Home » reading (Page 4)

Category Archives: reading

Januarius in March

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Arizona Writer Charles Bowden (1945-2014)

Typically, the only books I read during the month of January are by authors I have not before encountered. I call this my Januarius project. This last January, however, I was too ill to read more than two books—and that at the end of the month. So I decided to hold this year’s Januarius in March.

During this month, I read fifteen books by authors who were new to me:

  1. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song. This was the first (and most popular) volume of a trilogy entitled A Scots Quair. Hard times on a farm near Aberdeen before World War I.
  2. David R. Fideler, Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living. Stoicism is one ancient philosophy applicable to modern times.
  3. Renata Adler, Speedboat. Consisting of seemingly unrelated scenes that manage somehow to hold together and be interesting.
  4. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. A somewhat grim book featuring multiple suicide attempts.
  5. Fyodor Sologub, The Petty Demon. A 19th century Russian novel about an annoying school teacher in a country town.
  6. Martial, Epigrams. Amusing sardonic quips about life in Imperial Rome.
  7. Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris Vagabond. Paris seen from the eyes of a highly intelligent hobo.
  8. Edward Said, Orientalism. Intelligent critique of the whole concept of orientalism as being the result of colonialism.
  9. Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Seven Moons and Seven Serpents. Brazilian Magical Realism that allegorizes the whole South American experience.
  10. Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter. Imagine having to drive Jorge Luis Borges around the Scottish Highlands without ever having read any of his work.
  11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance. It’s hard to believe that I’ve never before read any Emerson other than a couple of his poems.
  12. Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future. The best book I read this month, about life in the Arizona and Sonora desert, the drug lords, mountain lions, and crooked developer/banker Charles Keating Jr.
  13. Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life. The title says it all.
  14. Alexander Ostrovsky, The Storm. A 19th century Russian play in which the villain is a mother-in-law.
  15. Gao Yuan, Lure the Tiger Out oi the Mountains: The 36 Strategies of Ancient China. A somewhat lame attempt to show how ancient Chinese philosophy can improve your business acumen.

All in all, it was a good month with some writers I would like to revisit—particularly Charles Bowden. Next week, Martine and I are going to Tucson, Bowden’s home turf, where I plan to read some more of his work.

Classics of Travel Literature

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I have always loved reading classical travel books—even if they were written long ago. Here is a list of some of my favorites, listed below in no particular order:

  • Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694). This is the earliest book on the list including a poetic rendering of the author’stravels to shrines in Japan, written in haiku.
  • Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977). A not entirely reliable account of the author’s journeys through Patagonia.
  • John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841). The book that made we want to go to Mexico. Great illustrations by Frederick Catherwood.
  • Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (1979). Still my favorite of his works, made me want to visit South America.
  • Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels (1934). She traveled alone throughout the Middle East and lived to be 100 years old.
  • Robnert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937). A travel book in which the author fails to reach his destination, but what he does see his so interesting that it doesn’t matter.
  • Sir Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Medinah and Meccah (1855-1856). It took incredible gall for an Englishman to pass himself off as an Afghan physician and visit the holiest sites of Islam.
  • Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (1999). Life doesn’t stop just because you want to pilot a yacht to Juneau, Alaska.
  • Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus (2007). A brilliant Polish travel writer tells how the ancient Grfeek historian informed him on his travels.
  • D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921). It was written in just a few days, but it’s great anyhow.
  • Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons (1957). The author of The Alexandria Quartet describes his years spent on the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977). Travels through Central Europe just before the Second World War.

I cannot help but think some of my other favorites are missing. What you won’t find on this list are books like Eat, Pray, Love and such bourgeois fantasies as A Year in Provence. If that’s what you prefer in travel literature, I would prefer that you don’t undertake to read any of my recommendations. Ever.

Quid hoc ad Iphycli boves?

Posted on by

Old School Card Showing Cattle Farming in the Roman Forum

Roughly translated, the title of today’s post is “What has this to do with the cattle of Iphyclus?” or, more loosely, “Let us return tom the subject at hand.”

I am currently reading Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). Scott is famous for starting his novels slowly. I have just read fifty pages of densely packed plotting as Edmund Tressilian gets lost fleeing Cumnor and his horse throws a shoe. He meets up with an old scholar named Erasmus Holiday who converses mostly in Latin and who is delighted to meet anyone with even an imperfect knowledge of the old Romish tongue.

What Tressilian wants, quite simply, is the directions to the nearest blacksmith so he can continue on his way, but Erasmus is not willing to let go of him that easily. Finally, after numerous quotes from Latin classics, he deputes Hobgoblin (aka Flibbertigibbet), the son of his washerwoman, to show him the way to Wayland Smith, the local farrier.

And here we are detained still more by the rumors of said farrier being a tool of the devil as a result of his former association with a local mountebank.

Eventually Tressilian gets to his destination accompanied by Smith, who is now his servant.

There was a time when I would have been upset at the slow development of the story in Kenilworth, but now I am delighted. This is definitely a slow read, requiring frequent consultation with the notes and (yes) a detailed glossary.

In my old age, I now appreciate Scott’s divergence from the subject at hand. He is so damnably erudite and enjoys sharing it with us. Will Tressilian ever rescue the lovely Amy Robsart from the clutches of the evil Richard Varney? Eventually, I’ll find out; but, in the meantime, whether or not the cattle of Iphyclus enter the fray, I will enjoy every minute of this long and painstaking read.

Conspiracy of Silence

Posted on by

Costumes of the Knights of Calatrava

Around the time when Ferdinand and Isabella jointly ruled the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, there were three independent orders of knights: those of Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava. One of the commanders of the Knights of Calatrava, Fernán Gómez, is the feudal overlord of the village of Fuente Ovejuna (“The Well of Sheep”).

When Gómez goes on a rampage of torturing the peasants and raping the women of the village, the villagers resolve to assassinate him—first having promised not to reveal the names of the perpetrators, even under torture. When an investigative judge sent by the monarchy asks for the names of the murderers, all the villagers say, “Fuente Ovejuna did it!” Faced with a conspiracy of silence the villagers are let off the hook.

Around 1612, Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote a play called Fuente Ovejuna which memorializes the event.

There have been two interesting examples of similar events in which the unanimity of the populace prevented a judgment against the actual perpetrators.

In 1970, a group of Icelandic farmers took matters into their own hands when a governmental agency planned a dam that would affect a large swath of land along the Laxá River near Lake Mývatn in the north of the country. According to the Reykjavík Grapevine, this is what happened:

More than a hundred farmers officially claimed responsibility for the explosion, which annihilated a small dam in the river on August 25, 1970. The area’s inhabitants were determined to prevent the construction of a much bigger dam, which would have destroyed vast quantities of this natural area, as well as most of the surrounding farmlands.

The upshot was pretty much the same as in the Lope de Vega play:

“What makes the Laxá conflict peculiar is that those who resisted also succeeded,” Grímur says. “The planned dam was never built and the area was saved.” Four years later, parliament passed a law securing the protection of Laxá and Mývatn, contributing to the explosion’s status as “the most remarkable and powerful event in the history of environmentalism in Iceland,” as Sigurður Gizurarson, the bomber’s defence lawyer, put it.

Closer to home is the case of Ken McElroy, a small-town bully who regularly committed crimes against the inhabitants of Skidmore, Missouri, without serving time for his depredations. Until one day in 1981. The Wikipedia entry on McElroy tells the story:

On July 9, 1981, he appeared in a local bar, the D&G Tavern, armed with an M1 Garand rifle and bayonet, and later threatened to kill Bowenkamp [the local grocer].] The next day, McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight as he sat with his wife Trena in his pickup truck on Skidmore’s main street. He was struck by bullets from at least two different firearms, in front of a crowd of people estimated as numbering between 30 and 46. Despite the many witnesses, nobody came forward to say who shot him. To date, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy’s death.

As I read Lope de Vega’s play, the other incidents came to mind. I found it interesting that they closely mirrored the Spanish events of some 500 years earlier.

PCs and Nizards

Posted on by

My First Book, Sort Of

Back when I was a toddler in my crib at 2814 East 120th Street in Cleveland, my mother used to tell me stories in Hungarian to help me drop off to sleep. When the stories were her own, they usually involved a fairy princess and a dark forest. But when she was running out of ideas, she would take out children’s story books from the city library on East 116th Street and translate the story into Hungarian while showing me the pictures.

One of them I remember very clearly was Dr. Seuss’s The King’s Stilts. Picture to yourself a kingdom that was below sea level, surrounded by tall dikes covered with trees. These trees were constantly under attack by flying nizards, which went after the roots.

Fortunately, there were legions of patrol cats (P.C.s) deputed by King Birtram to keep the nizards from destroying the trees and flooding the kingdom. When not busy signing proclamations, the king delighted to whizzing around his kingdom on a pair of red stilts.

One day, wicked Lord Droon decided to have the king’s stilts buried by Eric, the royal page, because he thought it was too infra dig for the monarch to be enjoying himself so much. The king was thereupon so despondent that he no longer gave orders to the patrol cats, and the nizards’ attacks were resulting in streams of water flooding into the kingdom.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending. Here, on YouTube, is the Dr. Seuss book, complete with words and pictures:

Naturally, I own a copy of the book. It is a constant reminder of my mother’s ingenuity and love.

Back to the Books

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Enjoyable Books: Just the Thing I Need!

After a month of illness, I have finally returned to my first love: reading. I started with a reread of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar (the second volume of The Alexandria Quartet) and then picked up John Le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field.

On Thursday, I plan to resume my weekly visits to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles. The combination of a guided Mindfulness Meditation session with access to the vast circulating holdings of the library is my indication that things are returning to normal. Plus, I have seven overdue books to return.

This January has been my worst month in many a year. Add to that the fact that it was Los Angeles’s worst month in thirty-one years. What happened in 1994 that was so bad? The Northridge Earthquake on January 17 of that year.

Winding Down

Posted on by | 2 Comments

If you know anything about me, you know that I read a lot of books, something around 160 per year. This month, to date, I have not read anything. I just didn’t feel good enough.

To make matters worse, my apartment will be inspected by the City of Los Angeles a week from today. Not only did I not read anything, but Martine and I have been preparing to donate upward of a thousand books by January 29.

It breaks my heart to donate books that I had spent big bucks collecting, including Folio Society, Library of America, and other premium hardbound editions.

I only hope that the people who get these books appreciate their quality. In the end, it’s probably best that I don’t think too much about this. It would be even more grim if I were given a warning by the city to gut my personal library.

The Ghost of New Years Past

Posted on by

Lucky New Year’s Postcard

I’ve said on many occasions, usually around this time of year, that only a fool celebrates the passing of time. Every January 1, take a picture of yourself in your bathroom mirror and note the thinning and graying of your hair, the mottling of your skin, and the network of spidery lines demarcating the zones of your face. Oh, well, it’s all a natural process.

On a more positive note, let’s see what the youthful Charles Dickens wrote about New Years Day in his first book, Sketches by Boz:

Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.

There must have been some few occurrences in the past year to which we can look back, with a smile of cheerful recollection, if not with a feeling of heartfelt thankfulness. And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.

This is our view of the matter; and entertaining it, notwithstanding our respect for the old year, one of the few remaining moments of whose existence passes away with every word we write, here we are, seated by our fireside on this last night of the old year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, penning this article with as jovial a face as if nothing extraordinary had happened, or was about to happen, to
disturb our good humour.

Hackney-coaches and carriages keep rattling up the street and down the street in rapid succession, conveying, doubtless, smartly-dressed coachfuls to crowded parties; loud and repeated double knocks at the house with green blinds, opposite, announce to the whole neighbourhood that there’s one large party in the street at all events; and we saw through the window, and through the fog too, till it grew so thick that we rung for candles, and drew our curtains, pastry-cooks’ men with green boxes on their heads, and rout-furniture-warehouse-carts, with cane seats and French lamps, hurrying to the numerous houses where an annual festival is held in honour of the occasion.

We can fancy one of these parties, we think, as well as if we were duly dress-coated and pumped, and had just been announced at the drawing-room door.

Clarice Lispector in the U.S.

Posted on by

The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.

I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:

Clarice Lispector (R) and Sons

Vodka and Zakuski

Posted on by

Zakuski: Hors d’Oeuvres to Go with Vodka

It’s a culinary tradition in Slavic countries such as Russia and Ukraine: When you drink vodka, you eat zakuski, which literally means “something to bite after.” It sounds like a delicious culinary tradition. Except for one thing: I’ve never had vodka.

After reading Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012), I just might get myself a bottle. Throughout the novel, the characters are dealing with a strange anomaly. The inland city of Lviv has strange incidents of seagulls, starfish, a stench of seaweed, and salt water crabs appearing in various places throughout the city.

Several residents band together to try to identify the problem, which they do after the consumption of a whole lot of vodka and zakuski. Their Lviv is a magical city in which the hand of the late Jimi Hendrix is buried in a local cemetery, having been supplied by the KGB with the help of Lithuanian operatives. Why? Apparently to study the speed of the spreading of rumors in Soviet society.

This is the fifth work of fiction by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov that I have read. They are all of them sweet and gentle—especially as they come from a land that is now mired in a brutal invasion by Russian forces. I cannot help but think that Kurkov’s whimsy can be as deadly to Putin’s aims as any weapons in his arsenal. Anyhow, let’s hope so. I have a lot more of Kurkov that I want to read; and I hope he continues to live a long and productive life.