Saturday, November 25, 2017

November (fourth week) 2017 Reads

This week was a mixed bag of short stories, non-fiction, a mystery, and not much time for making notes on the books and uploading cover images. I'm really surprised that I've been pretty faithful with the Deal Me In challenge


Deal Me In
Story: The Boar-Pig (in  Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki)
A short piece involving party crashers, a mischievous girl, and a ferocious beast. This is a gentle story, not one of Saki's macabre pieces.






Card: Ten of Diamonds.
This card from Roy at Deviant Art has nothing to do with the story. I just thought it was a fun design.








from the library....
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware (Kindle edition)


from my shelves...
Conversations on Art and Aesthetics by



Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky by


Old Rendering Plant  by


Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology by












Sunday, November 19, 2017

November (third week) 2017 Reads

Browser problems this week so post is light on images.


Deal Me In Story:  The cat in the attic by Valerie Martin  (Sea Lovers: Selected Stories)
Not a bad story, but I don't care much for her style. I won this collection in a GoodReads giveaway, read a few of the stories and decided not to review it. Lots of animals being mistreated by people.  Not sure why it's still on my shelf or why I put it on my roster--maybe I decided to give it another try. Will donate to book sale.

 Card: Nine of Hearts: Not looking for a card image this week.

from my shelves...

North Station by


A Son at the Front: A Library of America eBook Classic by


Island of a Thousand Mirrors by

Free advance review copy.

Bat City Review, Issue 8, 2012

Botchan by Sōseki Natsume (Kindle ed.): translated (1918) from the Japanese by Yasotaro Morri
An enjoyable read. This classic 1906 Japanese novel tells of the adventures of a novice school teacher in a small rural community.
(Also available on Gutenberg)


 Gutenberg finds...


When I Was a Boy in Japan by Sakae Shioya; published in 1906
What a happy find--just as I was about halfway through  Botchan by Sōseki Natsume. Both books were first published in 1906. Botchan is a novel about a young teacher in a rural school. The purpose of this memoir "...is to provide an introduction by telling some of the experiences which are common to most Japanese boys of the present time, together with some account of the customs and manners belonging to their life."



California Missions: A Guide To The Historic Trails Of The Padres, by Karl F. Brown; Illustrated With Seventy-Eight Photographs by Floyd Ray; Foreword by Rexford Newcomb; 1939, Garden City Publishing
Just fun to look at all the old photos.

San Juan Bautista


San Buenaventura









Saturday, November 11, 2017

November (second week) 2017 Reads

A fine week of reading which included a super novel, excellent poetry, and a fine collection of short fiction. All this whilst workmen were crashing about overhead installing plywood flooring in the attic. Then there is the story of the week...

“Deal Me In 2017!”

Story: The Vacant Lot (in The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural, by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, first published in 1903)

This story goes nicely with strange sounds in the attic. A family gives up small town life and buys a bargain house in a good Boston neighborhood. They find out why it was so cheap when strange things happen in the empty lot next door and then right in their house itself. A good ghost story, I will certainly read more in this collection. A Gutenberg gem.



Card: Four of Diamonds
I couldn't find a sufficiently creepy four of diamonds, but I did find this book on Amazon. It shows diamonds as signifying money. Money was the motive for the purchase of the house next to The Vacant Lot so I'll go with it. Looks like a fun book, if you're into that sort of thing. (It averages 4.5 stars from the 37 Amazon reviews)





from my shelves...



Kensington Gardens by


 
Miami Century Fox by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias; translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio
Bilingual editions of poetry translated from languages I have some familiarity with always fascinate me. They teach me so much about what I don't know. If I were to sit down with this collection of poems,  my minimal knowledge of Spanish and a good dictionary or two I could probably decipher some meaning of the text but the result would hardly be poetic and certainly not fifty-one Petarchan sonnets. I would totally miss the point and give up early on. A collection to make one appreciate the Cuban-American experience, poetry, and the art of fine translation.
Free review copy from publisher through LibraryThing giveaway.



I Am the Brother of XX  by Fleur Jaeggy; translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff
These strange short stories seemed to go perfectly with the strange noises coming from the attic. I almost expected the workmen to come downstairs and tell me they had found some weird artifacts from the 178 year history of the house. No such luck so I had to be startled by the odd goings on in this Gothic collection. The cover, by the way, is deceptively calm for the the sharp, sometimes brutal, world view in the stories.

Saturday, November 04, 2017

November (first week) 2017 Reads

The story for this week is one of the best from my roster, the rest of my reading was also good stuff. (well almost all of it was good.)


“Deal Me In 2017!”
Story:   The Song the Owl God Himself Sang, Silver Droplets Fall Fall All Around,” An Ainu Tale .
Transliterated in Romaji and translated from Ainu into Japanese by Chiri Yukie; Translated from Japanese into English and introduced by Kyoko Selden

This is wonderful. The introduction is quite detailed on the interesting history of the work. The preface to the work, Ainu Shin’yōshū (Ainu Songs of Gods), in which this song was originally published is also included. The song itself tells a story of how the Owl God takes pity on a pauper family.

From the Preface: Long ago, this spacious Hokkaido was our ancestors’ space of freedom. Like innocent children, as they led their happy, leisurely lives embraced by beautiful, great nature. Truly, they were the beloved of nature; how blissful it must have been.

On land in winter, kicking the deep snow that covers forests and fields, stepping over mountain after mountain, unafraid of the cold that freezes heaven and earth, they hunt bear; at sea in summer, on the green waves where a cool breeze swims, accompanied by the songs of white seagulls, they float small boats like tree leaves on the water to fish all day; in flowering spring, while basking in the soft sun, they spend long days singing with perpetually warbling birds, collecting butterbur and sagebrush; in autumn of red leaves, through the stormy wind they divide the pampas grass with its budding ears, catch salmon till evening, and as fishing torches go out they dream beneath the full moon while deer call their companions in the valley. What a happy life this must have been. That realm of peace has passed; the dream shattered tens of years since, this land rapidly changing with mountains and fields transformed one by one into villages, villages into towns. 

From The Song: 
“Silver droplets fall fall all around me
golden droplets fall fall all around me.” So singing
I went down along the river’s flow, above the human village.
As I looked down below
paupers of old have now become rich, while rich men of old
have now become paupers, it seems.
By the shore, human children are at play
with little toy bows with little toy arrows.

 

Card: 7 Clubs, Owl deck from Scout Playing cards at Zazzle

This finishes the club suit for this year. This suit was defined for my roster as "Clubs--different format (narrative poem, short play or skit, graphic, clever title, narrative essay, etc.)." It was fun to set up and fun to do so if I participate again next year I may use it this way again.


from my shelves...
 



Chocky by John Wyndham,  Afterword by Margaret Atwood
My kind of sci-fi. A classic.

And I like the cover too...







Dazzling the Gods: Stories by Tom Vowler
Wonderful collection.  This is one I helped crowd fund through Unbound 
Glad I did that.

Another great cover...


 
 


Not One Day by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Memories of loves past.  Garréta is a member of Oulipo, but this work is not exactly Oulipo. She does set a rigid form--write at computer for five hours every day, with no revisions, for thirty days chronicling memories of women she has desired or has been desired by--but she doesn't stick to the program. So there are not thirty entries (she abandons the schedule early on) but what there is has wonderful insights, poetic writing and, at times, amusing encounters.






Old Demons, New Deities by

anthology of contemporary Tibetan fiction. Some of these stories were written in English, others have been translated from the Tibetan or, in one case, from the Chinese. I enjoyed this look into the lives of Tibetan exiles.

 I must have been picking books from my to read shelves by cover this week.

 



Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by J.T. Mahany
The most difficult of this week's reads. A complicated fantasy world of experimental authors who are dying off in some sort of prison. When the last man dies there is no one left to tell the story but the story gets told. A book (and an author) to read and read again.

Not a dazzling cover but one that fits the material.



The Octopus: A Story of California (The Epic of the Wheat #1) by Frank Norris (Kindle ed)
I've been reading this off and on for several months--partly because it's on Kindle and I forget about it, but mostly because I found it a bit tedious. I would have appreciated it more if I had read it a long time ago when I was studying California history. Almost a bucket list read. Glad I read it, but also glad to scratch it off the list.

Image Googling will bring up some really fine covers for this, but I have used the generic, forgettable one from the Kindle edition to highlight my problem with remembering to read what is on my kindle.


Saving Tarboo Creek: One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land
by Scott Freeman, Susan Leopold Freeman (Illustrations)
A worthwhile book about an ecology project on a small piece of land in Washington state. This is a salmon breeding area so Freeman gives some background on what salmon need. The book covers the broader picture of how this small property fits into the wider ecology of the creek and the surrounding area and also why this small project matters in the world-wide ecological picture. One message here is: do what you can, every little bit counts.
A nice companion to The Hidden Life of Trees which I read in August.

free advance review copy from publisher.