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Books recently devoured upon arrival in-house:
Cross Game v7, Mitsuru Adachi - Contains v14-15 of the Japanese edition -- one more volume to go. I am once again reminded of just how good Adachi is at storytelling, as the implications of the events of v6 continue to reverberate and the characters prepare for the climactic summer qualifying tournament. (I use "reverberate" deliberately -- echoes, structural and ironic, are a major tool in his kit.) Highly recommended, still.
Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith - This is billed as a retelling of Iphis and Ianthe, but it's not so much that as a genderqueer romance with characters conscious of Ovid -- including two separate summaries of Ovid's version, one told in character. A fun, breezy read, though the partial implication that one solution to the problems of the world is to go Brazil-ending is not as encouraging as was probably intended.
Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge - I want to sit this book down in a locked room with Westmark and then eavesdrop as they try to figure out whether how much to trust each other, and what's to be gained by turning the other in. Wonderful evocation of pre-modern espionage, even though too much time is spent without the goose. I am inexplicably without the sequel.
The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima - I gather this is the Mishima novel I'm most likely to connect to. I must say, it's a good unraveling of exactly why secret lovers in Japanese poetry angst over discovery so much. I get the very strong impression that, even though the heroine is (like the hero) so very much An Ideal it's not even funny, Mishima did not like women. I also get the impression Mishima preferred the unreflective type in his boy-toys. All carping aside, I like the story itself -- I'm guessing it's in some sense based on Daphnis and Chloe? The parallels are too strong to not be deliberate, but was it direct or indirect influence is the question.
Books taking longer to digest:
Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, Thomas LaMarre - The odd subtitle obscures that this is really a study of the poetics of Kokinshu-era poetics and its entanglement with calligraphic styles (so nothing as expansive as the main title suggests). It's thinky enough that I have to take time off every five pages to process. It probably helps that I was already, in my own unsystematic way, already working toward some of the author's arguments (regarding the relationship between pivot-words and names-of-things poems), but other parts, I don't yet understand enough to evaluate.
A Waka Anthology, volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance, Edwin Cranston - 1100 folio pages do not go down in a single gulp. Or even two.
Tsunaide Tsukurou: Yunitto Origami (roughly,* "Let's Connect and Make: Unit Origami"), Tomoko Fuse - It is likewise impossible to rush through an origami book -- all the more so for unit origami.** Fuse is one of my three favorite origami artists,*** and this book hasn't been translated, that I'm aware of -- found in used book store's foreign-language section, along with several Japanese origami books from the library of someone from Alberta. I kept myself to under five, but snagged all of Fuse's, and I started on this as the looking the most interesting.
Haiku: The Poetry of Nature, ed. David Cobb - On the other hand, while it's possible to read a haiku collection in a single sitting, doing to so pretty much misses the point. This one has a pretty good mix of traditional and modern poets, generally in reasonable translations, plus lots of pretty pictures from the Japanese collection from The British Museum.
* This can probably be rendered more idiomatically.
** The domain of such implied instructions as "Now make 19 more of those so we can assemble them."
*** Robert Lang and John Montroll.
---L.
Cross Game v7, Mitsuru Adachi - Contains v14-15 of the Japanese edition -- one more volume to go. I am once again reminded of just how good Adachi is at storytelling, as the implications of the events of v6 continue to reverberate and the characters prepare for the climactic summer qualifying tournament. (I use "reverberate" deliberately -- echoes, structural and ironic, are a major tool in his kit.) Highly recommended, still.
Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith - This is billed as a retelling of Iphis and Ianthe, but it's not so much that as a genderqueer romance with characters conscious of Ovid -- including two separate summaries of Ovid's version, one told in character. A fun, breezy read, though the partial implication that one solution to the problems of the world is to go Brazil-ending is not as encouraging as was probably intended.
Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge - I want to sit this book down in a locked room with Westmark and then eavesdrop as they try to figure out whether how much to trust each other, and what's to be gained by turning the other in. Wonderful evocation of pre-modern espionage, even though too much time is spent without the goose. I am inexplicably without the sequel.
The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima - I gather this is the Mishima novel I'm most likely to connect to. I must say, it's a good unraveling of exactly why secret lovers in Japanese poetry angst over discovery so much. I get the very strong impression that, even though the heroine is (like the hero) so very much An Ideal it's not even funny, Mishima did not like women. I also get the impression Mishima preferred the unreflective type in his boy-toys. All carping aside, I like the story itself -- I'm guessing it's in some sense based on Daphnis and Chloe? The parallels are too strong to not be deliberate, but was it direct or indirect influence is the question.
Books taking longer to digest:
Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, Thomas LaMarre - The odd subtitle obscures that this is really a study of the poetics of Kokinshu-era poetics and its entanglement with calligraphic styles (so nothing as expansive as the main title suggests). It's thinky enough that I have to take time off every five pages to process. It probably helps that I was already, in my own unsystematic way, already working toward some of the author's arguments (regarding the relationship between pivot-words and names-of-things poems), but other parts, I don't yet understand enough to evaluate.
A Waka Anthology, volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance, Edwin Cranston - 1100 folio pages do not go down in a single gulp. Or even two.
Tsunaide Tsukurou: Yunitto Origami (roughly,* "Let's Connect and Make: Unit Origami"), Tomoko Fuse - It is likewise impossible to rush through an origami book -- all the more so for unit origami.** Fuse is one of my three favorite origami artists,*** and this book hasn't been translated, that I'm aware of -- found in used book store's foreign-language section, along with several Japanese origami books from the library of someone from Alberta. I kept myself to under five, but snagged all of Fuse's, and I started on this as the looking the most interesting.
Haiku: The Poetry of Nature, ed. David Cobb - On the other hand, while it's possible to read a haiku collection in a single sitting, doing to so pretty much misses the point. This one has a pretty good mix of traditional and modern poets, generally in reasonable translations, plus lots of pretty pictures from the Japanese collection from The British Museum.
* This can probably be rendered more idiomatically.
** The domain of such implied instructions as "Now make 19 more of those so we can assemble them."
*** Robert Lang and John Montroll.
---L.