins to demand more material goods from Joji.   Joji begins their relationship worshiping her for her purity, as he perceives it.   As the narrative proceeds it is clear he is an unreliable narrator.   (I like to think that maybe Ford Madox Ford might have published Naomi in The English Review).    Naomi decides she wants to have  lessons in Western  style dancing.   Now  the real trouble begins.   The lessons are given by a White Russian woman who may have been a countess in  the old days.  (I notice in novels of the 1920s former Russian noblewomen often play the parts of the bringers of trouble.)    Naomi is about 19 now and she and Joji are married.    Naomi begins to occasionally mock Joji as an old man out touch with the then westernizing Japan.    He begins to compare her to Mary Pickford, something she finds very flattering.   There are young men her age in the dance class and to Joji's great surprise somehow Naomi seems to already know them.   When he asks her how she knows them, she tells him oh I just met them around.  There is also a Western man in the class.   Joji sees him as sinister figure of some sort in Japan as part of criminal enterprise.  Soon some really bad things happen.   I do not want to tell anymore of the plot action as the plot is so much fun and suspenseful as well.   We were really made to care about Joji even if our 21th century sensibilities are offended by his joy in bathing the 15 year old Naomi  which becomes full scale erotic enslavement.   (I admit as his enslavement to Naomi progresses I wanted to tell him go down to the pleasure quarters and get her out of your system before it is too late.).   The work is acutely perceptive in his portrayal of the characters.   We see slowly the dynamics of power change.   Joji thinks he loves Naomi but he actually has altered her into a fetish object.   Naomi is drawn to western culture and completely repelled by her own cultural roots.   In one purely masterful scene Naomi comes to visit Joji dressed in purely western clothes with matching make up and hair.    The revulsion felt by Joji nearly made my skin crawl.

Naomi has numerous thematic mines one could work.    It is a tale of the corruption of a culture by an outside force.   It is a story of the balance of power between a man and a woman.   It is a classic tale of misperception.   In Naomi we have a woman degraded by what she and others think exalts her.  It is also a story of what may be described without being judgmental as  a sexual perversion by which I mean turning in this case a woman, Naomi, from a person to a fetish object.   There are also lots of acute observations along the way.   It is a good look at Japan in the 1920s and the influence of western culture, mainly movies.  (For a time Tanizaki was a screen writer.)   I cannot judge if the translation is good or not but the prose is very well done and there are none of the "howlers" there are in some translated work.    It is a tragedy and a comedy of manners.    Most of all it is a lot of fun to read.   

This is the sixth work of Junichiro Tanizaki that I have reviewed for the Japanese Literaure 3 Challenge.    I have him on my "Read all they have written list-or in this case all that has been translated list."   I think he has four other novels translated into English that I have not yet read along with a collection of short stories and a work of artistic theory.

This will be my last review for the Japanese Literature 3 Challenge.   I give my sincerest gratitude to Dolce Bellezza for hosting it.   As The Japanese Challenge 4  begins I plan to do a post called "The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the Japanese Novel" where I will give my ideas on the best 3, 6, 9 or 12 Japanese novels to start with and why one should read Japanese novels.   There are still, of course, huge holes in my reading.   One obvious one is that I have read none of the major works of Murakami.   I hope to read his major works in the next few months.    I also have two novels by Kenzaburo Oe waiting to be read soon and he has a brand new one coming out in March!-

Mel u

"My Son's Story" by Nadine Gordimer

Johannesburg in the Times of Apartheid

If you are visiting from the class project on Nadine Gordimer, you are very welcome here-feel free to leave any comments or questions you may have-Jan 13, 2011

My  Son's Story (1990, 277 pages) is my first venture into the very large corpus of Nadine Gordimer.   Gordimer (1923-) was born in Johannesburg South Africa in a time of institutionalized legally mandated white supremacy.    Citizens were legally classified as either pure white, black or colored by the government. (Indians were also treated as a separate class of citizen.)   Where one could live was determined by your race.   Where you could go to school was determined by this.  In most areas, only whites were allowed to use the libraries, for example.   The wealth of the country was concentrated in the hands of whites.    Here is a good summery of the history of racial relations in South Africa (from Wikipedia.com):

"Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times, but apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial groups ("black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian"), and residential areas were segregated by means of forced removals. From 1958, Blacks were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of whites.


Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a long trade embargo against South Africa.[1] A series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organizations responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence."

My Son's Story is set in the decade prior to the beginning of the end of apartheid (1990) as a state policy.   It details in a masterful way the effects of growing up mixed in this enviornment.    A very big part of the evil of the policy is the harm it does to the souls of those raised under it as Gordimer shows us brilliantly in My Son's Story.

There are five characters that matter in this novel.   Sonny, a mixed race political activist and the father of late teen age Will and his slightly older daughter Baby.   He is married to Aila who is a beautiful, very mature almost gently regal woman.   One day Will sees his father at the movies with a white woman, a blond named Hannah who his father met through his political contacts.   (Hannah is mentioned as blond over and over - maybe this is a bit heavy handed on the part of Gordimer).    The son is shocked.   He begins to feel hatred as well as jealousy toward his father as he too wishes to be with a blond woman rather than the sort of woman society feels he should have.   The first woman for whom he has a sexual desire is a woman his father is committing adultery with.   Hannah is not at all a bad person.   She is very involved in the struggle for human rights in South Africa and is solicitous about Sonny's family.   Sonny (Gordimer does point out for us the irony of calling a mature man in a position of leadership  "Sonny" and sees the proliferation of such names as one of the insidious effects of state policies) feels deep guilt over his unfaithfulness to his wife.    He wants a white woman so badly he will risk everything to be with Hannah.

My Son's Story does a wonderful job detailing the small intimacies that make up a good marriage.   Sonny has a very good wife and a very good marriage.   Sonny is also a deep reader of Shakespeare and Kafka.   Sonny's daughter Baby is a bit rebellious but nothing real bad.   I noticed as the action of the novel changed the prose style changed.   In a great set piece in which Gordimer describes a riot the tone and the syntax of the prose comes to unite with the plot action to make us feel we are in the middle of the riot.    Sonny does come across as a man who totally on his own has internalized much of Shakespeare.   As we read his thoughts we think what he might have been.    We see the many ways in which apartheid effects the characters.   Baby begins to act out in a way calculated to offend those in the community who admire her mother as a beautiful and dignified person of mixed blood.   Will and others in the work continually speak of tribal blacks as dangerous and undisciplined.   Much of  the self esteem of the son comes from looking down on blacks.    Some will question the exact motives of Hannah as we are not taken very deeply into her psyche.  

There is a lot in My Son's Story.    There is a very knowing portrait of the growth of intimacy in a marriage.   We see how the father's adultery affects his children and his wife as well as his commitment to the movement.   We see the inside of courts and prisons.    To me My Son's Story is a work of small gem-like   observations and fine subtle nuances.   I felt a powerful intelligence behind this work.    I learned, among other things, how labor policy under apartheid was behind to a large extent the spread of aids in South Africa.    In the three figures of Alia, Hannah and Baby we have a commentary on women in this society.    At some point one must wonder if the gentle refinement of Alia is really the result of her parents raising her to be a person very unlike the stereotypical notion of a nonwhite woman.   Maybe she is bound by this.    There is a very subtle suggestion that Alia may have her own affair also but we are left to decide if she did or not on our own.    Baby is acting out.   In her late teenage years she is dancing in the streets in skin tight clothes and shorts to music very unacceptable to her parents.   

There are interesting and exciting things that happen in the plot line.   At times Gordimer does seem a bit heavy handed in being sure we do not miss things.    She received the Nobel Prize in 1991.   She is very active in human rights organizations.    It should be noted that some in South Africa  see her as paternalistic and condescending in her treatment of blacks both in her work and in her social activities.

I am glad I read My Son's Story.   Maybe it is a bit heavy handed once or twice but it is beautifully written and a very high intellect shines through the book.  

I see this as a suitable read for the Women Unbound Challenge given its treatment of the three women.    We see how a marriage is ruined by the binds of race.   Sonny would never have cheated on his wife with Hannah if she were not white.    Baby breaks away from her father and partially asserts herself also but to explain that would be a spoiler.    


Mel u

Themed Reading Challenge 2010

Flaubert and Friends

Caribousmom is hosting for the second year the Themed Reading Challenge.   This is a very interesting challenge as it gives us a lot of freedom to create a reading project.   Basically you are asked to read five books with a central theme.   The challenge runs from February 14, 2010 to August 14, 2010.   (The full particulars are on the challenge blog linked above along with some ideas from 2009 if you need them.)  It is ok for books for this challenge to overlap with others.  

As soon as I saw this I began to ponder different themes for the challenge.   I just finished reading my first Salman Rushdie novel, The Enchantress of Florence.   I really liked the lush prose of the work so I thought I could read five more of his novels.   Then I thought, this might be like a literary sugar rush.    Then I thought maybe I could read western writers that Kenzaburo Oe admires like Stendhal, Twain, and Yeats.    Next I thought I might read some Japanese crime novels as I have a few already lined up to be read in 2010.

I have decided that my theme will be works by Gustave Flaubert and his Friends.   (I am taking as my authoritative source for inclusion among the friends, A Biography: Flaubert by Frederick Brown.    I urge anyone interested in Flaubert to read this very wonderful  book.)   

Here are some of what I hope to read and why:

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert-this will be my second reading-12 to go!

Indiana by George Sand -very close friend of Flaubert-set on the Island of Reunion
(Ok here is a good challenge idea-books set on Reunion Island!)

Anything by Ivan Turgenev-Turgenev was for sure his closest friend among writers-the information given on Turgenev in Brown's book makes me wish someone would write a similar biography of him.  

Emile Zola-(Brown has also written a biography of Zola.   I have it but have not yet read it.)-Zola passes into the class of friend as admirer but not a full intimate.

Guy de Maupassant-also in the category of disciple

Henry James-not actually a friend but he was part of Flaubert's circle for a while and attended dinners at which Flaubert's intimates were present.   I imagined Flaubert and Turgenev taking Henry James out for a night on the town while he was in Paris but the picture does not quite work!   

This will be my 35th reading challenge for 2010.   I have already completed seven challenges.   I anticipate I will be signing up for more challenges as they are announced, as not all challenges run from Jan 1 to December 31.   

I look forward to seeing what themes others will come up with for The Themed Reading Challenge 2010.

Mel u

"The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of  Florence by Salman Rushdie (2008, 381 pages)

A Lush Account of Court Life in Mughal India  

I have been wanting to read a novel by Salman Rushdie for a long time.    He achieved fame in the non-literary world when he received death threats based on political reactions to his novel The Satanic Verses.    He is the most internationally known author from India, it seems to me.    (I still recall when Kramer mentioned him in a "Seinfeld" episode.   Nobody on the show had actually read his book but they had heard of him.)    Rushdie has received nearly every well known literary award short of the Nobel Prize.

The Enchantress of Florence is set in the late 16th century.   It takes place in part in the Florence of the Medici and in part in northern India in the court of Akbar, the greatest Mughal emperor.   Both of these cultures are nearing their zenith.    The tie to the two areas is a mysterious blond male visitor from Florence who claims to be related to Akbar the Great.     The language of this work is very lush.    The focus is on court life in both of the capitals.    We get a feeling of what it was like to be the emperor (it had a lot of perks such as a huge harem).    His oldest sons are already very corrupted by their power and Akbar feels they may well kill him one day and turn on each other.

"Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh

A Neo-Victorian Tale of India

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008, 469 pages) is part one of a trilogy.   Part two is scheduled to be published in 2010.   Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008.

The novel is set in the late 1830s, starting out in Calcutta and on the banks of the Ganges River.   This work has a kind of old fashioned feel to it.   The completed trilogy will run to over 1500 pages.    There are a large number of characters, there is a lot of historical detail, there are a lot of unfamiliar terms used from slang of the period relating to the opium trade, seafaring and caste issues, and there are multiple plot threads open.    Most of the characters have hidden aspects in their past.   We see the near highest levels of wealth and the depth of poverty.    Most of Sea of Poppies is devoted to introducing the people who will be on the ship the Isib (the trilogy is called The Ibis Trilogy) when  it sails to Mauritius, a very remote isolated island in the Indian Ocean.   (This is  journey of near 3000 kilometers.)

Sea of Poppies has a lot of characters, enough to fill a Dickens novel.   We learn the stories of each of the main characters and what lead up to them boarding the Ibis.   A trip of this length was very hard and dangerous in this period as the book well shows us.  Here are some of the main characters.

Deeti-a young widow who was rescued from Suttee when her husband dies by Kalua, the local village Ox man.    In order to escape from her in laws (who wanted her burned as tradition required) she and Kalua commit themselves to become indentured servants to the owners of the Ibis.  

Zachary Reed is an American, his mother was a slave and his father was the owner of his mother.    The Ibis was at one time a slave carrying ship and Zachary has been on the ship since it was commissoned.    The ship is really the only home he has ever known.   Like all the characters, there are secrets about his past yet to be revealed.   (I think this is part of the old fashioned feel of the novel.   At anytime someone who seems to be a convict might be revealed to be a prince placed in chains by his enemies.)

Neel Halder-a wealthy Rajah falsely tried and convicted of forgery.   Neel was sentenced to be transported to Mauritius as a convict and stripped of all his property.    His family has to go live with one of his chief servants.   In a telling moment in the narrative, Neel realizes that before then he did not even know his servant had his own house.  

Ah Fatt-another convict being transported.    He is an opium addict.    When Neel is in prison waiting to be transported he learns that a transported convict has the lowest caste in the prison system.   We see Neel coping with the incredible transformations in his life, from wealthy Rajah to convict.    My guess is Ah Fatt for sure has a mysterious past and is not what he seems to be but we will have to wait to find out.

Paulette is French born teenager who is now an orphan.   She is on the run from her guardians as they want to marry her off to a very old man.

There is a lot in this book.    We get a good look at the pernicious influence of  opium in India.   We see how it is traded, how the poppies are turned into opium and how it destroys traditional culture.    We learn a lot of nautical slang.   We learn many expressions for occupations in the period.   We learn a lot about the caste system.   We learn a lot about life inside an Indian prison.  (His prison scenes are really well done and can compare with classic Victorian depictions of prison life.)     We get a good idea of how it might have felt to live in the period.    We see the food, family relations, brothels, and clothing.   We get a strong feel for the extreme diversity and richness of Indian Culture.    We see the effects of colonialism.   ( As I  read this work I was reminded  of Edmund Burke who argued that Indian should be set free as it was in fact a much older and in many ways richer culture than England)

I like Sea of Poppies a lot.   It made be realize how little I know of Indian history.   There are wonderful set pieces in the book, miniature narratives brilliantly done.   The book does have an old fashioned feel.   By this I mean it seems like it was written for a time when readers were happy to read what will eventually be a 1500 page character rich trilogy.    It makes use of many words which will be unfamiliar to the reader who is not a scholar of the period.   (In an appendix to the book, Ghosh indicates the authoritative sources for his use of expressions.   My guess he has got his history and terms correct.)    Ghosh takes his time building up to the start of the voyage.   He is in no hurry.    We know, shades of  The Count of Monte Christo, that vengeance will be dealt out eventually.    Sea of Poppies  ends on a cliff  hanger

Amitav Ghosh was born January 1, 1956 in Kolkata, India.  He has a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford.    He has written six novels as well as four collections of essays on a diverse range of topics.  

I enjoyed this book a lot and I learned some interesting things from it.   Some might want a bit faster paced book, I think.   I will for sure read the next book in the Ibis Trilogy.   (The Sea of Poppies does leave us hanging.)   If I come upon other historical novel by Ghosh there is a good chance  I will buy them.   I looked at Ghosh's other works on Goodreads.com and, of course, I want to read them all but I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to my next Ghosh or South Asian Novel-thanks


I am reading this work for the following challenges

South Asia Challenge
Global Challenge
Read Before I Die Challenge
Historical Fiction Challenge
New Authors Challenge (new to you)

Mel u

My First Six Months as a Book Blogger

I will always recall the question my wife asked me when I did my first blog post six months ago.  It was "who will read these posts you are writing?"     The only answer I had was "I do not know".    I wanted to have a record of the books I read so I could look back on it in the years to come and writing  on a book helps to clarify my thoughts on it so I started my blog anyway and now it is of great importance to me.

Japan's Only Known Survivor Of Both Atomic Blasts Has Died

Japan's Only Known Survivor Of Both Atomic Blasts Has Died - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR


I received this notice today via NPR (public radio in the United States)-it made me think again of Kenzaburo Oe's non-fiction work Hiroshima Notes in which he spoke of the  of people who survived both atomic bomb blasts and their fates. One of the people mentioned by Oe was Tsutomo Yamaguchi.   He passed away yesterday at the age of 93 after a long fight with stomach cancer.     The people of Hiroshima were among the very first Japanese to speak out against the role of the Japanese military in WWII.    Oe said in Hiroshima Notes that the most important thing to come out of the bomb blasts was the wisdom the suffering did bring to many of the survivors.     Oe's collection of short stories by and about survivors of the atomic bomb blasts, Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath is a world class treasure.   I devoted five reviews to the stories in this book.  When I did Google searches on the authors of the stories, some of them went on to become famous and respected authors.   However, three of the authors had no Google records (other than mentioning their story was reprinted in Oe's collection).   At first I thought this means I am writing these relatively long blog posts on something no one cares about and I admit I was concerned the posts might turn new readers (my blog had just started when I wrote the six posts devoted to this collection and Hiroshima Notes) away from my blog.    I had by then begun to follow my blog with Google Web Master tools (as most all blogspot bloggers do).    I noticed people from all over the world were doing Google searches on the very obscure to most writers to whom I had dedicated posts and coming to my blog to read the articles on them.    A number of them read the articles in Japanese.   Somehow I have now come to see my posts on the writers from the collection as a small memorial to them.    Before I wrote my posts you could find information on five of the eight writers in the collection via a Google search. Now you can find information on all of them.


Mel u





 

Books Reviewed in 2009

Books Reviewed in 2009

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak     

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry    

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Getting the Girl by Marcus Zusak

After Dark by Huruki Murakami

Dewey:   The Small Town Library Cat that Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto

The Age of Prize Stock Innocence by Edith Wharton

Real World by Natsuo Kirino

A Start in Life by Anita Brookner

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrow

Strangers by Taichi Yamada

The Uninvited by Geling Yan

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata

Prize Stock    by Kenzaburo Oe

Adventures of a Child of War by Acico Flores

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears by Kenzaburo Oe  *

Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kacharo

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

One Man's Justice by Akira Yosimura

Miss Chopsticks by Xue Xinran

Aghwee The Sky Monster by Kenzaburo Oe

Ring by Kuji Suzuki

Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson

Barefoot in The Fire:   A WWII Manila Childhood by Barbara Gamboa Lewis

The Flower Mat by Suguro Yamamoto *

The Crazy Iris by Masuji Ibuse

The Summer Flower by Tamiki Hara

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace by the Sea by Yukio Mishima

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Empty Can by Kyoto Hayashi   *

Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink

The Secret History of the Lord of Musahi by Junichiro Tanizaki

Arrowroot by Junichiro Tazizaki

The Colorless Paintings by Ineko Sata

The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian

Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki

Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki

My Life by Anton Chekhov

Leaving Home by Anita Brookner

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

Mandrians:   A Collection of Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

Hardboiled by Banana Yoshimoto

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Shame in  the Blood  by Tetsuo Miuka

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto

Shamela by Henry Fielding

The Almost Moon by Ann Sebold

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe

Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Man Who Killed Rasputin by Gary King

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford   *

February Flowers by Fan Wu

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Kenzaburo Oe

Moonlight Shadow by Banana Yoshimoto

Mel u

Books Read In 2010

1. The Tales of Ise by Arihara no Narihira
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Yellow Light Bookstore by Lewis Buzbee
4. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
5. One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat
6. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
7. Sea of Poppies by Amitar Ghosh
8. The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
9. My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer
10. Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
11. The Journal of a Tour to The Hebrides by James Boswell

February

1. Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
2. Pinay:Autobiographical Writings of Women 1926 to 1928 by Cristina Hidalgo
3. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins 
4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
5. The Reed Cutter by Junichiro Tanizaki

"One Night @ The Call Center" by Chetan Bhagat

A Look at An Indian Call Center

One Night @ The Call Center by Chetan Bhagat (2005, 310 pages) is set in Guragon in northern India.    The author was born in New Delhi and now lives in Mumbai.

When I first saw this book on the 80 percent off table at a local book store I was moved to pick it up by the title.   Call centers are very big here in the Philippines.   Very near us are offices for IBM and HSBC in huge ultra modern building with all the amenities  possible and surrounded by American style fast food restaurants.  When we go past the offices in the day time the big parking lots are completely empty.   The employees start working somewhere around 800 in the evening as most all of their clients are in the USA.    The government is doing a lot to promote these businesses.   Tax breaks and free rent are given to big corporations and there are all sorts of  classes one can take in what is called "Call Center English".    The pay ranges from about $200.00 (USA) per month up to $500.00 for top agents.   The papers are full of ads for call center workers.   Many of them say recent college graduates only, must be over five foot tall (this makes no sense but many companies will not hire a person under five foot tall-the average height for Filipino women is five  two).     In the employment ads for these companies you will see smiling employees all of whom look like movie stars and none are over twenty five.   So I figured why not read this novel about call centers.

As it sounds, the novel is set in a call center in India.   The employees all work at night. The novel centers on a call center for a big American appliance company.   If somebody in Miami cannot figure out how to adjust the power levels in his new microwave they call the center.    The employees in the novel are in a special section that handles "problem callers".

This means the hostile or those who call every other day asking where the on switch on their DVD player is located.   The calls of the employees are monitored and they have standards about how long they can talk.   These employees see only a select group of Americans, those who call to ask how often a frost free refrigerator should be defrosted or  simply call to talk to someone it seems.   The worst of the callers from the point of view of the workers are those who hate the Indian call center workers.   The call center workers generalize from this sample of people that all Americans are idiots who hate anyone who speaks English with an accent that sounds wrong to them.    Of course  the frustration of the call center employees is increased by the fact that on average they are much worse off financially  than their callers.   Each of the employees has a call center name.   There are different types.   We have the princess type girl whose parents have found an Indian doctor who lives in Seattle to marry her (She has never met him but he has promised her a Lexus), we have the young man totally into fast vehicles, we have a female employee who wants to be a model and two employees who want to start their own web design business.    No body wants to be a call center agent too long even though the money is not bad for their area.

Some of the call center employees say Indian will surpass American by getting the jobs of the Americans.    The smarter ones realize that they are just doing the work American corporations are farming out to them to increase their profits.   Call center workers do not produce anything of lasting value for their countries.   Most of the pay they make is spent on fancy cell phones, mixed drinks in  clubs that cost them half  a day's pay and a vast array of consumer items that they are driven by the media to buy.  

The fun (and it is a very entertaining novel) is in the conversations of the employees.   We really do get a real look at the inside of a call center.   The employees are made to come to life for us.    Any one who has ever worked in a big corporation will be able to relate to the way the call center workers plot to take revenge on their boss.

I thought this book was an entertaining and edifying look at a call center in India.   Some might be offended by what the agents say about Americans but if you realize what  they say is really a comment on their own limits then no offense should arise.   Goodreads.com reviewers give it the full range of ratings from one to five stars.   I would give it three stars.  It has been made into a movie.    It is a  clearly written fast paced and fast reading book.    I would probably read another one of Bhagat's novels (he has written four) if I could get it  for 80 percent off.   If you do a Google search you can in fact down load this book for free as a PDF file.

I am reading this book as part of these reading Challenges

South Asia Challenge
52 in 52 Weeks
Global Reading Challenge
Across  the Centuries Challenge
New Authors  (new to me)
TBR Challenge

Mel u

"Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" by Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985, 171 pages, English) by Jeanette Winterson is not the first of her books I have read.   I really loved her Powerbook, both for the beauty of the writing and for the thematic matters explored.   I knew as soon as I finished that book that I wanted to read other works by Winterson.   I loved her style and the intermingling of realistic narration with magical realism and folk tales.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is told in the first person by a late teenage female, Jeanette.

She is an adopted child being raised by very fundamentalist Christians.   Her parents, especially her very religious mother,  see the primary goal of life as to avoid sin.   The primary sin appears to be sexual acts.   Winterson does a marvelous job of conjuring up for us the hyper-binding atmosphere in which the central character is raised.   The mother is  literate, being a lover of the work of Charlotte Bronte and she has internalized much of the poetry of  William Blake.   She believes in a literal devil who might well be living across the street.   Anyone who is not like her and anyone whose ideas are not like her faith is not simply misguided or mistaken but is to be seen as actively evil.   The world is divided up into a small group of people destined to be saved and the rest to be dammed.   It is a very closed and cramped world in which our protagonist has grown up.    In this world the most evil thing there is seems to be sex.   We get the impression the mother may have a bit of a past she is not telling her daughter all about.   She does admit to a premarital encounter with a handsome semi-stranger.   Somehow we feel the mother does not preach so much against the evils of sex because she hates it but because she likes it so much.   The father in the work seems to have decided just to stay in the background for the sake of peace.  

I think almost anyone who selects this novel to read among the many many 1000s of others they could have read will know in advance that it is a story about a young woman giving into and coming to cherish her sexual desire for other women.   You know in advance pretty much what is coming and the very long build up to this some how increases our suspense in spite of that foreknowledge.   The opening half of the book creates such an oppressive atmosphere that I am very much looking forward to something happening, anything really!.   There is no sense of the pleasure of life in the upbringing of Jeanette (the central character bears the same first name as the author  and apparently Winterson was raised in an atmosphere very like that described created in the book).   

Near the opening of the book Jeanette asks her mother  about two women who jointly own a paper shop.  These  women  are old enough to have a husband but for some reason do not.    When Jeanette asks her mother about these women she is told do not associate with them and above all do not get to know them.  

There are numerous interludes in the book in the form almost of fairy tales or fables.   These fables were simply delightful interludes to me and help illuminate the themes of the book.   Part of the general theme of Winterson's work is how we create myths for ourselves to help us give meaning to the events in our life.

As we knew she would, Jeanette does have her first sexual encounters with another woman.   No graphic details are given.   It is as though the puritanical gloom of her raising has quite turned her from men and has left her with little real relish for sex in any form.  She loves her female partners but we sense no deep passion in these opening encounters in her life.   I do not wish to give out too many details as a lot of people will eventually read this book.

It is beautifully written.   I in fact enjoyed the fables that were interludes more than the main narrative but I think that is just my quirk.   I do think  Powerbook  a greater joy to read in terms of the wonderful prose of Winterson at her best.   Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit gives us a brilliant look at the atmosphere which some how turns Jeanette into an embodiment of the very thing her up-bringing is most against.   

This book is one of my selections for the GLBT challenge.   It's relevance there is obvious as it is, I think, a core text in that area.    I also think it is a very good read for the Woman Unbound Challenge.   It shows a woman moving away from the very binding atmosphere in which the protagonist was raised and turning to  sexual partners that would be completely unacceptable in terms of the religion in which she was raised.   I should note that I am not of the mind set that any novel where the author is a homosexual female (or male) should be counted as a GLBT read or as a novel appropriate for the Woman UnBound Challenge but Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a paradigmatic work for both these challenges.  

Off the books I have reviewed there are three works of fiction that I think would be good choices for the GLBT Reading Challenge: 

Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki -Japan-1928-this work actually has  more of an open erotic element than Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit-If you read this book, I think you will find it hard to image it was written over 80 years ago.

February Flowers by Fan Wu-a coming of age story about two female university students in modern China

Hardboiled by Banana Yoshimoto-a novella concerning a woman's only gay relationship -Her novel Kitchen also touch on themes related to the challenge but it is not directly focus on related issues.

I also posted a review of a biography that is very relevant to the GLBT challenge-The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Youssoupov and the Murder That Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire  by Greg King -Prince Felix in his personal preferences was gay but did marry and have  children as part of a dynastic duty.    This book purports to show the factors that caused his development and does have some interesting data on upper class gay brothels in Czarist Russian and early 19th century Japan.

This book is being read for these challenges

Women Unbound

GLBT Challenge

Simply British Challenge

Global Reading Challenge

Second Chance Challenge  (read a second book by an author you have already read)

The Read Before I Die 2010 challenge

Mel u

"The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" by Lewis Buzbee

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History by Lewis Buzbee (216 pages, 2006-non-Fiction) was one of the books I acquired a few months ago in a book swap. (If anyone in the Philippines wants to work out book swaps please contact me to see if we can work out a mutually advantageous swap). The book looked interesting as it is in part a story of a man obsessed with reading and books. When I did my daily Google Reader browse of the book blogs I subscribe to (now at about 325 and growing) a few weeks ago I found a post by Lesley of A Life in Books announcing the Bibliophilic Books Challenge 2010. The idea behind this challenge is to read books about books and reading. The books can be fiction like The Elegance of the Hedgehog or The Thirteenth Tale or it can be history or a memoir. This challenge was my spark to read this book.

Lewis Buzbee spent much of his life working in book stores in the San Francisco California area. He did this out of a love for books, not out of any wish to make a large or even a decent amount of money. He loved seeing the new boxes of books come in, stocking them on the shelves, talking about books with other store employees and the chance to buy books at a discount and sometimes get free books. He bonded with other employees in the shops he worked for and obtained a feeling of family from them. This was in the pre-Chain pre-Amazon.com book selling days when book stores were owned by people who loved books not by huge stock traded companies with shareholders demanding an ever rising profit. A lot of his favorite times in the book stores were in talking to customers about what books they should read. Those were the days, but I cannot imagine now asking an employee in a local book store (all chains) for a recommendation as to what to read.   At most I might ask them when the next book in the Twilight Series will be in the stores (very big for my teen age daughters). Not to be too rude but I really think if you asked the typical book store employee what Ford he recommends he would say "The Mustang".  If you asked him if they had any Joyce he would say "Yes we have Juice in the coffee shop".  If you asked the shop manager about Dickens, she would say "Oh you mean that movie with Jim Carey?-check back in the video section next month".  Ask about Jane Austin and you will be given a choice of a book about Sea Serpents or Zombies.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee (1960, 376 pages) came at once to my mind when I began to put together my to read list for "The Books to Read Before I Die Challenge 2010" hosted by Diane of Bibliophile by the Sea.       Over thirty million copies have been sold.   It is on many  lists of top 100 novels of all times.   The time had come long ago for me to read this book, this prototypical American novel praised and loved by nearly all.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a universal tale of children growing up in a climate of prejudice and hatred of those in some way unlike themselves.   No culture or country today is immune from this.   In some places it is subtle and in others it is murderous.  Here in the Philippines darker skin is looked down on as a sign of lower class origins.    To Kill a Mockingbird is also very much a work rooted in the the American South, in Alabama in the 1930s.   In this part of the United States, as a legacy of slavery of course, the population is around fifty percent of African descent.   To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee have received every form of award and acceptance a book can have in America.  It was made into a very successful movie.

The book centers around a family, a father (a widower in his 50s) his young daughter (who narrates the story) and her brother.   The father, an attorney, is defending as an unpaid volunteer a black man accused of raping a white woman.   The woman is from what was in the time called a "White Trash" family.   The only evidence against the man is the word of this woman.   The man is crippled in  his right arm.   Common sense dictates that upon an examination of the facial bruises of the woman that it could not have been caused by a man whose  right arm was crippled.   A doctor and the sheriff testify to this.   Clearly the man is innocent.     I do not want to give away to much more of the plot as many others have not yet read this book.    I think you will enjoy it as I did.

I think To Kill A Mockingbird is so popular and loved because it is a book of gentle wisdom.      For many  it will be the only  book they read that will ever be on a list of best novels.   It is almost a Young Adult Book even though it deals with adult themes.    The father is a very wise and strong man.   He loves to read and has passed this along to his daughter.   In fact the daughter says reading is just like breathing to her, she does not love it she just does it.   When I read what the daughter says about her father I had to show it to my wife as it hit close to home:

"He did not do the things our schoolmates' fathers did:  he never went hunting, he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke.   He just set in the living room and read".

Harper Lee captures well the speech of the characters.   There is true insight into race relations in this work.   One of the common social functions of prejudices is to keep one class of people in place through making them think that they are superior to another one.  To Kill a Mockingbird does not tell us about this, it shows us how to learn  from our own thoughts.   There is real wisdom in this book.    It is for sure worth the time to read it.

It is an easy read but it will stay in your mind.   Millions of people love this book.   For sure I would be happy for my 13 and 16 year old daughters to read it.   I do not really think To Kill A Mockingbird should be approached as if it were a literary masterwork but it is a good read and a morally good book for sure.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a touching,  written from the heart "Feel Good" book.   It is an important part of the American reading life.   American presidents have given her awards    Talk show hosts swoon over Harper Lee.   She never wrote another book.   She was a childhood friend of Truman Capote and helped him research In Cold Blood.    If you have not yet read this book, you probably should at some point, especially if you are a teacher or librarian as it is a good first serious book for young readers.

I am be reading this book for the following challenges:

1. New Authors to You
   
2. Global Reading Challenge
3. Awesome Authors
4. Centuries Reading Challenge
5. Wish I Had Read That Challenge
6. 52 books in 52 weeks
7. Read Before I Die Challenge
8. The Book Blogger Recommendations Challenge
   

Mel u

"The Tales of Ise" by Arihara no Narihara-10th Century Japan

The Tales of Ise  by Arihara no Narihara-10th Century Japan

A few days ago I was in one of my favorite local book stores and they had a big table of books for sale at 80 percent discount.   I spotted a Tuttle Publishing Book by the cover design.    The title was The Tales of Ise (translated and introduced by H Jay Harris from Japanese, 1972, 251 pages with notes).   I had never heard of it.    I checked the back cover and it was a set of short stories and poems about court life and romantic encounters written in the late 10th century and 11th century Japan.   I am interesting in reading  older Japanese literature to help me to understand the Japanese novel as well as for the value of the work itself.    So I bought this book.

When  TheTales of Ise were composed the world still had to wait 350 years for The Canterbury Tales.   The Khmer empire was at its peak.     Robin Hood was in Sherwood Forest.   Streets were beginning to be paved in parts of Paris.   The Vikings settled in Greenland.   The Mayan civilization had begun its decline.   In China the country was unified under the Sung Dynasty.   Here in the Philippines the country was ruled largely by a collection of kingdoms, rajahnates, principalities, confederations and sultanates with about half of the country under governing bodies with a scope of no more than a few square miles.   There was trade with China and Japan and  very sophisticated gold art was produced.   Most of the population were hunter gatherers.   Hundreds of languages were spoken.    We have no literature from the pre-Spanish period left from the Philippines as the Spanish burned all the writings they could find but there are good reasons to think there was a literary culture among the very elite modeled on the Chinese and Indonesian forms of the times.


The introduction has some useful material about court life in Japan of the period.   It was interesting to learn that out of the estimated population of 3 million about 5000 people had noble status.  Japan was at that time first beginning to develop a cultural identity that was not totally based on Chinese forms and roots.   There is little in the introduction about how these literary works were preserved or transmitted.   Professor Harris tries to get us to accept 10th century Japan as a culture in which poetry plays more a role than it has in any place or time prior to this but presents no evidence for this very broad almost silly claim.


The work consists of 125 of what are called "Dans". These are very brief prose pieces followed by a poem which had to follow prescribed rules as to grammar, word count and imagery and was to serve as a commentary on the prose. The vast majority of them concerning a noble man making advances toward a noble woman. Here is a very typical Dan (64)

"Long ago a young man, incredulous as to where she might be from, recited to a woman who was not sharing his intimacies, even in the privacy of his letters the poem

Could I make myself

like the wind that gently blows

at your bamboo blind--

Through its loosely woven chinks

might I enter you.

In Reply:

Though there be a wind

which I cannot hold in check

at my bamboo blind--

Who has designed to give it leave

that it should seek my chamber".

This is the flow of these stories.  We see the natural images that still flows through the Japanese novel.  We have to work to figure out what the noble lady intends in her reply.  Does she repulse her suitor or simply ask that he follow procedures?  Some of the Dans are a bit longer and give us a bit more of glimpse of court life love affairs.  I would endorse this book to those interested in increasing their background knowledge of Japanese literature but not really to anyone else.  The longer episodes were interesting but the shorter one were very alike.  I think many readers would quickly be bored with this work after a few pages.  I would classify it as mainly a background read and as such I think it is very useful and will deepen my appreciation for older Japanese novels.

Mel u