Highlights and Review Index

2012-06-11 (Last Modified: 2012-06-11)

Below you’ll find what I consider to be my best posts, and an index of shows and books I’ve done review/impressions posts for. You may also be interested in the main site, On the Origin of Fire…

First, a sampling of some of my better posts:

Articles mostly about literature

Reviews of literature

One Hundred Leaves, Watson’s translation of the Hyakunin Isshu
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Lewis Carroll, the Alice Novels, and Sensible Nonsense

Popular culture

It’s not part of this blog, but I’ve also written a commentary on Dante’s Monarchia.

A few essays and editorials:

An Ascent with Xenophon - On making up for a poor education, featuring Xenophon and Bl. John Henry Newman
How to Begin Studying Literature - As the title indicates
Don’t Learn Literature from Memes - A caution as the title says
Cardinal Newman’s Portrait of a Gentleman - Largely quoting from his Idea of a University
Cardinal Newman on Education and Journalism - More from Idea of a University
What Books Have Most Influenced Me? - Asked and answered
What’s the Appeal of Mishima Yukio? - As the title advertises
Which Translation of the Analects Should I Read? - Also, as the title advertises
Notes on Approaching the Confucian Canon - Advice on how, and how much, to read of the Four Books and Five Classics
Notes on Praying the Divine Office - Some tips for people new to the Office
On Human Sacrifice in the Book of Judges - On Jephte’s daughter
The Catena Aurea on Biblical Genealogies - Why does Scripture include long genealogies?
The Happy Game of Mahjong - On learning and enjoying mahjong
The King of Sports - On professional wrestling
You’re the Mandarin Now, Dog - On learning Chinese
Against James Burnham’s Interpretation of Dante - Responding to his portrayal of Monarchia in his The Macchiavellians
I’ll Hang Around As Long as You Will Let Me - The blog’s tenth anniversary special
Junior-year Reflections, which ties in with Education without University
On Surrounding Oneself with Books - An apology for my bibliophilia
Why Do You Not Study the Odes? - On the value of good art, and focusing on the beautiful
Is There a Hierarchy Among the Arts? - On the distinction between high and low art
Notes on the Purpose of Poetry - What is poetry, and what is its end?
What’s Up with Anime Fans? - Addressing some criticisms of anime fandom
An Experiment in Fandom Criticism - A follow-up of sorts to the above
The Moral Dimension of Judging Art - On the interaction between art and the broader culture
How to Write About a Book - Advice for learning to write about literature and non-fiction
That 50 Questions Meme - Twenty-five questions on my experience as an anime fan, and twenty-five personal questions
Why I Watch Anime - Just as the title indicates
We Hope You Will Enjoy the Show… In One Piece - A very early post about the album as a unit of composition
How Do We Judge Anime? - On how to compare disparate works of animation, and to a lesser extent art in general

I’ve also done a handful of special series on specific subjects. These lead to category pages.

Making One Hundred Friends - memorising one hundred poems (introductory post)
lain20th - on serial experiments lain’s twentieth anniversary.
Anime Autobiography - on my experiences with that medium, written in 2012.
Maynguh Memories - an irregular follow-up to the above, on Japanese comics.
Uncle Walt-a-thon - reviewing every major Disney movie that Walt Disney was personally involved in.
75 Book Challenge 2015 - reading 75 books in one year, successfully completed (technically).

Next, an index of review/impressions posts, by categories.

Poetry:

Alighieri, Dante - La Vita Nuova
Anonymous - The Book of Odes (Arthur Waley’s translation)
Anonymous - Edward, Edward
Anonymous - The Epic of Gilgamesh
Campion, Thomas - “Rose-Cheeked Laura”
Carew, Thomas - “Mediocrity in Love Rejected”
Carroll, Lewis - The Hunting of the Snark
Catullus - Various poems
Cavalcanti, Guido - Various Poems
Cecil, William, 1st Lord Burghley - “To his Daughter Ann, New Year’s Day, 1567”
Cowley, Abraham - “The Given Heart”
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline - “Le Rendez-vous”
Denham, Sir John - “A Song”
Donne, John - Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud
Frost, Robert - Fire and Ice
Fujiwara no Masatsune - Hyakunin Isshu 94 (“Fair Yoshino”)
Graham, James, Marquis of Montrose - “On Himself, upon Hearing What was his Sentence”
Henry VI - “Kingdomes are but Cares”
Herbert, George - “Prayer (I)”
Hesiod - The Works and Days, Theogeny
Homer - The Homeric Hymns, The Iliad, The Odyssey
Hopkins, Gerard Manley - “The Windhover”
Housman, A. E. - “Here Dead Lie We”
Lindsay, Vachel - “The Congo” and “Factory Windows are Always Broken”
Martial - Epigrams
Milton, John - Sonnet XIX: When I Consider how my Light is Spent
Pindar - The Odes
Poe, Edgar Allan - poems
Pope, Alexander - A Little Learning
Pound, Ezra - Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Cantos, “A Pact,” and “In a Station of the Metro”
Randolph, Thomas - “Upon his Picture”
Ransom, John Crowe - “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”
Sage, Alison (Ed.) - Treasury of Children’s Poetry
Sappho - Various poems
Shirley, James - “The Glories of Our Blood and State”
Spenser, Edmund - “Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name”
Stevenson, Robert Louis - A Child’s Garden of Verses
Thomas, Dylan - Various poems
Various - Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets
Various - One Hundred Leaves (Hyakunin Isshu) (Frank Watson translation)
Various - The Penguin Book of Haiku
Villon, François - “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (English) (French)
Waller, Edmund - “Go, Lovely Rose”
Whitman, Walt - “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

Prose Fiction and Drama

Banville, John - The Sea
Carroll, Lewis - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Chesterton, G. K. - The Man Who Was Thursday
Dick, Philip K. - The Man in the High Castle
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hasekura Isuna - Spice & Wolf (vols. 1-4)
Heinlein, Robert - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Irving, Washington - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Kafka, Franz - The Castle
Molière - Le Misanthrope
Murakami Haruki - Kafka on the Shore
Neovictorian - Sanity, Reality
O’Brien, Tim - Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried
O’Connor, Flannery - Various short stories
Ogle, Garth - The Bowl of Tears and Solace
Poe, Edgar Allan - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Pu Songling - Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stoker, Bram - Dracula
Takimoto Tatsuhiko - Welcome to the NHK
Tanigawa Nagaru - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Series) (Books 1-7) (Dissociation)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray

General Non-fiction:

Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles van Doren - How to Read a Book
Alighieri, Dante - Monarchia and The Monarchia Controversy (ed. by Anthony Cassell)
Anissimov, Michael - A Critique of Democracy
Aristotle - Poetics
Azuma Hiroki - Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
Bernays, Edward - Propaganda
Bloom, Harold - How to Read and Why
Carter, John - ABC for Book Collectors
Chapman, John “Borzoi” - Cultured Grugs
Clark, Christopher - Iron Kingdom
Cochran and Harpending - The 10,000 Year Explosion
Dabney, Robert Lewis - A Defense of Virginia and the South
Demetrius - On Style
Esolen, Anthony - Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
Evola, Julius - Fascism Viewed from the Right and Notes on the Third Reich
Garfunkel, Art - What is it All but Luminous?
Grenby, M. O. and Andrea Immel (eds.) - The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature
Herodotus - The Histories
Hitchens, Peter - Short Breaks in Mordor
Hobbes, Thomas - Leviathan
Ingrao, Charles W. - The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815
Israel, Ann and Gregg Swain - Mah Jongg: The Art of the Game
Jones, Dan - The Plantagenets
Kissinger, Henry - Diplomacy
Kobliner, Beth - Get a Financial Life
Kondo Marie - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Maine, Henry Sumner - Popular Government
Mangan, P. D. - Best Supplements for Men’s Health, Strength, and Virility and Muscle Up
Marchant, Bill - Northern Reaction
Maritain, Jacques - Education at the Crossroads
Metternich, Klemens von - Metternich: The Autobiography (1773-1815)
Longinus - On the Sublime
Okrent, Arika - In the Land of Invented Languages
Pines, Yuri - The Everlasting Empire
Pound, Ezra - ABC of Reading, with a follow-up post
Sallust - The Catiline Conspiracy and The Jugurthine War
Santagata, Marco - Dante: The Story of his Life
Scott, Emmet - Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited
Semmes, Raphael - Memoirs of a Service Afloat During the War Between the States
Southern, A. C. - Elizabethan Recusant Prose: 1559-1582
Tanizaki Junichiro - In Praise of Shadows
Taylor, A. J. P. - The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918
Trudeau, Noah Andre - Robert E. Lee
Trump, Donald and Tony Schwarz - The Art of the Deal
Tuchman, Barbara - The Guns of August
Various - The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists (ed. by Robin Waterfield)
Walther, Peter - The First World War in Colour
Weaver, Richard - Ideas Have Consequences
Xenophon - Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises
Young, Philip H. - The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Religion/Catholicism:

Bellarmine, Robert - The Art of Dying Well, De Laicis, De Romano Pontifice vol. 1, and Doctrina Christiana
Benedict XVI - Saint Paul
Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy
Calloway, Fr. Donald - Consecration to St. Joseph
Chesterton, G. K. - The Everlasting Man, Heretics, and Orthodoxy
de Liguori, Alphonsus - How to Pray at All Times
Hockenmaier, Fr. Fructosious - Confession Made Easy
Kinkead, Fr. Thomas - Explanation of the Baltimore Catechism
Mamalakis, Philip - Parenting Towards the Kingdom
McGovern, Fr. James - The Religious and Moral Training of Children
Various - From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (ed. by Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan)

Confucianism:

Anonymous - The Analects of Confucius (Leonard Lyall translation) (Choosing a translation)
Anonymous - The Book of Documents (a.k.a., the Shujing)
Anonymous - The Book of Odes (Arthur Waley’s translation)
Anonymous - The Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean
Gongyang Commentators - The Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals
Herbert, Edward - A Confucian Notebook
Mencius - Mencius
Pines, Yuri - Foundations of Confucian Thought
Yao, Xinzhong - An Introduction to Confucianism

Plato:

Shakespeare:

1 Henry VI
2 Henry VI
3 Henry VI
Titus Andronicus (and Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew)
Richard III (with notes on reading Shakespeare generally)

Graphic Novels and Comics:

Aida Yu - Gunslinger Girl (vols. 7-8) (vols. 11-12) (finale)
CLAMP - Gate 7 (vol. 1)
Fujishima Kosuke - Oh, My Goddess! (vol. 41) (vol. 47) (vol. 48) (vols. 1-7)
Go Nagai - Devilman
Kamachi Kazuma (story) and Fuyukawa Motoi (art) - A Certain Scientific Railgun (vols. 1-2)
Kio Shimoku - Genshiken Second Season vol. 6-7
Kishiro Yukito - Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Omnibus vols. 3-5
Ishinomori Shotaro - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Ito Junji - Frankenstein, Gyo, and Uzumaki
Kon Satoshi - Opus
Koume Keito - Spice & Wolf (GN) vol. 9-10
Kumeta Koji - Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (overview) (vol. 9)
Mori Kaoru - A Bride’s Story vol. 6
O’Connor, Flannery - The Cartoons
Oshii Mamoru and Kon Satoshi - Seraphim 266613336 Wings
Suenobu Keiko - Limit vols. 3-6
Suetsugu Yuki - Chihayafuru (French Edition)
Tadano Nobuaki - 7 Billion Needles
Takemiya Yuyuko (story) and Zekkyo (art) - ToraDora (vols. 1-2) (vol. 3) (vol. 7)
Tanigawa Nico - Watamote vols. 5-7
Tezuka Osamu - Dororo
Ueda Hajime - FLCL
Unita Yumi - Bunny Drop (vols. 1-2)
Yasuhiko Yoshikazu - Joan; and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (vols. 4-5), (vols. 6-7), (vols. 8-10)

Animation:

101 Dalmatians
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Alice in Wonderland
Bambi
Cinderella
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (both seasons)
Dumbo
Evangelion 2.0
Evangelion 3.0
Fantasia
Fate/Stay Night
Fate/Zero (box set 1) (box set 2) (final impressions)
FLCL (blu-ray)
Ghost Hound
The Hobbit
Interstella 5555
The Jungle Book
Lady and the Tramp
Last Exile (eps. 1-2)
The Last Unicorn
The Lord of the Rings
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Endless Eight arc)
The Mystic Archives of Dantalian
Neon Genesis Evangelion (TV Series)
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth
Peter Pan
Pinocchio
Return of the King
Rozen Maiden and RM: Träumend
Rozen Maiden: Zurückspulen
serial experiments lain (blu-ray) (the “theology” of) (personal experience with)
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Sword in the Stone
The Three Caballeros
Watamote
The Wind Rises
Your Name and 5 Centimetres per Second

Miscellaneous:

Akira Club (art book)
Board Books by various authors
The Chekist (film)
Dr. Seuss (picture books)
Dr. Zhivago (film)
Jurassic Park (film)
Katyn (film)
Maniac (film)
Medieval Monsters (art book)
Mischief Makers (video game)
Moby Dick, by Geraldine McCauhrean (picture book)
Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (video game)
Pokemon: White Version (video game)
The Road Home (film)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (film)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (musical)
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PS version) (video game)
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis (video game)
Tales of Mystery and Imagination (album)
A Visit to Brambly Hedge (guide book to Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series)
The Wicker Man (film)

Bibliophile’s Journal (Short Book Reviews):

Akira by Otomo Katsuhiro
Alex Cross, Run by James Patterson
Anything and Something by Mori Kaoru
The Arthurian Handbook by Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (Omnibus 1) by Kishiro Yukito
Biblical Commentaries: Romans by St. Thomas Aquinas
A Bride’s Story (v.4) by Mori Kaoru
Bunny Drop (v.3-4) (v.8) by Unita Yumi
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Confessions of a Mask by Mishima Yukio
Considérations sur la France by Joseph de Maistre
Cromartie High School (v.1-2) by Nonaka Eiji
Disappearance Diary by Azuma Hideo
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Gate 7 (v.3) by CLAMP
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Great Expectations (started) (finished) by Charles Dickens
Gunslinger Girl (v.13-14) by Aida Yu
History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Sir Winston Churchill
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya by Tanigawa Nagaru
Limit by Suenobu Keiko
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Navarre Bible Commentary: Jeremiah
Neon Genesis Evangelion (v.1-3) (v.7-9) by Sadamoto Yoshiyuki
Oh, My Goddess! (v. 42) by Fujishima Kosuke
Rules of Prey by John Sandford
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Spice & Wolf (graphic novel) (v.7) by Koume Keito
Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Mishima Yukio
Thermae Romae (v.1) by Yamazaki Mari
ToraDora (v.5) by Zekkyo
A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade
Twenty Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
X (Omnibus III, Omnibus V) by CLAMP
Yotsuba&! (v.11) by Azuma Kiyohiko

Finally, the year-end retrospectives, which may be of interest since they contain a “highlight reel” of each year: