Well, now that I’m mostly moved into a new apartment, I’ve had some more time to read. Part of my newfound free time has gone into resuming my study of Japanese, as well as my usual mix of film and anime, but on the literary front here’s what I’ve been up to:
I finally, finally finished Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. For the patient reader, the narrator’s frequent asides, long descriptions, and multitude of characters and plot threads can be quite entertaining.
“Didactic” literature has a poor reputation, in part because of its distinguished critics. J.R.R. Tolkien’s dislike of allegory is well-known, and his friend C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is often compared unfavourably to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings partly because one is allegorical and one is not. Edgar Allan Poe also criticised explicitly didactic literature, and Lewis Carroll mocked the tendency to look for a “moral” to stories via Wonderland’s Duchess character.
My reading schedule has collapsed over the last month, due to a new job with longer hours and commute than my old part-time gig, in addition to apartment hunting. It’s been a struggle even to keep up with my anime-viewing, but I do have a few things I’ve finished over the last few weeks.
The biggest project is the fourth and final volume of Sir Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the first volume of which I read roughly a year and a half ago.
I’ve decided to provisionally make The Bibliophile’s Journal a regular, probably monthly, feature of the blog. My stated purpose with the blog is to share my thoughts on what I read and watch, but with most books I don’t have enough material to justify a dedicated review, but do have a few things to say. This is especially with individual volumes in ongoing series (e.g., Gunslinger Girl this month). Depending on how it goes, I may also just start posting very short, say one- or two-paragraph posts on everything I read.
I’ve occasionally mentioned, here and on Twitter, that I love books - not just reading, but the actual, physical objects, and try to surround myself with them. That “surrounding” is, in fact, literal since I don’t have much space in my room, and I long ago ran out of shelf space and have to stack new volumes on the floor. It’s something like stuffing the Library of Alexandria into a broom closet, or Yomiko’s room from R.
As far as reading goes, the big event of the past couple months is that I have a Kindle Fire HD now. I owned and had mixed feelings about the Kindle 2, but since this one is basically a tablet I’ve been getting more use out of it. I’m still not a fan of e-books, but it is a decent way to conveniently get things that would be difficult otherwise (like French-language books), or things available for free online but that are too long to read comfortably at a computer, like the Vatican’s online library of papal encyclicals.
Spice & Wolf is a series that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but I’ve struggled with actually putting pen to paper for it. It’s like the Haruhi series in that it’s charming and competently written, but lacks the subtlety and complexity that make for a great, re-readable novel series.
Spice & Wolf’s basic premise is that Lawrence, a traveling merchant in a world loosely based on late Medieval or Renaissance Europe, meets Holo, a wolf-spirit and harvest goddess in a village he does business in, and agrees to help her return to her homeland of Yoitsu, far in the north.
As you may have guessed from the length of my last post, I admire Ezra Pound.
I’ve found, though, that I’m one of a relative few. His poetry seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and I can certainly understand those who don’t care for him. Much of his poetry is difficult, his references obscure, and his politics generally right-wing but eclectic enough mostly to just throw people off, except that he vocally supported Benito Mussolini, and even those critics who appreciate, say, T.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a round-up post, but I’ve of course continued to read quite a bit. Here’s the highlight reel.
The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien - I’ve been meaning to re-read The Lord of the Rings, since I haven’t read it since shortly before the film trilogy came out ten years ago. I tend to approach long books reluctantly, though, so it’s taken me a long time to get around to it.
This past week, I read through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for the first time. It’s been a few years since a book held my interest so firmly, and I made it through the novel quickly. It’s the sort of book that reminds me of why I love literature so much, being symbolic but not presumptuous, intense, and realistic. It does have a few problems, but overall I loved this novel.