Meme: Reading Wednesday
13 March 2013 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerWhat I've recently finished since the last post
The Book of Restoration Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite, though I feel like I made it through the first generation of Augustans only through the blessings of Swift and Gay -- not that it was nearly as hard as crossing the Ming Dynasty without a camel, but I was not in the best of moods for pointed sententiousness. There is, by the way, a much greater range of genres in this than the Elizabethan volume, possibly because the Augustans were not the best hands at lyrics. (And did I know that Pope once attempted to write a Spenserian pastoral? (Content warnings: shepherds, unconvincing lovelornitude.) He should have known he was too Civilized to pull off the Arcadian pose.) Recommended.
Mahôka Kôkô no Rettôsei v7, Tsutomu Satô - Okay, I didn't expect to see stakes escalated that high. This series is supposed to last all three years of high school? Without disintegrating the planet into a swarm of lifeless asteroids? Okay then. But yay back to prose.
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Songling Pu tr. John Minford, an early Qing-dynasty bricolage ranging from one-paragraph incidents to fully formed short stories about ghosts, Taoists, fox-women, dreams, con men, jokes, gods, and the just plain odd-and-unexplained. This was a slow read, off-and-on since December. I'd previously taken in Soulié de Morant's slimmer selection, which avoids the more risque tales, and found this harvest of about a third of the original quite delightful. I did, at times, have the same experience as in some of the later parts of Journey to the West of wondering, "Okay, which permutation of this trope is being worked out this time?" but I've come to suspect that's to be expected in Chinese literature. Recommended.
The Book of Georgian Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite, which is a third again as long as its predecessors. It turns out I can read a butt-load of Romantic-era poetry when I'm laid up with a cold. Three sections, this time, the generations of Collins and Gray, of Blake, Burns, and Cowper, and of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats -- which last section takes up more than half the book. (Tennyson and the Brownings were, despite being born under a George, deferred to the existentially challenged Victorian volume.) Even more variety in genres, including several longer poems, both narratives and otherwise, including a rather tedious stretch in the first section of moral philosophy disguised as verse. I appreciated the generous selection of Scots poets before and contemporaneous with Burns, by way of giving him context -- highlighting what was and was not original in his works. Also, "Cristabel" is much more interesting than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I hereby propose the later be replaced by the former in all anthologies that don't have both. It's interesting, too, to realize I now solidly prefer "Ode to a Nightingale" over "To Autumn," much as I still prize the latter; I wonder whether, my next reread of Austen, Persuasion will be displaced as my favorite. Recommended.
Akurei a.k.a. Ghost Hunt v1 by Fuyumi Ono - The first of an earlier series by the author of The Twelve Kingdoms (Akurei, "evil spirit," is the original title, but the manga and anime adaptations used Ghost Hunt after one of the later volumes in the series, and that's now better known). From the mannerisms, this feels very much like something that wants early '80s shoujo-manga style illustrations -- or better yet, to be an actual '80s shoujo manga. A pleasant story of psychic investigators ghost hunting at a high school, but not exactly grabbing my lapels to make me read more.
Kaze no Stigma ("stigma of the wind") v1-2 by Takahiro Yamato -- now THIS is good writing. Makes no pretension to be anything but an entertaining contemporary fantasy, but without many of the more annoying tropes of Japanese pop-culture artifacts (tho' there's more in the second volume than the first). It helps that the author thoroughly embraces the anti-hero nature of his protagonist, and provides a reasonable and reasonably competent backstory character arc to back it up. Unfortunately, the author died before finishing the series and the fan translators lost wind -- I'll have to see if I can find the raws, or better yet actual, yanno, books. (Or the anime, though without the omniscient narrator's commentary, I don't know how the protag's actions come across.) Recommended.
(Maybe I should use actual paragraphing instead of relying on pilcrows ... ) (ETA: reformatted for easier reading.)
What I'm reading now
Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan by Giles Milton, a biography of William Adams, the historical inspiration for Clavell's Shogun. The subtitle severely overstates the situation -- Portuguese Jesuits had been in Japan for 50 years when he arrived in 1599, shortly before Tokugawa Ieyasu consolidated his hold with the battle of Sekigahara. Not to mention, the country wasn't actually closed by the Tokugawa shogunate for another couple decades. Anyway, some light, zippy history.
The Book of New York Verse ed. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a 1917 collection of poems about New York City. The first half is a sort of potted history of the city, mixing poems written at the time, including much journalistic verse, with historical pieces, but around the turn of the 20th century this blends into more associative thematic arrangement. Interesting so far, but a bit light-weight. It's possible I would take better to the Colonial-era pieces if I knew more local history -- once into the Federal (post-independence) period, I could rely somewhat on general national history.
What I'll read next
This part is always hard, but I can predict one thing for sure: Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century ed. Herbert Grierson, a 1921 collection that can, without too much exaggeration, be said to have completely changed Donne's reputation -- finally snagged myself a copy, and its extended critical introduction. Beyond that, who knows.
The Book of Restoration Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite, though I feel like I made it through the first generation of Augustans only through the blessings of Swift and Gay -- not that it was nearly as hard as crossing the Ming Dynasty without a camel, but I was not in the best of moods for pointed sententiousness. There is, by the way, a much greater range of genres in this than the Elizabethan volume, possibly because the Augustans were not the best hands at lyrics. (And did I know that Pope once attempted to write a Spenserian pastoral? (Content warnings: shepherds, unconvincing lovelornitude.) He should have known he was too Civilized to pull off the Arcadian pose.) Recommended.
Mahôka Kôkô no Rettôsei v7, Tsutomu Satô - Okay, I didn't expect to see stakes escalated that high. This series is supposed to last all three years of high school? Without disintegrating the planet into a swarm of lifeless asteroids? Okay then. But yay back to prose.
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Songling Pu tr. John Minford, an early Qing-dynasty bricolage ranging from one-paragraph incidents to fully formed short stories about ghosts, Taoists, fox-women, dreams, con men, jokes, gods, and the just plain odd-and-unexplained. This was a slow read, off-and-on since December. I'd previously taken in Soulié de Morant's slimmer selection, which avoids the more risque tales, and found this harvest of about a third of the original quite delightful. I did, at times, have the same experience as in some of the later parts of Journey to the West of wondering, "Okay, which permutation of this trope is being worked out this time?" but I've come to suspect that's to be expected in Chinese literature. Recommended.
The Book of Georgian Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite, which is a third again as long as its predecessors. It turns out I can read a butt-load of Romantic-era poetry when I'm laid up with a cold. Three sections, this time, the generations of Collins and Gray, of Blake, Burns, and Cowper, and of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats -- which last section takes up more than half the book. (Tennyson and the Brownings were, despite being born under a George, deferred to the existentially challenged Victorian volume.) Even more variety in genres, including several longer poems, both narratives and otherwise, including a rather tedious stretch in the first section of moral philosophy disguised as verse. I appreciated the generous selection of Scots poets before and contemporaneous with Burns, by way of giving him context -- highlighting what was and was not original in his works. Also, "Cristabel" is much more interesting than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I hereby propose the later be replaced by the former in all anthologies that don't have both. It's interesting, too, to realize I now solidly prefer "Ode to a Nightingale" over "To Autumn," much as I still prize the latter; I wonder whether, my next reread of Austen, Persuasion will be displaced as my favorite. Recommended.
Akurei a.k.a. Ghost Hunt v1 by Fuyumi Ono - The first of an earlier series by the author of The Twelve Kingdoms (Akurei, "evil spirit," is the original title, but the manga and anime adaptations used Ghost Hunt after one of the later volumes in the series, and that's now better known). From the mannerisms, this feels very much like something that wants early '80s shoujo-manga style illustrations -- or better yet, to be an actual '80s shoujo manga. A pleasant story of psychic investigators ghost hunting at a high school, but not exactly grabbing my lapels to make me read more.
Kaze no Stigma ("stigma of the wind") v1-2 by Takahiro Yamato -- now THIS is good writing. Makes no pretension to be anything but an entertaining contemporary fantasy, but without many of the more annoying tropes of Japanese pop-culture artifacts (tho' there's more in the second volume than the first). It helps that the author thoroughly embraces the anti-hero nature of his protagonist, and provides a reasonable and reasonably competent backstory character arc to back it up. Unfortunately, the author died before finishing the series and the fan translators lost wind -- I'll have to see if I can find the raws, or better yet actual, yanno, books. (Or the anime, though without the omniscient narrator's commentary, I don't know how the protag's actions come across.) Recommended.
(Maybe I should use actual paragraphing instead of relying on pilcrows ... ) (ETA: reformatted for easier reading.)
What I'm reading now
Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan by Giles Milton, a biography of William Adams, the historical inspiration for Clavell's Shogun. The subtitle severely overstates the situation -- Portuguese Jesuits had been in Japan for 50 years when he arrived in 1599, shortly before Tokugawa Ieyasu consolidated his hold with the battle of Sekigahara. Not to mention, the country wasn't actually closed by the Tokugawa shogunate for another couple decades. Anyway, some light, zippy history.
The Book of New York Verse ed. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a 1917 collection of poems about New York City. The first half is a sort of potted history of the city, mixing poems written at the time, including much journalistic verse, with historical pieces, but around the turn of the 20th century this blends into more associative thematic arrangement. Interesting so far, but a bit light-weight. It's possible I would take better to the Colonial-era pieces if I knew more local history -- once into the Federal (post-independence) period, I could rely somewhat on general national history.
What I'll read next
This part is always hard, but I can predict one thing for sure: Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century ed. Herbert Grierson, a 1921 collection that can, without too much exaggeration, be said to have completely changed Donne's reputation -- finally snagged myself a copy, and its extended critical introduction. Beyond that, who knows.
no subject
Date: 13 March 2013 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 March 2013 07:45 pm (UTC)(If you don't take risks ... )
---L.