Noehēcatlapalqui cōāmichtēnqui
The wife had the next pick in our family book club. We stuck with the horror genre and so she picked a Dean Koontz: Phantoms. I recognized the title immediately and think I saw the film many years ago, with Peter O'Toole.
Found a great reading challenge for 2022, thanks to My Reader's Block. It involves a random number generator based on the number of books on your TBR shelf. And yours truly has a ridiculously large TBR shelf. 1269 books. Holy shit. How'd it get so big?
So the challenge has goals for each month, two books a month off your TBR shelf. I'll probably do this challenge if only to knock some books off the shelf. And DNF is allowed, so if I start a book and hate it, that still counts in the challenge.
So, in January 2022, based on the following rules, I'll read:
Number generated randomly (622): A School for Fools, by Sasha Sokolov; and random number after list ordered on "date added" (472): Campusland, by Scott Johnston.
What else do you do when you can't sleep? Finish a book, of course. But also, watch the movie adaptation!
Empire of the Sun, by JG Ballard, has been on my TBR shelf for a long time. I first discovered him by paying attention to the credits from Waterworld. Yes, that movie. Supposedly based on Ballard's The Drowned World, so of course I had to read it.
Wow, so different. And better.
So next I got his short stories, volume 1. Great stuff in there. Read that 10+ years ago, so don't remember much, except the two or three I skipped as they were way too psychological, a la weirdo stuff from the early 1970s.
A few years back I tried his Kingdom Come. Didn't like it much. Can't remember how much of it I read, but not much. Maybe I'll attempt it again someday.
Recently, when I found the Classics Club and had to come up with my 50 classics, I sought out lists. There I found Empire of the Sun. I'd already had it on my shelf, as I said, but I thought here's an excuse to read it. I went to the library last Saturday with my list of 50 on my phone and started at the card catalog. Empire was one of the few the library actually had on its shelves.
So glad I did. What a great book. I also found the audiobook on Hoopla, so I managed several chapters each day driving to/from work and walking the dog. A chapter or two at night before bed.
Great book. Great war book. Again, one of my preferred genres. Not quite sure how much of the book was Ballard's own experiences and how much fiction, but I don't care. Not even going to look it up.
And the film. I'd never seen it, only known that Christian Bale was in it. A very young Bale. And it was incredible. Everyone in the film was great. A bit long, and of course changes and reductions from the book, but altogether a great watch.
Karaj leguloj, the 72nd Esperanto Sumoo is about to start. For those unaware, the Sumoo is a 15-day event whereby you commit to reading a set number of pages per day. In this particular case, the book is written in Esperanto.
Esperanto is one of my better languages. I have a C1 in writing and reading it, based on the KER exam I took in 2017 in Moscow. For those used to ILR scales, that's equivalent to level 3. I've read dozens of books, many originally in Esperanto, the rest translations from various source languages (Hungarian, English, Russian, и так далее). Weekly I get email notifications about new Esperanto books being published. A quick look at my email and I can say about 5 books a week are published in the language.
The Sumoo happens six times a year, so this November Sumoo will be the last for 2021. I had a great time in the five previous ones, mostly reading non-fiction but not finishing them. (Finishing is not the point; number of pages is.) This time I've decided on fiction, and reading till I'm done.
The book is Kromosomoj, by Lorjak.
OK, so finally finished Wuthering Heights, Ms. Jay. Started in 12th grade in 1984 and never finished. Unless you count Cliff's Notes.
I'm not sure how much I like this book. As I said in my quick GR's review, were 18th century peoples' constitutions so poor that they could drop off after a loud argument? And my goodness, what kind of romance is this? Horrible.
But the writing. Oh so sweet. I listened to about half of it, for free! (thanks Audible) and read the rest. But amazing how much different this is to Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The writing, just as good. The story, so much better. I know, I know, decades separate the two. We'll see how much I like this era of writing when I read another from her or her contemporaries.
This is the first of the 50 classics I endeavor to read over the next five years, based on the list I created for the Classics Club.
I discovered that November is German Literature Month. If you know me, you know I love groups, lists, things like that. So why not German literature (in English, meine Deutsch ist nicht so gut)?
A few months ago I read (and did a quick review of) The Glass Bees by the wonderful Ernst Jünger, author of the equally great A German Officer in Occupied France. He's also written one called Heliopolis, but I'm having issues trying to find a copy. Therefore, one must look elsewhere.
They Divided the Sky sounds good, and having spent four-plus years in the divided city, this might be a fun read. There's also The Swarm, which might hit both the German lit box and the sci-fi box.
How about you, dear reader(s), do you have a recommended novel for German Literature Month?
Glyphstudy started a new iteration of their Collier and Manley study session of Middle Egyptian.
For those dear reader(s) who haven't followed me for a while, Glyphstudy is a group of language lovers who are interested in the languages of ancient Egypt (or further abroad, in the case of Hittite). The group is led by advanced students who guide others through specific books covering Middle Egyptian and Coptic. Most of the courses follow a book, during which the students read a chapter for a couple weeks then do exercises for a couple of weeks.
I started the Hoch course way back in 2018, but life got in the way and I had to drop. Last year I joined the Coptic group, and kept to it for 7-or so months until I dropped everything to work on my Russian (resulting in a first-ever 3/3 in the DLPT!). I also started the Hittite course last year, but it was concurrent with the Coptic and thus the Russian got in the way.
Glyphstudy just started the Collier and Manley section yesterday. C&M is a simpler intro to Hieroglyphics than Hoch, and perhaps that means I'll be able to keep up. For the next two weeks we are tasked with reading/studying chapter one, after which we'll start working on the exercises.
I think I can do this. I'm also going through Teach Yourself's Complete Old English, a great book which has allowed me to already read some bits of Beowulf in the original (which dear reader(s) will know is a goal of mine, using Heaney's bilingual edition). I'm going to try and keep C&M up even when I start on Russian hard for my DLPT in February. I might pause Old English for a bit while doing Russian (and Middle Egyptian), but we'll see.
John le Carre's last Smiley book, A Legacy of Spies, tells the behind the scenes story of Alec Leamas, late of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This one is 1st person, but done well. The person in this case is Peter Guillam (played excellently by Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). We learn more about his prior work for the Circus, and Smiley makes a few appearances. All in all, a nice addition to the Smiley novels, and a great way to get the reader, whether or not they've already read the others, back to the first novels in the sequence. In fact, the pull is strong for me to reread book #3 in which Alec features prominently. Or at least watch the excellent 1965 film version with the incomparable Oskar Werner and Richard Burton.
Lingo, by Gaston Dorren, is a good book that'll hold the interest of a language lover and/or hobbyist, but don't expect depth here. Pick something interesting about many languages (60) and write a short chapter about it. That's what Dorren has done in Lingo. My issues are these:
Ossetian, the one member of the Iranian branch present in Europe (by way of Russia), is covered over three pages of text. He discusses where Ossetian can be found in the first paragraph. Along with a list of languages found in Russia beginning with just those that start with T. Then K. All of that in chapter number one. Then nothing at all about Ossetian until the last paragraph. And, you guessed it, the only thing apparently of interest with the language is that it is the only member of the 10th branch of the Indo-European tree (Iranian languages) found in Europe. Whoopie-doo.
His chapter on a "much-needed merger" was silly and a waste of a chapter. Why try and convince the reader that Slavic languages are hard thus let's merge two of them into a horribly named Slogarian? What's the use, when this chapter could have covered another European oddity, or even another Slavic language if he so chose? For the first category I'd recommend Meadow Mari, spoken in Russia between the Vyatka river and the Urals, thus officially in Europe. It's Finno-Ugric, so unlike most of Europe's languages. Or for the latter category how about Rusyn, the not-just-a-dialect-of-Ukrainian language of over half a million?
Despite these issues of mine, the book was engaging. Just don't expect depth in any of the 60 chapters.
Oh what a book. Oh what a recommendation. Thank you, wife!
Black Tom is a short book, novella really, filled with magical realism. Slowly and subtly introduced, just as I like it. Victor LaValle wrote a great story, a la HP Lovecraft. I read this in a day. (Plane flight helped.)
Dear reader(s) know I don't like to give spoilers, and I still won't. All I'll say is this book is fantastic, in all the meanings of the word. Well written, with plenty of wonderful homages to HPL fans.
I'd never heard of LaValle before, but I'm on the lookout now for his other books. My wife mentioned his book The Changeling, which means something in our family, so I'll most definitely be reading that in the future. Perhaps that'll be a family book club choice in the future soon?
Just finished Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling. I read about it initially on the great blog The Neglected Books Page. I read his reviews up to I find interest in the book, then I stop. I don't want the spoilers. Stirling's book was one such. And luckily, I found it cheaply online for less than $8.
Sigh was published in 1958 and involves a coup or revolt or something very post-WWII and very Soviet sphere in which the narrator and her aunt and her aunt's lover escape their country and become refugees. The country is never mentioned, but there's plenty of ammo there with which the reader can guess. Hell, the book never says straight up what year these things happen but one can guess from several clues (for one: when Joe mentions seeing a book of photographs from the holocaust 10 years ago).
Stirling's book is great with imagery, and description, and despite it being in 1st person (not my favorite POV), it is a very engaging book. And short (188 pp). Look at some of Stirling's descriptions:
Back in Paris...the Seine was rising, greenish brown around the Zouave's stone thighs, while in the smoky twilight the clever, irritable crowds pressed around newspaper vendors as if round a street accident. (154-5)
This book, also, like many recently (Dirda's Browsings most recently) have mentioned other books I've read or intend on reading.
Joe: Yet I'm crazy about war stories like that one about those British officers who captured the German general in Crete... (158)
Well, no crap, I've got that book on the bookshelf. Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss. I bought it in one of Boston's great used book stores some years ago and just haven't read it yet. But damn does it look good.
As for Stirling, if I ever find another of her books at a used bookstore, I won't hesitate to grab it.
OMG, I still "own" this blog? Hmmm...I must consider reawakening this thang. I may have to rename this, too. Something like ...
