Bibliophilia

With Sioux Falls's Favorite Bibliophile, Doug

It's quiet before the music starts, then, percussion. Bass and kettle drums, the whisper of toms. Horns start to whistle from a distance, louder, closer, pace quickens, the crescendo, the peak, the climax, the crash screams stop, the horns fade to an echo. Yet before it's gone, before the murmur of conversations start, the hi-hat comes in, slow, quiet, pulling a rhythm picked up by the snare drum. An upright bass walks in, the lights are low, the smoke is thickening, the mood is set. Book talk. Yeah. Jazzy.

So, book talk. Why? Because you're interested, you're already here so there is a hint of curiosity in you, if not a full out frothing-at-the-mouth need, and, I want something to type about. But why? Because, I kid you not, there are thousands, literally thousands and thousands, of books out there, far more than both your pinkies combined, books that are well worth reading, spectacular reads. Some really bad ones. A lot of really bad ones. So I'll write about a few books, I'll be candid, honest, and biased, all for you.

And by the by, not all books will be new books. It's a collage of literary feats by the hands of the intelligentsia bounding across the ages and continents. But corporate-book-store has a bestseller list, why not just go by that? Because. Bestsellers are quantitative reports and statistical data representing profit and intellectual sterility. Millions of people eat Big Macs, means that's the best meal right? Or is it just a quick, easy, on the go meal with just enough fabricated taste to keep you going till you can eat something better? Your choice. But, alas, new books can be good too, just saying now so you don't call me a hypocrite later. Also, junk food can be just as delicious, guilty pleasures, we all have them on plates and paper alike. So onwards and upwards, beyond the cover and curse the paper cuts cause scars are the battle wounds of the courageous, or so we'll tell ourselves, the paperback heroes of the modern age...

I have started this book, really I have, I just haven't had a chance to finish it yet but I thought the title was wonderfully appropriate. This review will be rather different than the others, which may be a good thing for those that may have read my other reviews, and I will also try and keep it short.

All I'm going to say about the The Glorious Adventure by Richard Halliburton is that it is a book from the ages where travel and adventure were still wildly romantic. Not long ago I read another of his books called The Flying Carpet, his are books to dream about. There are only a handful of books that he wrote and the last of which would never be finished as in 1939 at the age of 39, Richard Halliburton was lost at sea in an attempt to sail a Chinese Junk across the Pacific Ocean. Halliburtons' books are to be read on sunny days while sitting with your feet drifting in a gurgling river or on a cold night with a single lamp next to a chair in which you are reclining. His are tales of adventure from the heart of a poet and the hand of a excited story-teller. As of now three of his books have been reprinted with, hopefully, the rest to follow in the near future. If you have a chance, swing by Zandbroz in Sioux Falls and pick up a copy, they may not be around very long.

It has been nearly a year since I last wrote a review, life has been busy and I have neglected things, like this, that I've meant to continue. But I've started again! A new review! Yet it will also be my last. As of the 18th of May I will be turning the page on a wonderful chapter of my life and starting a new one that will take me across continents and oceans. In nearly two weeks I will be arriving in Japan, my home for the summer. Three weeks from today I will be making my first visit to the city that, by August, I will be calling my home for at least a couple years. One of the four Asian Tigers, Hong Kong is a bustling city of innovation and daring, an international city where East meets West. But before I start this new chapter I want to look back and reflect on what has been before, the chapter that ended with my feet pointing in a new direction.

I've been in Sioux Falls now for 8 and a half years. It would have been seven years ago, in either August of September, that I started working at Zandbroz and about six years ago that I was given the opportunity to become the book buyer. In this I became permanently fused with my passion for books and literature and I will never be able to let go, nor would I want to. During my time here at Zandbroz I have met an amazing number of wonderful people and have had so many cherished discussions about books that would add up to weeks stacked end to end. On Saturday, a mere three days away, I will put together my final book order, my last contribution to a selection I have hand-picked over the last six years, and I will do so with a heavy heart. My time here has been precious and I will carry away many fond memories.

I truly thank Jeff and Jamie for giving me this opportunity and I have enjoyed working with them immensely as well as the rest of the staff here in Sioux Falls that I have been able to call my friends and who do not openly laugh when I do so. And to Alice who has, in the past year or so, finally started saying hello back when she would walk through the store. I have also had a great time working these past few Festival of Books with Greg who would come down from the Fargo store and regret that we haven't had a chance to work more together. And I will say goodbye with great appreciation to everyone I've meet here at Zandbroz and Downtown Sioux Falls, it is a community unparalleled to anything I've experienced before. I have walked up and down Philips Avenue thousands of times and in my dreams I will remember every step and all the faces I would pass by and those who would share their tables with me and those who would share benches.

Thank you to everyone who has kept us a bookstore and defied the techno age in moments to sit back with a book, you are the paperback heroes of the modern age. History and knowledge, poetry and love, will live on through you and you will forever be walking out into the world with a new understanding and compassion. Keep reading and seeing the world anew with every turning page, the world needs people with patience and understanding. That's it. Now go buy a book or something.

At the time of writing the it is about three quarters into May and so far this year I have read 36 books compared to the 46 that I read in 2011. I feel pretty good about it and still energized. It was a couple years ago, it may or may not be much different now, that I read on average about 50 pages per hour (pph) and that is what I round at when I look at a book and estimate on how much time I would need to get it finished. It's pretty handy really and fairly accurate. It also helps me prepare when I'm looking at a book, if it is an eight hundred page book I know it will take about sixteen hours and a twelve hundred page book would take twenty-four hours. Likewise a book that is two-hundred and fifty pages will take all of five hours. Not saying that five hours after I pick it up that I'll be done but five hours or reading time. Not all books are like this and there is a variety of factors involved. New paragraph.

There is always an acceleration delay in getting to a comfortable pph that adjusts to a few variables: Time of day; Distractions; Fiction vs Non-Fiction; New Author. Just to name a few of the ones I can think of right now. Really the first two can intermingle but so can the last two so it can really be divided into External & Internal. External delays are me being tired or trying to read on short breaks outside with people walking by. Internal delays switch to the three c's; Content, Comprehension, and… Camaraderie, whew, had to look up a third c. So, Content, I read fiction at a higher pph than non-fiction, in non-fiction I'm trying to store more information which is generally put forth in a fairly dull, albeit not necessarily un-interesting, fashion and fiction I let it flow and build up how it will. Comprehension should be rather self-explanatory. Last, Camaraderie, a 'c' word i had to find that would express "familiarity" and it works. Authors I've read before and gotten to know by their style or flow of words generally accelerate much more quickly and jump into a comfortable groove. New authors though, it can take me some time in finding their voice and usually starts off slow with few exceptions, like Vonnegut. I read him two years ago or so for the first time and picked him up and could burn through 80pph without breaking a sweat. Any handicap I had with Camaraderie was entirely offset by the first two variations within the Internal aspect. On the flip-side, there are other books I jumped into and it felt like hitting a wall and feeling my teeth scrape across the bricks.

On a cool winter day (guessing), 5th of December, 1932, Jacques Roubaud was born in the Rhône department of west central France. It was a Monday. It was the same day that Albert Einstein was granted a visa to come to the United States. I imagine he was born to parents and may have even had siblings. It really is hazy, not saying there nothing out there about him, just not much. I'm disappointed, he may not be a household name but it seems that there should be more, at least a little bit. He did publish his first book of poetry at the age of 12 and was to later get Doctorates in both Mathematics and French Literature. He has published 20 books and is one of the earlier Oulipians.

I had assigned The Great Fire of London to The ABC as our second book to read following Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell as it was an experimental work and I thought that it compliment each other and bring out more meaning in comparing and contrasting. I'll admit that it was interesting. The Great Fire of London was originally published in 1989 in French and its English translation appeared in 1991. There are 196 chapters split up between 3 sections; The Story, Insertions (or interpolations), and Bifurcations. The story itself has 98 chapters while the other two sections add up to another 98, purposely done. Roubauds favorite number is 17 and he knew Alix for 1187 days. And it's Alix who was the impetus for this book, the idea was there for 19 years before he started but it was her death that changed the idea and the mood. They had been married for 3 years when she, an asthmatic since a child, died young from a pulmonary embolism. From what I had understood, the book was about Alix but without talking about her, it was Roubauds idea that memories change when you write them down, that they are no longer yours but the papers and those who read it. He wanted the memories of her to be his and his alone so he kept to the fringes, he talked of so much but her.

But that's not really how the book turned out or what I had gathered from it after reading. To start with, the discussion for The Great Fire of London was to be on the 9th of May, a Wednesday. There were only about 318 pages of reading so I figured, starting the Sunday previous (and being able to average 50 pph), I would have plenty of time. I had already put the book off twice as I read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and Doctor Who and the Daleks by David Whitaker (a novelization of the episodes originally aired Dec. 1963 - Feb. 1964. (a reprint and yes, I like Doctor Who)). What I didn't count on was the absolute density of the book. By Wednesday I still had over 100 pages left and had no hope in its completion before the meeting. But the book was fascinating and it is very difficult to explain what, exactly, it was about. There are so many details, so many branches, so much stuff. There are paragraphs on his opinion of the perfect croissant, exact details on the set-up of his working desk including how the shadows rest on the picture in its frame from the lamp. Why he doesn't own a car. Why he is a swimmer who no longer swims. Why he no longer rides bicycles. How to make azarole jam. So much more of the mundane, sad, and humorous that during our discussion we had talked for an hour and a half and there was still more that we could talk about, each topic prompting others that were recollected sporadically throughout the book.

I had finished the book a week after I had intended. It took me around 20 hours of reading to get through 318 pages, dropping down from 50 pph to 15 pph which is a reduction of 70%. But I finished and I'm happy that I finished. I could of stepped away from it after the meeting of The ABC but I stuck with it out of stubbornness as well as curiosity and it felt good to finish walking the bookmarks, ending the sections one by one. There are some images that I'm left with and I'm not sure if they will ever go away but they are ones that I can't readily explain out of context as it is. An impression that I got through the book is that Roubaud is writing down all these auxiliary memories, all these other moments, while understanding that it robs him of their personal attachments yet he continues in detail, choosing and selecting so as to leave the other memories, those of Alix, in ever more detail and ever closer to him and him alone. There is something touching about that and it is heartbreaking.

The Great Fire of London is not for everyone. It is a challenge to read and a challenge I enjoyed. What I got through the book was a feeling of grief, of detachment with the outside world, a desperation to save what's gone, a need of occupation. All the pieces from this book (I call them pieces because they are disjointed images that have, seemingly, little or no relation to each other) swirl around in my head and seem to make some sense and then it's gone. I think to the investment I made in this book, the time it took to read it, and I think I did well. I look and I see that there are two more books after this that make it a trilogy and I waiver on my ability to continue forth, but I'm curious. I love being curious. If anything of what I've said about this book makes you interested, give it a try. There is a pay off, not that it ties together at the end, but the contemplation afterwards has its place. It is something different and it has changed part of how I look at books, for that, I would consider it absolutely worth it. But you are not me, which could be a good thing, maybe you would hate it, maybe you would not finish it, but maybe you would. (Pause for dramatic effect) Maybe you would.

I remember the last year of Elementary School and heading into Middle School that I was perpetually stuck between groups. I would be friends with the popular kids and could walk freely amongst that group but without a clear or defined association of me in that group. At the same time I would mingle with other groups like the geeky kids or the seemingly dull kids but with the same result, I was accepted but a perpetual non-member. I appreciated the free movement and the ability to appear (I was a silent walker and could walk up unnoticed by people) (which actually was a fun game because I would open up backpacks and take things out only to hand it to them when I was walking alongside, my own entertainment)) at someones side with more of an "Oh, there you are" rather than an expression of repugnance.

There was one day when I was sitting with some friends from our gifted class and there were talking about meeting up at Pizza Hut some night that or the following week and, me being there during the conversation, they were kind of quiet and, I believe, had a conversation with glances before off-handedly inviting me. I was too excited about being included to understand they were just being polite, a situational paranoia that plagues me to this day due to this and another incident that took place around the same time. So I ran home in a state of exhilaration because I had been invited, I was accepted. And I told my mom all about it with that christmas glitter in my eyes.

The day had come and my mom pulled up to Pizza Hut to drop me off. I was wearing a new shirt (a colorful one with vertical stripes, short sleeves, and a solid colored hood, it was the newer trend at the time) that held in all the butterflies that impressed a sense of vertigo in my stomach. My mom drove off and I walked in searching for my friends. I saw them, they were sitting at a booth by the window all smiles and laughter amid their conversation. Then I walked up and while the air of mirth still floated in the air, a shade was obviously cast, and I knew it was me. There was a comment about not thinking I was actually going to show up and then room given for me to sit at the booth. I had sat down reluctantly because I realized with a sickening feeling the parameters of this invitation to which I was unable to extricate myself until an hour later when my mom was scheduled to return. I could not enjoy myself and stayed in semi-transparency at the outside corner of the booth. A moment that did in fact solidify that I was actually there was when I stood up to go to the bathroom and leaned on the corner of the table, nearly upending the whole thing while sliding pizzas and knocking over drinks. The fury and the embarrassment and the fury of embarrassment cemented into my core as a dark growth in the pattern of a question mark which throbs upon mention of any social engagement that is brought up for a future date.

As a reader I come across names referenced fairly often, authors that had a large impact, works that were the sensation of the time. One of these names oft repeated is that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was born on the 28th of August, 1749 in the city of Frankfurt which would later be, 122 years or so, part of Germany. He died on the 22nd of March, 1832 at the age of 82 and though he anticipated he would be remembered for his art it would be the writing of this polymath that would stick with the populace through his poetry, prose, and plays. His play Faust should be instantly recognizable, if not, maybe you're reading this on accident, or perhaps out of confusion, expecting there to be something more. It was the publication of his second work in 1774 that rose his name to the heights of immortality and one of the first international literary celebrities. It also emboldened the Sturm und Drang movement which preceded the age of Romanticism.

The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774 with a revised addition in 1787 when Goethe was in his mid-twenties. It was essentially an overnight success with fans including Napoleon Bonaparte who took the book with him on campaigns. It is written in a series of letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm primarily about the pains and sufferings of love Werther has for a girl named Lotte who is engaged to Albert. Werther can't take it anymore and moves away to Weimar until he makes a disastrous faux pas at the house of a prince and, out of embarrassment and his inability to stay away, returns to the fictional town of Wahlheim and to Lotte who is now married. He is in love, tormented endlessly and it can't continue the way it is, someone has to die. And die they do, and there you have it, a short synopsis all for you.

I am not really a big fan of novels in the forms of letters or diary entries or whatever but on occasion I can do it. That was my biggest apprehension on starting this book but I quickly got over it. The other hurdle was that it was one of the greatest emo books of its time, so pathetically sentimental that sometimes it's embarrassing to read and I wish he would just stab himself in the chest a few times and get it over with. The difference though, between this and something in the current emo trend, is that The Sorrows of Young Werther matured by the end. It was fatalistic, yes, but there was a clarity of understanding. If it wasn't for that I don't think I would of cared for the book all that much.

When it was written The Sorrows of Young Werther set a trend. It was fashionable to wear the clothes described in the book, to recite the poetry he did, and, what I imagine, to be an annoying weeping girl at times, just like Werther. Entire nations clamped on to this, just like todays rabid trends. There were recreations from the end of the book which was alarming to the world of academics as much as the church. The book was big, the clothes were in style, and people wanted to be with it, in the know, part of something. I wore that stupid shirt so proudly into Pizza Hut that day, so happy to be invited and to be accepted. That day sticks with me, that little event, that hour of my life. I hate trends and I hate wanting to belong to something. And it matters as much as it doesn't like anything else. I've gone in the direction I feel like, sometimes I weave in and out of trends and I still do want to belong but it should happen naturally over time, it took me decades. I think there is a lesson here in all of this, and that, I would like to point out for your sake and for those you care about, hooded t-shirts are really, really, stupid. That is all, now go and buy this book and Manon Lescaut by Antoine François Prevost if you can find it (we have three of the Hesperus edition here) because the more you read, the more you'll hear references to these two books. High on sentimentalism and soap opera-esque but actually decent stories and entertaining added to the historical (in the literary sense) importance. There, I think we are done here.

It is something that seems to happen at least once a day and it kind of bugs me. I'll be at work or walking somewhere and I'll recognize someone, an acquaintance or whoever, and they would say "Hey, how are you?" and I would respond in kind and hopefully in not such a blasé fashion with "Not bad, how are you?" or something to that effect. It is a response of acknowledgement and reciprocation, but it gets met by silence and aloofness if not an outright lethargic… like that, trailing off into nothingness. I find it very annoying and the voice in my head immediately says ah, rhetorical. If I knew specifically that it was going to happen, I wouldn't respond at all, maybe just nod my head or push for the active high-five with a look of conviction on my face. As it is though I feel a breezy cat fart of affrontation (I know it is technically not a word) with posing an actual question as a form of a passing greeting. Why not just say "Hey" or in a stage whisper say "pegasus" whilst pointing randomly and squinting your eyes. But, really, not a question that traditionally has an answer then just walk away, I'd rather just not be interrupted.

See, a rhetorical question, as you must know, is a question that hasn't an intended response. Questions where you don't answer but just stand there and try and look reasonable and/or sorry. They are like fillers that try to justify a point or bullets that are intended to make you pensive and ponderous. Parents and spouses know that very well with questions like "did you eat all the frosting off the cake?" or "do you take so-and-so to be your waffly wedded what-not?". See (another rhetorical question)? They are like statements of uncertainty. "You ate all the frosting off the cake!" and "You are taking so-and-so to be and waffle wed bacon!"

Ah-hem. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey on the 17th of December, 1873. In 1919 he changed his name to share his appreciation for his grandfather (and repetition) to what we all know him as. Which sounds like you are introducing new acquaintances, or so as I would like to imagine. He became one of those great and influential authors that in themselves morph into their own repetitious and rhetorical name. He wrote books with Joseph Conrad and worked with the likes of John Galsworthy and G.K. Chesterton and was known by H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. And ask yourself, where would Hemingway be with out Ford? A good question but one rife with conjecture.

Though he had been writing for a number of years before it was in 1915 that The Good Soldier came out and its success made him very well known and is now included on many of the "Best 100 Books" lists with good reason. At the time modernists were en force and writing had a hardness to it, books like The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (1906), Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912), The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France (1912), and even the surrealist novel Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel (1914) had that hardness. I knew that after World War I writing had changed and I always attributed it to primarily F. Scott Fitzgerald and, shortly after, Ernest Hemingway. But my comfort in knowing for certain that they were the ones who ushered in a new era was questioned when I read Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet and now even more so upon the finishing of The Good Soldier. There is a familiarity with the writing as if spoken by an endeared acquaintance if not a friend. A softness and a sort of rambling that denotes a certain humility which is okay for us to read being the state of our relationship.

Alright alright, on to the book itself. It is narrated by John Dowell after the fact and as he is putting together all of what he missed the first go-round. Florence Dowell, his wife, has a heart condition like her grandfather. Edward Ashburnham, part of the British couple the Dowells befriended, also has a heart condition like the sweet Maisie. Leonora Ashburnham is Edwards faithful wife who knows what John Dowell does not. So there is disease, death, adultery, ignorance, and pain, all wrapped up in a nicely chaotic story sprinkled with humor. I don't know if you really need much more of a description than that, I mean, it's good enough, right? There's no murder… no, I don't remember there being a murder, so anyone most intrigued by that might be out of luck. It is told in no real precise order, the story jumps around a lot then circles back on itself time and time again. Excellently put together and has a distinctive voice.

After reading through what I had initially put up, I decided to add an extra paragraph, this one to be exact, as a further description of the novel. See, the Dowells were travelling after a quick marriage. By travelling I mean a decade long stint. They ditch a lackey and head off for some retreat for heart patients, because Dowells wife must really have a defective heart. There they encounter the Ashburnhams and Maisie. Edward Ashburnham is a really interesting character and is more of the focus of the novel. He is extremely charitable and heartfelt, courageous and self sacrificing but he has that problem of falling in love with just about every girl other than his wife. That sort of thing raises complications and Leonora, Edwards wife, is absolutely in love with him but knows about his flippant heart. She covers for him, cleans up the nastier affairs, and all the while thinking that eventually it will be her time, that he will fall in love with her, that she will finally be loved in return. It's a sad story really and it even starts off with the line, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." That is my added paragraph which I hope gives some actual insight into what the novel is about.

This book was, for me, testing the waters that are Ford Madox Ford. I had wanted to read Parade's End, a novel in four parts that was first published in 1924 but at a smudge of 900 pages, I wanted to have a feeling for the author first to see if I could move easily into something a bit longer and the answer is yes, rather confident even. The Good Soldier is a great introduction into one of the more influential authors of the early 20th century and one that you could easily benefit from reading. As a last note I would like to say I recognize the difference in writing between Ford and Hemingway, stylistically of course, Hemingway being short and succinct, but there is a familiarity in tone. Open for debate. Now off to reading something more, until next time… I guess. For gods sake, go buy a book already, or two! Summer is coming, another wonderful season to read plus ignorant people with a tan, seriously, too many, too too many, you can do something about it. I don't mean kill them… no, I'm not advising that. But be that balance.

Ok, so I have been reading more lately and really haven't had the chance to type up a new review. I think I'll make an attempt at some quick reviews, probably of the thinner type but who really cares? As a side note for those that are interested, The ABC now has a Facebook page and… really? TextEdit just automatically capitalized Facebook for me, wow, ok, distracted. But yeah, there is a page out there for the book club, go like it if you would then tell your friends to do the same cause apparently I'm lacking in those...

I found a new, to me, publisher that I've been grabbing books from recently. Smaller publishers as you can imagine are more specific either to genre or region and it is the ones that highlight a region that I have taken a liking to. If you think of an Egyptian hieroglyph image of an eye with the eyeliner going off to the right, that is what I think of the region that Telegram Books takes on, around the Mediterranean and shooting off eastward. And again, with other publishers that I like, Telegram seems to be hard to find or to keep in stock, so if you see it and it looks interesting, grab it while it's around.

Mohammed Choukri was a name I had no familiarity with, two months ago you could of asked me and I would of just stared at you blankly until you walked away. But now, I have read a couple of his books and read a little more about him and the people around him, if you were to ask me, I don't know, maybe we would chat but when would that topic ever come up? Mohammed Choukri was born on the 15th of July, 1935 in a small village in the Nador region of Morocco. Morocco is located on the north west coast of the African continent west of Algeria. The Nador region is caught up in the Rif mountains and sits near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Really interesting area actually, was just reading about it, people have been there since at least the 13th Century BCE. History and Geography, wonderful subjects.

So Mohammed was born into a poor family in an area that was, itself, very poor at the time. He was raised more in the streets of Tangier than in his parents home and as such spent a lot of times in bars and brothels at an age where I would be in middle school and unable to talk to girls, let alone… pay… them? It wasn't until Mohammed was 20 that he learned how to read and write, something that he did of his own volition which is pretty amazing if you ask me. So he learns to write and starts writing books, meets other authors, writes more books and became one of North Africa's most controversial authors.

For Bread Alone is the first part to Mohammed's autobiography, translated by Paul Bowles, and describes his first twenty years. The language is fairly simple but it progresses as his sphere of knowledge expands. Granted this is one persons perspective on growing up in Morocco during that time but it's a perspective I've never seen through before. The early years of starvation and disease, watching his brother killed by his father, sleeping on the streets to his teenage years of starvation and disease, sleeping in bars and on the streets, being a bystander for the 1952 independence riots; these are segments of the life of Mohammed Choukri.

It is difficult to explain the variety of topics in the book because a number of them are as similar as they are different but it is the growth and the movement that you just watch unfold. The ups and downs of his successes as a child seem rather large as you are reading and then you sit back and you see that the differences between his success and failure were so narrow that sometimes what counted as a victory may have just been some food. Or a prostitute. Or kif. Bizarre thing, this outlook on life in Morocco. I'm not sure that it is at all exceptional for life at the time other than Mohammed lived through it and was able to write about it but it is also interesting to compare it to what some experienced in late 20th or early 21st century New York or even break it down into something more modern by race discrimination. I'm not sure if it's comforting on how much is actually the same or if it's depressing that we've come this far and haven't learned to better the problems that afflicted civilizations back through 13th Century BCE, the age of Homer, and, the Berbers of the Nador region.

I want to start a book club. I'm going to, that's decided, but then comes the problems of timing and choosing at least a few books to start it out with and build that momentum. Then there is the issue of choosing a name, seems easy, but holy f*#$ chunks, what do you name a book club? I mean, of course I've thought about it before, the way some people think of what they would name their super awesome band, I've spent that same time thinking of book club names. I know, there are plenty more things wrong with me than just that. My top favorite name in the whole widely world, at this point, and a name I want to use for the book club in my own dreamed about future book store, would be Diet of the Literati . Sounds awesome right? And it has different meanings which always adds to the overall effect. And yet I'll save that one for some future wonderland when I've got some small corner shop somewhere in the world where I'll pass my days. Until then I've got another name that will sustain.

I want it to be an ambitious reading circle, not one that focuses on the best-seller list or books that are just junk reads. No, I want something more and I don't mean that I want all the books to be 1,200 page epics but a balance between influential works and then some of the epics. I'm interested in the pairings of books, ones that will add to the next and give a greater understanding or a flip perspective. And as I would like this book club to be as accommodating as possible I won't use that as an excuse to read lower quality books. So either you take the challenge or you don't, that's why I want it to be ambitious . There will be a wide selection of books, spanning not only countries across the world but also centuries and I don't want to say the focus will be on translations but, well, I'm sure a large percentage will be said translations. So what really is the accommodating factor? Ambition . In fact, that's like the only prerequisite, so age or how well-read you are won't matter, only that you'd be willing to read whether it be a 200 page book or a 1,200 page book within a month.

An example of a title I think would be interesting to discuss would be this one, The Lake by Kawabata Yasunari . Kawabata is a significant author in Japanese literature much like Natsume Sõseki who came before and Mishima Yukio to whom Kawabata was a mentor. He was born in Tokyo on the 14th of June, 1899. By the time he was 15, after bouncing around to different houses, he had lost all those in his immediate family, his parents, sister and grandparents, all gone. At 18 he moved to Tokyo and was accepted into the Tokyo Imperial University where he graduated in 1924. He began submitting stories to and doing journalism after college. In 1926 one of his first notable stories came out, The Dancing Girl if Izu , followed by the serialized The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa which came out in 1929 through 1930. In 1968 Kawabata was the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. And on the 16th of April, 1972 at the age of 72, Kawabata was found dead, a possible suicide but maybe just an accident? Regardless, he was an excellent author who left behind some amazing books.

I really wish I had the book in front of me right now so I could be more accurate but hey, I'll give it a shot. The Lake was written in 1954 and the lead character is Gimpei who is kind of a creepy stalker-ish guy. Meaning, he's creepy and stalks girls, usually younger girls. The story slips back and forth through the present to events that Gimpei ponders on, events like his first love, or maybe obsession, with his cousin Yayoi to the student he had a fling with which ended badly. There are some off-shoots to the story that start another story line which is equally interesting, about a woman who essentially sells her body to an older man to live independently. There is also a bit about a baby that Gimpei leaves on a prostitutes door step that later he thinks is following him step for step from under the ground. Probably the creepiest thing I've read in a Kawabata story.

I liked this book, it had a great flow and pace about it. Gimpei's stalker attitude isn't really threatening and he's really just entranced by beauty but it is still pretty creepy. Kawabata was known to not finish his stories and publish them prematurely and many feel like he did the same with this story but it was also his style of "art for art's sake". There is the definite genius behind the words, the images he paints are as beautiful as the transitions between past and present along with the interconnections between all the characters. I would recommend this book highly if you are interested in Japanese literature along with other novels by Kawabata, I think I'm five novels into his works so far and I have been very excited with what I've read and disappointed that there are only a handful more books of his in translation. But seriously, check him out, he's been a huge influence and his works have been cited by many authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez .

Just keep an eye out for a new book club, an ambitious book club, really, that'll be the name, the ABC. Not only it being that simple acronym it also is the building block to when you first learn to read, the essentials. And for those who are fans, it's also a reference to a work by Victor Hugo but that one you'll either know or you won't, no big deal. So to anyone who I've talked to these past couple months about a possible future book club, you've heard the name here first and I'm also looking for recommendations. I'll have more on the first meeting later so keep watching our Book Club page but until then, keep reading and especially if you can find a copy of The Lake , it can either be an interesting introduction to Kawabata or a supplement to his better known works like Snow Country or Beauty and Sadness .

I think it was August and I was thirteen when my sister and I left our house in Pembroke Pines, a suburb of Miami, and I climbed into my very first plane which would set us on our way to a very foreign land. We had left a sprawling city and as night fell we landed in the great unknown. It had been a long and difficult, exhausting, exciting, and adventurous day, we stayed awake after our mom picked us up at this tiny little airport and I had my eyes glued to the windows as we journeyed on for another hour before we would get to where we would eventually call our new home. On the interstate I had looked out onto a dark and expansive landscape of nothingness drift by different from travel in Florida where the roads were banked by indigenous trees or views of the coast seen between the passing condos. We arrived in a small town lined with, not the common newer ranch style houses I was used to seeing, but two-story houses with peaked rooftops. Our house was such a house, it had a large yard and here, stepping out, the air was different. We ran into our empty house and charged through the rooms on the main floor and upstairs and wandered into the unfamiliar basement which was pretty novel as the closest we ever had was a cellar you could only crawl into when we had a house in Pensacola.

It wasn't until the next day that this new reality was finally starting to set in. Waking up I had gone outside to discover these new surroundings. The trees were different, the air was dryer and cooler, even the sun looked new. But what was most amazing, and I still remember it vividly now, was the sky. The sky I was used to almost always had a haze around the horizon, straight up it was still blue but this was a different kind of blue and the strangest part was that there was not a single cloud to be seen. I can't remember seeing that before, a cloudless sky. I could also of been paying more attention or just realized it for the first time, yet whatever the case, the sky looked huge. The moving truck arrived that day and we had our bedrooms again, all our clothes, our toys, and the crap that we couldn't leave behind but some of which are probably have not strayed far beyond their boxes, now, even seventeen years later.

The atmosphere was different but in a couple weeks I would find out that wasn't the only thing. School started and I discovered that it was me, I was different. I had come from a school that was overpopulated, intense, and very diverse. I had friends like Jamal who was a Haitian refugee or Heath whose parents were Cuban refugees. I had friends from everywhere, India, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, everywhere. The girls I was used to in just seventh grade wore as much if not more makeup than the teachers and a ton of rings, especially the Latino girls. I had known sixth graders who walked, mustachioed, through the outdoor hallways. The year before I had gone to a friends bat-mitzvah which involved a cruise on this yacht through the inter-coastal of Miami. Then here, in this new school, I was surrounded by Germans and Scandinavians. A sea of white with only one black kid, who was a complete ass. And for a couple weeks I was popular, I was the kid from Miami. I was asked tons of questions, asked about my experiences, and what had it been like living in Florida. I felt out of place, and to a degree after moving around and coming back here, I still feel out of place. I tend to gravitate around people who are also transplants into the mid-west because that's about the only time I don't feel like an outsider.

Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon came out in 2002, two years after the acclaimed short story collection, The Question of Bruno which was published in 2000 and six years before he would release The Lazarus Project which was only a year before his latest book, Love & Obstacles, another book of short stories, that was printed in 2009, only three years ago. This is only the second book of Hemon's that I've read but I know own the other two and look forward to reading them when I get into a short story mode. There is a reason Hemon has been awarded the many prizes he has, including the MacArthur Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the guy is good. I see nothing on the near horizon about a new novel but if anyone here's different, let me know and I'll start being patient.

The novel starts in the voice of the narrator, whether it be Hemon or someone else, who knows, who is trying to get a job as an ESL teacher in Chicago. It is at this school where he runs into Jozef Pronek. There used to be a garden across from the narrator where the neighborhood kids used to play, imagine forts, have adventures and then the garden got dug up and an apartment building grew in its place. The neighborhood kids considered the new building and its inhabitants traitors and treated them as such. This is where he recognized Jozef from, the days of cornering other kids and beating them up. He was in the new apartment block at the time, it happens.

Here the story flips to Jozef, his story and all stories it starts with his birth on September 10, 1967. The rest of the book is pretty much all about Jozef while shifting perspectives. As a young teen he hears the Beatles on the radio and learns to play guitar. Then he starts a cover band to croon out songs and get girls. It works, cause it always works, chicks dig musicians. It was his youth, his aspirations, he wanted to be John Lennon. And on the story goes. He goes to school, does a semester in Ukraine as revolution hits and then packs up and travels to America.

I know this is a pretty lame review but it's hard to say exactly what this book is about. I mean, it's about Jozef Pronek, but what about him? He's a refugee. He isn't attacked by mobs or carried off by lions, he is assaulted by the challenges of an immigrant. The voices in this book are great. At times I'll reference some east europeans I know and the book makes me chuckle especially their humor, always slightly different from the norm but very rich. By the time I finished this book I thought it was great, really enjoyable.

I moved from outside Miami, Florida to Mitchell, South Dakota. The change was immense, the people were very different in almost all ways. It was kind of a shock moving to this part of the country and I can say it has never really felt like home, but then again, I never really had a place to call that. What I will say though is that I've meet many amazing people from here and far away. So to this book and anyone who has dived in far from home I would say 'cheers' or some cliché but with all honesty. Anyway, that's it for this one. Get the book, really. It's here in there rather depressing but in the way some books are supposed to be so give it a try, it's worth it.

Finally, maybe this is it, maybe now I can write this. Maybe. I have been reading more lately and have kind of put off doing these but I don't know if you noticed the newest addition on here? You can click on a button or scroll to the bottom and see what I'm currently reading. I figured that if I was going to be lazy and go back on the idea of writing something for every book that I read I would at least compensate by sharing what I'm busy with and at the same time attempting to validate for myself, and to you, what I'm reading. I mean, I can tell you that I've been reading and you can call bullshit anytime but now, now what can you say? Eh? Yeah, not much. I think it's pretty alright.

So far this month I have finished reading six different titles and an aspect that I like is that each author is from a different country. I've covered Spain, United States, Japan, France, Kyrgyzstan, and Germany while right now I'm on an author from Hungary of which I hope to finish in the next couple days or if I'm ambitious enough, to finish and also read a Russian title before the end of the month. I'll tell you right now though, that it is questionable but we'll see what kind of time I can set aside. Considering that this is the fifth attempt at writing this I think we should just skip into the book because I want to also try and get another one down today.

Georgi Vladimov was born Georgii Nikolaevich Volosevich in Kharkiv, Ukraine on the 19th of February, 1931. His father was killed in World War II and his mother, during on of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges, was rounded up and thrown into a gulag for being Jewish. So far, you see, his early life built a pretty solid foundation for becoming the dissident writer that he became. He published his first book in 1961 titled The Big Mine.

A quick note on the times. Stalin had died in 1953 and Khrushchev would take power, apologizing for some of the evils of Stalin. The gulags were emptied in 1956 which allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, who were indiscriminately and even discriminately thrown into hard labor camps, to finally return to what home they might have left. Also remember that there were no standard prison terms, they said you were only going for, I don't know, six years. But that six years would get extended another six, just because they felt like it, and then another six, or why not just go for twenty? That's how it worked, they were hard labor camps and who wants to let go free labor simply because the prison term they got was over? To further on quickly, in 1962 the loving Khrushchev lifted the censorship ban on writing about the gulags cause, hey, he was a nice guy. People went into a frenzy and there was this other guy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who put out a book called One Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovich, a book about the gulags that is was now okay to write about. The book sold really well, people were finally able to talk about what had happened. For a time. Then Khrushchev who was possibly slightly embarrassed about the negligible events that had happened so long ago, or for some reason didn't expect it to be such a big deal, reneged on his word and once again banned books on the gulag and the censors went back to work.

Georgi Vladimov had already built that excitement within himself like so many other writers. In the early 60's he had written this short story about the guard dogs from a gulag that had been set free who waited at a train station and attacked passengers when the got off the train. It was actual foundation for the story because it had actually happened. This short story evolved and was rewritten and finally published in 1978 as Faithful Ruslan. But it couldn't be published in the Soviet Union so he had to smuggle the manuscript with his agent into Germany. Vladimov was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1983 and remained in exile until 2000. He died in Frankfurt, Germany on 9th of October, 2003, at the age of 72.

The story is set upon the closing of the gulag that Ruslan, who is telling the story, is let out through the gates, free. But he doesn't want to be free. What about the service? Who is going to keep all the filthy prisoners in line? But really, who is going to first round up all the prisoners who have obviously escaped since the camp is empty and the gates are wide open? The dedicated Ruslan in a guard dog. Not just any guard dog but a highly trained Caucasian Ovcharka which are very smart, huge, and very scary looking, just look up some pictures of them.

So there's Ruslan, free, but how to be free? He's confused, not sure what he did wrong to be punished like this. He and other dogs end up at a nearby town, most dogs start whoring themselves out to new owners but not Ruslan. He is to proud and to dedicated to the service to betray his masters thus, he is waiting for surely they will return and life will go back to normal.Ruslan ends up watching over "the Shabby Man" who was formerly a prisoner because when the signal comes and it's time to return, Ruslan will make sure that the Shabby Man goes back to where he belongs. The book furthers and keeps focus on the train station.

All the dogs have definite personalities and the psychology of the story is wonderful. Vladimov exposes the gulags in a very unique tone. By giving so much life to the guard dogs, to see the world and "the service" through their eyes, further dehumanizes the prisoners of the camp. I thought it was an excellent story and adds an interesting perspective to the era. And right now, I'm hungry and want to go to lunch so I'm going to finish this right here. If your interest gets peaked by Russian literature, Soviet literature, dissident writers, gulags, prisons, injustices, atrocities, or life seen through the eyes of a dog, you owe it to yourself and to the preservation of history to take a look at this book. It's not a long read so it won't take up much of your time but I think you'd like it. If not, I'm not sure we could talk civilly any more. Done, finally.

46 is the new number of my disappointment. That is how many books I read in 2011 which is just shy of two-thirds of what I read in 2010 if memory serves me correctly. Maybe I had a busy year? I'm not sure but whatever the reason I hope to rectify it this year and so far, as I start this, I'm on my sixth book of 2012 and will see if I can finish one or two more in the seventeen days I have left to make a strong start to the new year. Which also brings to question, am I going to hold fast to the idea of writing a review for every book that I read? Probably not and for a few reasons. One, that's just too much time to devote when I could be reading or socializing. I mean, I like you, but sometimes I feel that I need some space to do vodka cartwheels. Two, it's another time issue. Trying to make myself sit, or stand as I usually do, and write one of these is the cause that I tend not to write one, I don't like people telling me what to do, especially myself. Three, I've read some really good books that we just don't have a source to restock and I don't know how fair it is to tell you how good a book is that you probably won't be able to find. But maybe I'll do that once in awhile, it's not like you are sharing any suggestions with me on what to read even though my email will be at the top of the page… (making note of that now so I can actually have my email at the top of the page… which I just did, Ha! Suck it.)

I may add some sort of scroll bar to chronicle the books I'm reading just so I can have some sort of new feature on this page that will be easier to keep up. Aaaaand I will attempt to be more systematic, as in consistent, with reviews, like one every two weeks or so. I'll let you know by telepathic transmission when I've finally reached that decision. Other than this, what's new with me? Not much and I'm ever so appreciative of your attentiveness. Well, just reading mostly and looking forward to attending Mahler's 7th Symphony at the Washington Pavilion tomorrow night (Jan. 14th). I have a feeling this will be a big year all and all. It's the infamous 2012 as you know, also the year marking 100 year anniversary of the Titanic and the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, not that I've been a huge fan of Dickens, I think he ends stories well but is only mediocre in his mid-game and horribly overshadowed by the brilliance of so much literature from the 19th century. But we live in a horribly anglocentric society, what can you expect? Speaking of, let's move on to a German writer!

Born Paulo Thomas Mann to Thomas and Julia in Lübeck, Germany on 6th of June, 1875, Thomas Mann would become a wildly influential writer who would flee to Switzerland in 1933 with the rise of Adolf Hitler and then to America in 1939 when war broke out. He wasn't the only writer in his family, his brother Heinrich was also well known and three of his children, Erika, Klaus, and Golo also took up the pen. If you recognize his name it would most likely be in association with either The Buddenbrooks or the novella Death in Venice. I've long known about him and have read a lot of references to his works but this is the first I've had the pleasure to experience his writing which I did find to be an experience.

To mark a coincidental addition to this piece I will note that 2012 is the 100 year anniversary on the publication of Death in Venice and not only that, the main character of Aschenbach was based off of a photo of Gustave Mahler who was greatly admired by Thomas Mann. I swear there was another thing to mention but in the process that was lost… oh well, maybe it will surface later.

The outline of the story is easy enough to quickly describe: Aschenbach is a famous author who travels to Venice and is awe struck by the beautiful son of a Polish family that is vacationing in the same hotel on Lido Island. Aschenbach feels that he should leave Venice but can not escape etherical knot that connects him to the young Tadzio. Days are spent on the beautiful beaches in mute admiration as the city slowly comes under the blackened veil of a cholera epidemic. It really is a great story that was intricately planned out and contains allusions to Plato and Nietzsche.

The edition of the book I purchased has six of Thomas Mann's shorter works and is an edition that is no longer available which is why I'm only mentioning this one story. Reading through Thomas Mann was very interesting. I found myself feeling very claustrophobic in the character, very ill at ease in a way that only afterward you discover was intentional. It felt like you were living inside a small glass of water and the world outside was at times vibrant and melancholic and whatever the temptations to reach out, breaking through this modernist distortion, the sensation of being confined becomes ever more apparent. The story seems to run a little long while being involved with it but it is laying down an immense foundation and has glimmers of such beautiful imagery that it really demands retrospection.

I'm not sure what it is about German authors in and around the Modernist movement but they are very clinical, very sterile, and tend to be fairly depressing. I don't think I would be able to read too many of them in a row, in fact the collection of short works by Thomas Mann made me take a small step back from my excited intention of starting the daunting work of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Müsil. I'll get there yet, banking on it this year but not going to force it, I'll read it when the time is right.

In conclusion I wish you the best beginnings of the new year and I hope you don't waste it all in idleness. I, for one, want to pack as many books into my head as possible before the four Mayans of the apocalypse ride in on white, red, black, and pale ufo's while Jesus, being towed in some astral chariot, kicks back with a bag of Cheetos while reading the Twilight series and promising everyone a free copy when they complete the ascension. At that point I think even the Pope will look around at the visions of eternal damnation and nonchalantly exclaim that he'll totally catch up in a bit, just going to rest here a little bit longer, he'll meet everyone in heaven but he's just got to run to the store quick for some cigarettes, maybe hit the new Mission Impossible, and follow that up at the strip club where someone owes him one back in the champagne room. But he'll totally catch up, super excited. Yeah. Goodnight everybody.

Occasionally I hear from someone with the continued curiosity asking if books are, in fact, dead. The absurdity is laughable but many in the book world cringe in uncertainty certain the end is near. I can understand the fear but it's when people react without knowing details, making predictions, and exclaiming insider knowledge and gloomy foreboding that I begin to feel better. When radio came out they shouted "Books are Dead!". When moving pictures came out they shouted "Books are Dead!". When talking pictures came out they shouted "Books are Dead!". Television, "Books are Dead!". Internet, "Books are Dead!". Hitler burned books and Stalin censored them, there are banned books throughout the education system and the public libraries in the United States. Forbidden books in Iran and China. How can books possibly survive?

Now people with raised eyebrows, feeling themselves witty after you've already started laughing at them, respond in their knowing condescension and twiddling thumbs, "But you know, the printed book is dead…" Hoping to surprise you in the way people tell me while I have cigarette in hand, "smoking causes cancer!" OhmygodIdidnotknow! So, to let you in on a little secret that we can be in the know together, books, even in a printed format… are not dead. Amazing! Yet of course there is ever more to it than just a short answer such as that, people want the fuzzy comfort of at least two sentences, but I'll do you more than that my friend, I'll give you a paragraph!

More people are reading, in general, because of email and texting, because of the internet with it's unlimited content ranging from the humorous to the serious to the convoluted and everything in between making grammar a bigger threat in my eyes than literacy. And e-books are making a variety of books more accessible by speed and content. And no 'aha's' with a throbbing finger pointed into the sky, e-books are bringing more people into the fold, making reading enjoyable again, or for the first time, to large groups of people. I have an e-book and I like what it can do. I have hundreds of books stored on it and all of them were public domain, which means they are no longer copyrighted and can be distributed freely. I have lots of classics on there and the fun for me is to compare translations. And there are some books that are too problematic to find a physical copy when I can have it in it's digital copy, like the collection of Armenian short stories that I have. But it can not replace the joy of holding a physical books, the smell of the paper, the turning of pages and the worn characteristics a book attains as you read it. The one can not replace the other but together they can strengthen the end result which is simply to have more people enjoy reading.

I have a habit of, depending on the book, doing a lot of auxiliary reading. When there is something I'm not familiar with in a book I can either just keep reading and not interrupt the flow or I stop if something gathers a significant momentum of interest and hit the computer to read up more on the history or this and that event and so on. It brings about a more well-informed outlook on the happenings that you could be reading about, adding something of a social commentary. While reading The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco having it in a digital format would of been as helpful as it would of been absolutely maddening. For a definition all you would have to do is click on the word and presto, there you are. And with all the events and real-world characters in The Prague Cemetery you would exhaust the built-in dictionary while at the same time turning a 437 page book into thousands of pages. Reading the hardcover forced me to accept the flow and just go with it and only having a few auxiliary reading sessions.

The novel itself is built around one of its only fictional characters, that of Simone Simonini, the anti-Semitic forger and agent who compiles, over decades, what would be known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that so inspired the likes of Adolf Hitler and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As a reader you witness the War of Two Sicily's along side of Garibaldi where Simonini, under disguise, gains entrance by jumping on a boat with an unsuspecting Alexandre Dumas. Simonini's work and intrigues involve conspiracies and murder. When he sets up shop in Paris he is there to further the Dreyfus Affair, pitting Catholics against Jesuits while throwing the Masons into the mix and under all of it is the dastardly Jews. All the conspiracies happened, all the anti-Semitic tones were readily there, the events are true. Only someone like Umberto Eco could have written a story like this, so heavily involved in connecting these eras, that it is to be undertaken with foresight of density.

The Prague Cemetery might not be for everyone and though I liked it, it wasn't my favorite book of the year. It is also not to be compared with Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose which had a more detective novel feel. One thing that I enjoyed while reading this was that I was also, and still am, reading through The Parisians by Graham Robb which is a collection of short snippets of interest in the history of Paris. A number or vignettes tied into what was going on in Paris at the time that The Prague Cemetery was set so that I felt I had that much more information on what was going on and my understanding, or maybe it was my own self elation, helped keep my interest keen. Those two book would be an excellent pairing as I also like Graham Robb.

And that's it. The Review is over. Check out the book if you like and if you like the weight of it, don't hesitate to make the purchase. I'm a fan of Umberto Eco so I was excited to read it and am happy I did and I think that if he was a villain in a Sherlock Holmes story, he would of leave Holmes and Watson defeated. That's how I'll now imagine Eco, Moriarty's disgustingly smarter brother. From Italy. Ok, over, I have more books to read, a new year is starting and I've been slacking off the past couple months and I've got a pile of books that are calling my name and you should give a listen too, there is so much out there and so much that can fill your mind with such interesting things that you can forget about how lame life is 97% of the time.

Well. It's almost that time again. Christmas. It's cold, people are running around in a panic, the lights, the invasion of personal space, the anxiety, the reluctance, the deep breath and moment of solitude you try and draw out as long as possible before you walk in that door. And it all starts with violence on the opening day of the season. People get pepper sprayed due to electronic lust, shootings in parking lots and waiting in lines throughout long nights huddling with people you don't even know and everyone is watching, and waiting, for what's to come and if they are fast enough, decisive enough, they might make it though alright. After all, they are vying to be better off than those others. Those in control sit back and nefariously rub their plump, well fed and healthy bellies against their manicured hands like an intoxicated baby watching the swollen breast of it's mother geyser eight feet into a cup while the refracted lights from an ambulance create a double rainbow arcing across the sky.

The general populace is charged with by a bulging electric nerve that makes us count down the days until this time is over and we can go back to our normal lives. And maybe the evolution of this season, the warm feeling we get at gatherings or the connections we make with people on the way, causes a bonding experience amidst the turmoil. The systematic chaos is maddening and to top it off with all of the passive aggressive arguments on semantics and terminology. So what is the correlation I am trying to make between this Christmas season and the book? Nazis, of course.

A stretch? Sure, but in my mind I like it and find a giddiness to it that your furrowed eyebrows don't change. Just imagine what it would be like to take that chunk of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas and stretch it out for thirteen or so years with a German accent and call that the 'G' version, it being more, hmmm... family friendly. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson takes you into the heart of Berlin from 1933 to 1937 from the perspective of the Dodd family. William Dodd was a Professor of American History at the University of Chicago when Dodd got the nod to become the new Ambassador to Germany. So he up and snagged his wife and two children, who were in their twenties, and ran off with wild abandon to Berlin where William was sure he would have the free time to finish his book on the history of the the South. They arrive to reports of Nazi brutality, surprise, and instructions to keep a fair relationship with Germany to ensure they pay back loans because how often is our tolerance heightened when there is something of monetary value concerned…

So, even with the all but absolute disappearance of Williams wife and son throughout the narrative you would still have the makings for a hit sitcom. William and his anti-semitism that would be much more blatant if it weren't so offset by well, the whole Nazi thing and who could forget Martha the daughter? Her numerous illicit affairs with high ranking Nazi officials because she thought they looked so great in their uniforms and they were so nice. She was even offered up to Hitler over lunch though sometimes a lunch turns out to be just a lunch. How zany would that be as a primetime comedy? With Nazis! Oh the hijinks! The American public would feast on that buffet much like they feast on a variety of actual buffets.

I did like the dual narrative in Erik Larson's other work, Devil in the White City, which created an excellent pace more than the singular narrative in In the Garden of Beasts but what I had the most problem with is my own perspective. As you read you get these images of Adolf Hitler when he was just grabbing on to some power and to even be an 'on paper' witness becomes infuriating. I could never fully get the idea out of my head of what was coming and even when I came close I still found how the story was unfolding nausea inducing. I am not saying I hated the book, I did like it, I think it's important to understand different perspectives of things that have happened. I did get very angry at the book multiple times which I assume was something intended. It was really interesting to read about when people saw the movement march past their comfort zones and the widespread paranoia which followed. Over all, it gets my approval.

When you are suffocating in the miasma that is Giftmas just remember what the season means to you. To me, this hell, this madness, will be over in just a touch over a week but in the meantime, I will enjoy my moments of peace where I can get them. I do in fact like the season and, in that garland and lights corner of my heart, I look forward to the day even if I am a staunch Atheist. This year our young tradition continues and we'll have our "Orphan" Christmas where our friends who live too far away from family or have other circumstances where they would otherwise spend the day by themselves, are invited over for the day. It's not about presents or spending the most money and all the stress, to me it is a holiday and holiday's should be spent with people and the celebration of friendships. How's that for ethics coming from an atheist? Yeah, suck it. (Meaning "Merry Christmas", "Happy Hanukkah", "Happy Kwanza", or "Hey, it's Sunday.")

I remember sitting in classrooms and knowing that a school vacation was just around the corner, be it spring break, summer vacation, or the bountiful christmas break, it didn't matter, it was something to look forward to. The excitement and anticipation was nearly a burden to a fanatical procrastinator like myself who greatly needed a break from all the effort it takes to put things off, to sit back and put off the simple things, like waking up or getting dressed. Very similar to how I react on my days off now but without the pleasure of seeing this vast panoramic of opportunities I can politely decline to immerse completely into my own dimensions. By now the extended episodes of selective freedoms are over unless it means I'm jobless which turns that exciting break into something like a boiling pustule full of anxiety with an infected salve of depression that makes everyday something special.

But let's return to leaving school. It was the anticipation that wrought a gleeful sort of anxiety that grew as the chronometrical gauge showed more and more signs of diminishing and that final day emerged on the horizon and came into focus. But you can not bathe in the honey-dipped sweat of anticipation every moment, you have to put on blinders, hold back and think of numbers or of an exotically dressed Meatloaf riding a shaved pigmy bull around a merry-go-round pretending it was the moon. You know, whatever helps. The goal is in the perception of time as it filters into your life. As, simply, the more attention you devote to time, the more you anticipate, the slower times moves. Adversely, if you staple your focus to daily activities or the one day at a time kind of approach, time tends to accelerate. But it is a delicate balance and occasionally our desires antagonize the passing of time to a detrimental degree that puts our fragile egos into a gyrating and tumultuous ethereal pain.

In August of 2010 I had finished reading the difficult to find Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, Haruki Murakami's first two novels which are also the first two books in The Rat Trilogy, the third being that of Wild Sheep Chase and as assumed fourth Dance Dance Dance, both of which are much easier to find, which left me without another Murakami novel until the publication of 1Q84 that I had been following since the original Japanese release date of book one on May 29, 2009. I had been able to sustain knowing I had four of his works to read while I waited but that ended in the aforementioned month of August, 2010. Leaving fourteen months until I could read something more of what I consider to be one of my top three favorite contemporary authors. I had to wait and survive until the new book came out. I filled my time by reading other books, discovering authors new to me, and avoiding any conversation relating to 1Q84 with my girlfriend who had read the books as they came out in Japanese. One day, this unfair advantage of hers will cease to matter, I will learn a few spare languages and laugh at her in exotic tongues when she is unable to read the book I hold in my hands.

Tengo and Aomame were in the same classes for the third and fourth grades, they never actually talked to each other but one day Aomame came up to Tengo and held his hand and forever on neither of them could forget that simple sensation. Fast forward twenty years and they are no longer the ten year olds they had been, they are turning thirty and the year is 1984. Or is it 1Q84? (In Japanese the pronunciation for the number nine is "kyu", or for the sake of a title, simply 'Q'.) Aomame works at a fitness center and occasionally kills people on her own time when the situation calls for it. Tengo is a math teacher at a cram school and writes fiction but as yet has remained unpublished. Until he is introduced to the seventeen year old Fuki-Eri and rewrites her short story Air Chrysalis that wins a new writers award and becomes a best seller. But now there are two moons, Fuki-Eri has disappeared, and the Little People are angry. Sakigaki is like a hornets nest that threatens both Tengo and Aomame who are still searching for each other after all these years and only one knows what risk there is in their meeting, what the price for destiny means.

1Q84 is a great book for these long looming months that are approaching while you have to deal with the contemplation of time. One of the interesting themes of the book is patience and living life as you actively pursue your destiny. There is motion as everyone is moving forward to their respective goals, it's a pursuit, you can't just sit back and hope something happens, you have to be aware and ready to go when the moment presents itself. The novel is layered really well and by the end, after you turn the last page, you know the story continues, that it is not really over but that there is this life that has been created and that still exists even after you put the book away. The more I let this book rest in my mind I feel the edges expanding ever so slightly and I wonder, since I have now been to the cat town, whether the world has somehow changed.

October seemed to be an eventful month if not just busy. It started with the Festival of Books. Then I had a mini family-ish reunion that involved me, a book dork, having a western style gun-on-hip in an attempt at tracking a full grown mountain lion with my sister (who was armed with an old bb gun and rocks), which was unsuccessful in the fact that we did not find the mountain lion but successful in the sense that we survived. There was the 40th birthday party of a friend from Bulgaria where I apologized in advance to my liver but all went well. My girlfriend had a recital that went excellent where she played pieces by Bausch, Franck, and Glazunov with accompaniment on piano by another very talented musician. Also her parents flew in for a week to visit and see her play and I have to say her parents were really great people.

There were other non-obligatory obligations but adding those would feel ostentatious since I am building up my excuse to explain why I only read one book during those thirty-one days. I mean, I watched a ton of Doctor Who along with a number of movies but didn't have time to read. It's alright though, I don't need to validate anything to you. I understand my own ebb and flow of literary pursuits and a slow month every once in awhile can be a good thing. It was only difficult in the fact that I was really enjoying the book that I was reading, just not allotting much time towards the endeavor.

When I had read through the first page, maybe even the first line, I was excited. I really enjoy the prose of Jose Saramago, he is very fluid and has a great tempo. There was a sense of comfort and I knew I was going to enjoy the book. It was like waking up with a headache in the trunk of a car but hearing your friends laughing voices, everything would work out just fine and even if it didn't you either knew you had it coming or your eyes glistened in that trunk that had that faint electrical smell mixed with the smell of the spare tire and old rain as a malicious smile bisected your face horizontally and an aged forest emerged with shadows dark enough to hide many things including those things trapped and the others that are waiting. And I know you know we've all had that kind of day. Or week. Whatever.

In The History of the Siege of Lisbon Raimundo Silva is a proofreader who, when tasked with checking out a book incidentally called The History of the Siege of Lisbon, makes one single change, he inserts a 'not' which would affect the way the siege is remembered. The alteration is caught in time but prompts a new course that Silva had not perceived. Instigated by Maria Sara, who was hired by the publishing house to make sure a similar mistake would not be made, Silva is asked to complete this alternate history where the diverted crusaders, who were on their way to Jerusalem, said they would not help and continued on their journey leaving the Portuguese army to attack the city without assistance.

Crossing back and forth between the ancient Moorish city and the present times of Raimundo Silva creates an engrossing story and a charm that very few authors can radiate. The book may not be for everyone, it doesn't race as much as saunter slowly through the park whistling it's own quiet tune. It won't change your life or anything but maybe it could give you a different appreciation that would enable you to pause and reflect momentarily on the meanings of subtlety. Either you read it or you don't, I read it and enjoyed it. I doesn't really matter to me because, standing near the edge of a ravine with a single action revolver on my hip, sleeve rolled up, arm poised, ears perked and listening, I realized something. I would not have hesitated. And you know what? I'm a good shot. Also I realized I was a book dork attempting to track mountain lion which makes no sense even if I did have a gigantic smile on the inside.

The relevance and importance of novelized fiction in a historical, political, and social context is, for me, a very interesting topic of conversation. It is not that I am opposed to reading nonfiction, neither is it something I partake in very often, for me it doesn't feel like it flushes out the mindset or social current of the particular time. Fiction is just a different vessel that takes you on a more stylized journey and offers you the advantage of an experience through vicarious means, to see and feel life through the eyes of a character via the authors interpretations. I mean, that's one of the main draws of reading fiction, right? Of course it depends on what you want out of it and what you are willing to look for. For some it is escapism through literary means which is, you know, fine. I guess. Whatever.

Say you read the Satyricon by Petronius written around 62 c.e., a broken novel though it may be, it still offers you a glimpse into a different life of the times through fiction in a novel form rather than a play by… I couldn't think of someone in a relevant time period. Ok, instead of plays, histories seemed rather popular, it was the age of Plutarch and Tacitus as well as a number of poets. The histories can be entertaining but to see it happen through a novel is significantly different. Or how about a book by Pietro Aretino who lived in Italy during the 16th century? His books contain a wealth of information about contemporary life that has been very enlightening to historians, once they got past all the d### jokes that is (censorship because there are kids reading this… no, no one is reading this). Seriously, there are a lot. Turns out things don't change all that much, which is rather comforting. Digress, they also divulge insight as to what was happening on the social scene, what trends were hot, who was doing what to whom and, in the case of Alexander Pope, heroically mocking people with his immense wit to such a shameful degree that they would rather eat s### out of a ##### and #### three ######## ### behind an apple mill. I'm not sure what an apple mill is, I imagine it something like a puppy mill but with more bondage.

When there is upheaval or drastic change the scene is set for a new voice or movement to capture some of the disillusions, frustrations, anger, fear, happiness, and angst that is plaguing society. Think of wars or political issues and if you can't think of an immediate twelve examples, I can't help you other than give you the one example (with off-shoots) for which I'm writing this… thing. Osamu Dazai was born Shuji Tsushima in Tokyo on the 9th of June, 1909 to a wealthy family on the northern tip of Honshu, the main island of Japan. He was eighteen when his idol, the author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, committed suicide, an event that marked a change in the life of Dazai. He became especially famous as a postwar era author and has been suggested as a forerunner to Yukio Mishima. Following a turbulent life and nearly half a dozen suicide attempts, fate succumbed to his will and Osamu Dazai successfully drowned himself in a river to be found two days later on what would have been his 39th birthday.

Written in 1948 and what would be one of his last works, No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical account of Dazai's own life written in a first person narrative. The story follows Oba Yozo in three memorandum. It's hard to tell if Oda is a highly intelligent yet repressed individual who resorts to acting the clown because that's how he sees his role or an extremely self involved individual who, out of no other idea where he sits in the world, becomes the clown so he fulfills some role in which he can indulge in a very "woe is me" internal conflict. Or it could be neither, only my opinions. He goes to University where he meets a friend that introduces him to alcohol, prostitutes, and marxism. He blows through his allowance and becomes a disgrace to his family who disown him after an attempted suicide that left a girl dead and him suffering intense guilt. Time and again his father brings him back in hopes that he will straighten himself out but he continues in a downward spiral that accelerates with further suicide attempts.

The book is very well written but I still wanted to punch Oda in the face. Yes, the world is full of misery and tragedy, but it will never change. There are good things in the world too, not that you should run to it like a fat guy to a heart attack, yet find a balance between the two so you are not fanatically delusional in either direction. I get it though, Dazai was placing his own experience adjacent to that of the Japanese society before, during, and after the war. A country that is lost in between a solidified existence. He was using the voice of a nation in turmoil and it's about understanding all of the angst the nation was going through, I'm sure they wanted to punch themselves in the face at times, it's how it goes.

So, will you like the book? How would I know? Is the novel a way of understanding the situation pertaining to a particular time? Yes, I feel that point was covered. Where understanding leads to knowledge and knowledge to wisdom, this book finds it's niche. The impact Dazai had on Japanese literature is enormous, a heavy weight of the postwar years, his writing affected the generations that followed which in turn has left it's mark on world literature. So it could be an important book to read? Holy crap, I'm done with these questions.

I was kind of a bastard as a teenager, my sister would undoubtedly agree. I started smoking when I was sixteen and felt no regard for school for which I was constantly late for when not plainly absent. I had terrible grades, not for lack of understanding, I just really didn't care. I would drive around with friends listening to music, stay out late, and generally lead an existence that even though I'm envious of now, I would never do it again. I had no prime directive, I just went along because I didn't want to apply myself for whatever reason. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of succeeding because then there would be expectations. I wanted to be a non-entity, and I essentially was. I was a bastard but was an otherwise polite and shy bastard.

I admired those who could plan ahead on things, I tended to live spontaneously. Growing up as a Navy Brat was erratic and I just kind of fell into that groove which works well adapting to new situations and accommodating the unexpected but no so much with those long term goals. As much as my teenage years had a feel of freedom they passed with a large sense of emptiness outside of the friends I had made who I have long since parted from except for one or two that I converse with sporadically. But I was very internal, that was the only constant I had, myself. I was outwardly morose and internally very critical, I always dreamed of doing some sort of grand public statement either to move people to see how deluded society was or bring people together in a way that would be jovial and be the highlight of a specific chapter of their lives. I did neither of course but it would of been grand.

Ryu Murakami was born on February 19, 1952 in the town of Sasebo. He is known not only for his novels but also his films as a writer/director. His focus tends to lean more on the disturbing and shocking side, gritty and darker. I would almost throw Chuck Palahniuk into the same group as Ryu Murakami aside from the blind plot twists favored by Chuck. For most of his work all you have to do is read the first line from Coin Locker Babies and decide whether or not you are significantly repulsed enough not to continue. I shouldn't say that though, I've only read two of his novels which were very different for each other. Just saying though, he can hit the darkly disturbing psychological fiction with a sort of ease and, if I may call it so, grace.

His novel 69 is completely different from his other books though and I think because of that I enjoyed it more than I was expecting. It wasn't at all like I was expecting and I consider it a treat when an author deviates from their niche to present something like this. It is a quick read that, from what I understand, is semi-autobiographical, if not a little idealized, but just a touch. It is 1969 and Kensuke Yazaki is 17 years old. He has high ambitions; he wants to hold a festival like the ones in Tokyo and Paris with rock bands and a chance to show a film he is going to make, totally avant-garde that will blow your mind whether it makes sense or not. He joins a political group so he can be a part of something, something that will make a statement and change the world. He wants to barricade the school, spray paint slogans on the walls and be a hero. He wants it all because he has passion and he wants to make a difference. Not really though, he wants a girl.

One of the reviews I read for this book was someone stating that if you were 21 or younger you'll love this book but it's not for someone older. I call bullshit, there is so much in this book that anyone can relate to because the inspirations were such an integral part of those formidable years. If you are a teenager when you read this, you get it, you can identify. If you are older, you remember, you become nostalgic for the years that you so wanted to pass by so you could start your life only to look back and reminisce. The prose is simple but intuitive and true to life. Ryu is faithful to the angst and the impetus of the actions that drove us forward as teenagers.

So just get the book while it's available. Kodansha International, the distributer for 69 as well as two other books by Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies and Always Transparent Blue, has pulled out of the western market. Whatever books are left are the last ones, which really sucks. We have only one copy of Yasunari Kawabata's House of Sleeping Beauties left and there just aren't any more out there. So if you want the chance to read these works by Ryu Murakami, get them now. I would like to imagine another publisher like Tuttle will pick up these titles and more to fill that gap but there's no assurance it will happen, at least any time soon. Don't disappoint me any more than you already have, faithful reader (not plural because I'm a realist), stop buying only popular fiction, it's aimed at the lowest common denominator and that's not you. You are special, you are different, you want that path less traveled and trust me, the company you find there is much more interesting. Get out there and run naked through the reeds, me, I've already got my pants off and looking forward to getting out of work.

I'm excited, the 2011 Festival of Books is just a couple weeks away and yours truly gets to drive across the state to Deadwood to work. It is beautiful out in the Black Hills, amazing scenery, really just a different feel than here on the east side of the state. Not that I want to live there mind you, I have said before that if you could move the scenery from the Black Hills over to the east side and land Sioux Falls in the middle of it, then it would be by far the most ideal city in South Dakota. Which isn't really saying so much if you do side by side comparisons with other places… but, it is what it is and no matter how much I'd rather live in a bigger city there are plenty of worse places to be in the meantime. Like prison.

Not that I'm in danger of facing time in prison, I'm far too innocent for incarceration. I imagine prison would be rather drab and not very exciting. If I absolutely had to, I think I'd shank someone or call the warden obtuse then toss on Duettino - Sull'aria for the fellows in the courtyard, lock the door and kick my feet up on the desk. Or maybe just shank someone. What ever could open the doors for solitary confinement with a chance for smuggling in books. Ok, interjection here, this is the third day I've been working on this, or attempting to do so, and it's still only on the second paragraph. Pretty lame. I was going to use this to build up into the opening of Tlooth because, you see, it starts off in prison. Get it. Yeah, it was a difficult stretch, not thrilled with it personally but really, the book was only ok. We'll get on with the rest of it.

Born on Valentine's Day of 1930, Harry Mathews grew up in New York City to later attend schools such as… and so on etcetera, the rest of it is a few pages up under The Journalist. I still think he is a really interesting person and his involvement with the Oulipo is great to read about. I even bought another book today about the Oulipo, a collection of writing that I've been waiting to be back in stock for the past three months. I have some books I want to finish first but it has displaced other titles on my list. On to the book eh? Why not!

Tlooth was published in 1966, Mathews' second novel after Conversions which came out in '62. It starts off during a baseball game held in this prison camp between the Fideists and the Defective Baptists. The camp is huge into baseball, and religion. Not religious in sincerity but more in a way to segregate the prisoners and the main character is one of the Defective Baptists who has a vendetta against one of the Fideists who had removed two of our narrators fingers during a dental operation, seriously affecting a furthering career as a concert violinist. When the Fideists strike up a business deal and leave the camp, the only way to exact revenge would be to escape and hunt them down, naturally. So the story continues, globetrotting for revenge, lots of word play, puzzles, and more.

I wasn't exactly thrilled by the book, rather disappointed. I'll take some blame though, I rushed into reading it with other books on my mind and to make matters worse, I read it slowly with no consistency. It never grabbed me, the desire to finish the book is what impelled me to read rather than caring about the characters or story line. The book itself has gotten rather good reviews which makes me feel I may need to give it another try in a couple years and see where it sits with me. Maybe I just didn't "get it" which is fine, maybe you will and then you can tell me how much better you are and I can just ignore you and go home into a dark corner and drink away my sorrows.

So I didn't like the book, big deal. I'm going to continue reading works by Harry Mathews, we're one for one right now, i'll see what his other books are like. Just to admit, it wasn't horrible, it just felt empty. I would rather read this fifty times in a row than reread Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. That book I really just did not enjoy, had high hopes for it but it just left a repulsive taste in my brain. Tlooth had a potential that was respectable and I would give it another chance after reading a few more novels by Mathews, you may like it the first time around, never can tell until you try it out, right? Right, now don't be such *insert profane or not so profane word here*.

Up until now I've been writing the occasional review when I finish a book and quite a few on books I had read in the past that I wanted to use to fill up space, to set some foundation. Now, I tell myself, I will review every book that I finish from here on out, which in fact I had started with either Penguin Island or The Appointment. If I had done this from the beginning I would have a list of forty some odd books already, so much for the foundation. It will take away my option of picking and choosing books to review on bias at the same time as having something of a deadline so I won't get backed up. It will give you, the interested (maybe just bored), a chance to mock other titles that I read. Awesome for you. So, onwards…

I love classics. Before it felt as though I had been stuck in a cesspool of modern horror lit and then when I was seventeen, I discovered Dostoevsky, then Dumas, then Tolstoy, and I was hooked. I spent the next five or so years reading only classics. I wish I had had my current reading comprehension, the thought of reading twelve books a years seemed awesome then. And for classics I don't think you can get better than the French and the Russians which I would welcome any debate. I love the form and the density, the development of the story and characters, all the little details which build this very empathetic world where you know these people almost better than family. You get so entangled in the people that inhabit these worlds and as the story unfolds it is the personalities who reign and only the story that becomes threatening. The Romantics, the Realists, the Naturalists, the Decadents, such an amazing century. The Modernists were proving a new potential but that was ruined by the Great War and literature changed forever.

Born the 23 of January 1783 with the name Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, France, he was only six years old when the Revolution started. At the age of 27 he was an auditor with the Conseil d'État where he traveled to Italy with the Napoleonic Wars and later was part of the 1812 Russian campaign. After the fall of Napoleon Stendhal spent time between Italy and France. His first novel Armance came out in 1827 followed by The Red and the Black in 1830. It was only after his death in 1842 at the age of 59 that Stendhal gained any notoriety as an author. His writing style was noted later as being more inline with the Realists whose era wouldn't come until the later half of the century.

Julien Sorel is the main character in The Red and the Black. He is the son of a carpenter who is hated and ill treated by his father and brothers. More adept at dreaming and reading he is soon pedaled off, at the age of 18, as a tutor to the Mayor of Verrieres' family due to his learning and thorough knowledge of Latin. Julien is constantly scheming his climb through society, idolizing Napoleon nearly fifteen years after his banishment. He despises society; their wealth, holdings, standards, and demeanor. He attempts to seduce the Mayor's wife because that is the logical step due to her station and what favors she could do for him. His idealism is interrupted by his ignorance and all his calculations contain a fatal flaw. His successes are failures that he has the choice of either correcting or blindly riding his ambition through, willing to risk anyone in his way. The book moves through Verrieres, Besançon, and finally, the center of the world, Paris.

I really enjoyed the book, it may not be the best story out there but it's well written and the characters are well developed. Stendhal has been praised for his psychological insights with due credit. It is a novel that mocks the politics of the time, it was published the same year as the abdication of King Charles X that lead to the Reign of King Louise Philipe I. It also challenges the social mores found in the upper echelons of society, the bigotry, greed, and sense of entitlement. Stendhal is a definite must read for anyone with literary interests, his works and characters are often referenced and were very influential to many authors.

I bought another book by Stendhal today, The Charter House of Parma, and really look forward to reading it now that the initial fear is over. I would also suggest La Reine Margot by Alexandré Dumas written in 1845, it will enlighten you on the story behind the ancestors of the de la Mole family back in the late 16th century around the events of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the ascension of King Henry IV. The tumultuous times of 19th century France bred some amazing authors, you'd be missing out if you ignored Stendhal. And remember, questions or comments or whatever, I've got an email address. Ok, done, go read a book or something productive. Me, I'm going to a show and then having some drinks because only I can be me.

Briar Rabbit. Peter Rabbit. Berenstain Bears. Winnie the Pooh. These are some of the children's books I remember as I was growing up. Later it branched out a little more when I got into books with more words and less pictures and eventually no pictures unless they were illustrations which were few and far between and usually consisted of some old wood cut print or something of the kind. I won't forget to mention the books by Shel Silverstein but those I remember from later elementary schools. There are so many of these little stories that are a friendly way to teach morality, tidiness, friendship, and helping the old and infirm. Or stealing, whatever, those crotchety farmers had it coming. They were written to instill the values in the form of cute little creatures that for some reason we should be able to relate to with our furry little insides.

It was probably a couple months ago now that childhood stories came up in a conversation over lunch at Ming Wah. I can't remember exactly how the conversation started but I had been sitting with my girlfriend and it was some mention that Jan, one of the owners, made about unfamiliarity with American children stories and rhymes. It was something I hadn't really thought much about before but makes more than perfect and obvious sense. Tunes like London Bridges or Ring Around the Rosie are so ingrained that they are just there, always with you like some polio vaccine they injected a gallon of into you as a child. How could you not know it? But to turn it around, have you ever heard of The Capricious Robot? Most likely not.

Shinichi Hoshi is a Japanese author that was well adept at writing short, two three or four page stories. Before he died in 1997 he had written over a thousand short stories that dabbled here in sci-fi and there in mystery, all kid friendly and projected some of those morals that allow children to grow up into studious adults. The stories and traditions I've heard about from Japan are just absolutely fascinating, I'm sure, in part, due to my limited depth of knowledge into the culture, especially what someone would grow up with as opposed to hearing of it as an adult. The stories are humorous, witty, sometimes rather dark, and at times a touch on the frightening side. As a kid I would of loved it to no end as now I find them utterly entertaining and a little jealous. I had a family of bears that romped around and learned clearly stated lessons, someone else had a robot that would make you breakfast and then chase you with a murderous rampage through an island.

Which is the title story to The Capricious Robot. To essentially give away the story, it is about a guy who was going to spend a month on a deserted island and who had a friend who claimed to have invented the perfect robot companion. Of course the guy wanted it badly and of course the friend lent it to him because otherwise the story would be pretty lame. So, on the island, the robot is awesome. It helps build a shelter, cooks, cleans, and all those things that are such a bother to do. Yet, alas, the robot flips out intermittently and chases the guy all around the island until he's a nervous wreck. Cause yeah, robot is making you a sandwich, but three bites in, in a moment of relaxation, is it going to brain you with your own severed leg? When he gets back home he complains to his friend and his friend responds that the robot worked perfectly, instead of making the guy lazy and lethargic, the robot insured he had his exercise and kept his senses keen. So it goes.

There are dozens of stories in this book, some are rather quaint and logical and some tend to raise an eyebrow or two. As I said, very entertaining. Of course if you want your own copy, we won't be carrying them. I've seen no sources outside of the english translation for students in Japan. There was one copy on that impersonal site where you can get anything, but it was $128.45 for a new copy. Crap if you ask me, but it's still there. A slightly more accessible author you could try in the mean time, if you have that ravenous itch, would be Miyazawa Kenji, who makes me think of a Japanese Oscar Wilde. Highly recommended. Well, as a good friend would say, good luck to ya, which is always and sincerely meant in the nicest way possible.

I was reading on a publishers blog the other day about the difference between the two styles of fiction an author has to choose from when writing a book, novel, story, or what have you. There is Literary Fiction, of which the goal is the presentation of ideas and that of self-expression of which you allow the reader to witness or observe but which is overshadowed by the the idea. And then there is Popular Fiction, where the idea of self-expression is cast aside if favor or writing to entertain the reader and to express emotion. Of course it is not so defined that the categories are strict in their parameters, more that they can share aspects but they, in the end, become distinctive. I've also heard, in a different view, that an author should not write to impress friends or family but to attempt something that would impress authors of their own admiration.

Essentially, what that means, it is much more difficult to find books and or authors of quality on the shelves of a store that is solely after profit and who want the commercial luke-warm middle school reading level kind of books that are gobbled up by the general populace that don't want to be challenged but want to say they are actively literate. Which is fine for some and sometimes fine for all which I will admit to swimming through the warm spots in a pool saying it feels kind of nice but knowing, in my heart of hearts, that really it's just fresh piss. And books are like that, to be out in the deep end you need a little more skill, a little more confidence, it's more strenuous, but it has a thrill and sense of accomplishment you just don't get punching through the children in floaters trying to stand on their tip toes, face skyward, with that odd but knowing smile on their face that radiates a warmth of the likes you are just about to wade through.

I like the idea of an author putting an effort into their work, developing patterns that are intricate, time consuming, maddening, or a mix, and hiding it within the work to be noticed only by a few, even sometimes if it has to be explained. Which is the case with The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino. It comprises of two stories, the title story and it's counterpart The Tavern of Crossed Destinies, and notes at the end by the author. The stories are conceptually the same only with a different location and, in my opinion, with the second story being stronger and more compelling.

Before I can continue to whatever it is that I do, there needs to be a brief and customary introduction for the author. Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923 in Cuba to Italian parents who a short time later returned to Italy to resume their work. Italo Calvino was in the University when WWII started and had already been an anti-fascist as he was a consummate devourer of books and ideas, but had to go into hiding when the Nazis occupied Italy with the puppet government of Mussolini. Encouraged by his mother he made a choice to join a communist resistance movement and spent nearly two years fighting Nazis in the alps until the Liberation during which time his parents were being held hostage and his mom was forced to watch mock executions of her husband. After the war he resumed his University studies, dropping Agriculture and focusing on the Arts and had his first short story Andato al comando published in 1945 and his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, in 1947. He was invited by Raymond Queneau to join Oulipo in 1968 where he met a number of influential authors. By the time he died in 1985 at the age of 61 he had written numerous short stories, novels, and essays.

Back to the book. I read it primarily on lunch and cigarette breaks but finished it strong, reading the last quarter to a third of the book in one sitting. It's a short book and I should of read it in one sitting but I'll continue to work on that as it disrupted me from enjoying the fluid experience I should have derived from it but faltered on. The concept in both are that there is a gathering of travelers as diverse as any who share their stories with one another. Think of the Decameron by Boccaccio or The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer with the notable exception that these travelers of Calvino cannot speak and choose to tell their tales through Tarot cards. As I said before, I found the second story much more interesting than the first, it even went on to tell the tale of Hamlet through the cards, intermixing other Shakespeare plays like Macbeth into the story line. By the time you read through the notes at the end you realize how much effort Calvino put forth to build these stories, mapping them out with tarot cards, making grids that tell different stories horizontal, vertical, and backwards, and all the frustration in keeping true to the cards and not shifting them around as he saw fit to form a different narrative. You'll have to read the notes to get a better explanation, but I found it very fascinating and it added another level of appreciation to the stories.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies may not be Italo Calvino's most acclaimed book, not even in the top five, but it is a very interesting concept. I'll be buying more Calvino in the near future out of not only curiosity as to what other concepts he'll use, but also because I sincerely enjoyed what I had read. I wouldn't consider this book to be out there in the deep end but it gets you out to where you can't touch the floor and away from any foreign warm spots you could encounter. With that being said, I really don't know the chances you would have of finding this in one of the evil box bookstores, they may or may not have him, but we do have carry multiple titles here at your friendly Zandbroz in Sioux Falls and Fargo to follow suit with a smile if you pester them enough. And coincidentally enough it's about time to close the store here on this beautiful Friday night, so I'm going to throw this online and run screaming through the windows and out onto the streets until someone gives me a drink and a hug. As Edward Murrow used to say, Goodnight and Good Riddance.

I'm horrible at putting laundry away. If I lived on my own it would be ok, I would just use the dryer as a dresser and the coffee table past the foot of the bed would remain relatively clear. As of now, though, you can't see it under the two feet of piled clean clothes. It is not just that I'm lazy, it becomes difficult for me to put laundry away, or to rephrase it, it becomes a far too intense process for me to clear that table. It's not about the table, that would be weird, it's just about putting the clothes away. On the odd occasion I do get everything in their respective places I have to take a break afterwards, go and sit somewhere, have a cigarette, a drink maybe, and let my thoughts come back to me.

I just have a few tendencies towards obsessive/compulsive actions, one being that of laundry. Others would include alphabetizing, counting, putting the top sheet on the bed, cleaning, and making things level or in line. Laundry for instance: if I fold quickly, I have to redo it, it has to remain symmetric, it has to remain in a relative association with the item directly next to it, it has to carry an over all theme or palette. Most clothes I would hang, easier right? oh yes. But no. There has to be a certain arrangement, from left to right; button-up long sleeve shirts, button-up short sleeve shirts, short sleeve t-shirts, long sleeve t-shirts (though I only have one). It is all color co-ordinated, dark on the outside, light shirts being in the middle. I have to hold some shirts up, blur by eyes, and figure out which ones are darker than others, should a maroon shirt be next to a red or by a dark green? For every shirt. The hangers all have to be equally spaced as well, I will go back and forth as many times as it takes until they are even. Maybe it doesn't sound like all that much, just during the process by breathing becomes very rhythmic, I get very twitchy, I really kind of just stop blinking, the only voice in my head is the one only talks about "the laundry" and "it's order", and I basically have to forcefully break my concentration to stop.

Born on Valentine's Day of 1930, Harry Mathews grew up in New York City to later attend low profile schools such as Princeton and Harvard during which he did a stint in the Navy where he married his first wife (if you think that implies he had a second wife, you'd be right, but you don't get a prize. It was pretty obvious). A B.A. in Music in hand, he started a literary journal in the early 60's as he also published his first novel The Conversions in 1962 followed by Tlooth in 1966. He was also the first American to join the French literary group Oulipo. What I like about Harry Mathews and for that matter, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de literature potentielle [workshop of potential literature]), it's about precision. Some may be nonsense, but if you pay attention, it's all precise nonsense. Mathews reads very straight forward but skewed, like walking parallel to the apex of a hill but trying to remain balanced and standing straight, kind of like that. But with a straw in your pocket.

The Journalist was first published in 1994 and as of writing all proceeding and this particular sentence, I had finished the novel last night. I was planning on finishing it today but I couldn't put it down, it just transmits this feeling of being unbalanced. After suffering a nervous breakdown, which is never explained, it had been suggested to the narrator, by his doctor, that he keep a journal, a way to be aware of what is going on around him. Along with prescriptions. Not long into keeping his journal, he begins to develop a system, a classification. It can't be written just straight forward, it needs to be divided, so he starts off simply enough by splitting it into the objective (a) and the subjective (b). As he ditches his medication and begins obsessing more about his journal, he finds that the system is lacking. Of course creating more incerpts is completely necessary to build a comprehensive journal, categories and subcategories and sub-subcategories. He has to devote more and more of his time to his journal if he wants to make it accurate but that only begins to bring about new revelations.

Essentially you're reading a chronicle of a descent into a madness, getting ever more neurotic as you turn the pages. But you can't read it and not feel sympathetic, if not empathetic, as crazy as it is, it makes sense and he really does want to get better. He even feels like he is, he is discovering the world around him, he even quits drinking so he can stay healthy and have a clear head. As his life falls apart he escapes into his journal by becoming a vigilant observer of his own life, I think of it like the image of the snake eating it's own tail. A very engrossing read, if you've ever felt a little crazy, it comes back to you while you read, but you feel removed and you can always put the book down or just embrace it and see it through to the end, cause it has to end, right?

Reading this book made me feel better, and better about leaving my clothes heaped on the table. Or maybe I'm just validating. And when I take twenty minutes trying to fold a perfect crease in the top sheet of my bed, it'll be ok, because I won't be continuously doing it, I do it once and don't worry about it for a couple weeks. But that's another thing, my defense revolves around either very cautious execution or avoidance. I choose my battles where I can. So I'd recommend this book to anyone, I'm very excited about reading more of his works and that of other Oulipo members. Thank you and good evening.

I haven't been reading very much lately and I feel like it is putting me out of sorts. I only read three books last month and I am not even sure what I have read this month but I keep wanting to read. I do still read on all my lunches and even the few breaks I have during the day. When I'm not working seems to be where I have neglected books the most. It's not that I don't have any books to read or that I'm not interested in reading anything, I have tons of books and am really excited about reading more authors from the Oulipo movement and getting back into some classics. I think I've shifted a matter of importance away from reading and directed it towards other avenues but it seems as something of a catch because it's reading that I believe gives me a center and focus, it quells the chaos in my head so that by devoting more time to reading the time I have for other things, though diminished, is approached in a more dedicated and suited manner.

It's like I have this image in the back of my head and that right behind me, with his nose and fingers draped over a short wall, is Kilroy saying "Wot, no time?" followed by a kind of wet, monotonous choking consumptive laughter or like the sound of a chisel in the wall going "keh keh keh keh" constantly. I mean, that's if I create a visual or physical manifestation, really it's my own annoyance with my self that I have to contend with. So my own advice would be to read more, still the waters, and just step back for a bit. So that's what I'm going to do and my first book going into that is Penguin Island by Anatole France.

Now Anatole France is not his real name, it's François-Anatole Thibault. He was born on 16th of April 1844 in Paris, France. He broke into the writing scene during one of the Golden Ages of French literature, it was the age of Honore de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant among others. He was young amidst the previous authors but also outlived them all and died at the age of 80 in 1924. Anatole France may not be a common name now yet he was highly established less than a century ago. He won the Nobel Prize in 1912 and had been a member of the Academie Française since 1896. Also, his entire oeuvre was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church, the Prohibited Book Index, until the index was abolished 1966.

I had been a little over two years since I had read The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France, a chronicle of a life through the years of The Terror, the corruption of innocence, and man's justification of evils, and it has been difficult to find many of his books in print or available. But aside from purchasing a 1943 hardcover edition for myself I also found that a publisher named Mondial offers a couple of France's books, not the most stylish of covers but the print is good and Penguin Island is worth the read, a charming book indeed.

Penguin Island is a satire about the growth of human civilization, it does take it's particulars from French history but in it's broad scope it is about us all. It starts of with old St. Maël, being tricked by the Devil, getting lost at sea and ending up on a frozen northern island. Being old, hard of hearing, and rather blind, Maël mistakes the penguins for humans and baptizes them, cause that's what he does. If I remember the phrase (I'm looking it up now), "When the baptism of the penguins was known in Paradise, it caused neither joy nor sorrow, but an extreme surprise. The Lord himself was embarrassed.", begins a discussion on what to do since animals cannot have souls. Eventually it is agreed that they will be transformed into humans and thus starts the story.

The island is moved and the question between Maël and another monk was that of whether to clothe them or not because there is evil in clothes; pride, shame, envy, and lust. And the progress of the penguins continues, they form hamlets, towns, group into cities. They have cons that turn into myths, that turn into legend and which form part of their religion. The generalities in the beginning covers ages quickly and you breeze through the medieval and renaissance ages before the vignettes become more lengthy. It then takes jabs at revolutions throwing off monarchies and the infamous Dreyfus affair that occurred in France in the late 1800's.

It is a very caustic look at the world we live in and something I would recommend to those interested in government, sociology, the human condition, or just looking for an entertaining read. What I've read of Anatole France expresses a true sense of compassion and fanaticism, people living with the best intentions but in a reality that doesn't convert their intentions with desirable results. It's a great time to rediscover such an excellent author like Anatole France, his writing comes across with a warmth like a story told by a friend. Penguin Island has definitely got me back on my path of reading and I am very thankful for it, I am starting to feel like myself again. See what kind of a better person you can be, go out and grab a book, preferably from your local independent book store, and read. Try and stay away from all the crap out there if you can, but that's why I'm here, I can be the Virgil to your Dante, I can guide you through Paradise. Hell too, but whatever. Keh keh keh keh.

It seems so strange to look back at the world I grew up in and yet at the same time it doesn't seem so strange at all. The paradox stems in that I grew up in a world as it was and as I knew it, I witnessed the changes and could accept them if only for the idea that I was and am only a witness. I remember watching an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks when they were visiting Berlin and someone kicked a soccer ball over the Wall, Alvin returned it or it was vice versa, but I remember the separation, the theme of seclusion and imprisonment. I was aware of politics but didn't understand them, I was not immersed with what the world was going through, I was playing with Matchbox cars and GI Joe's in my room or riding my banana seat bicycle and running through the woods with my friends. I was eight years old when the Berlin Wall came down, there was this electric current all around, this static energy in the air. I didn't understand it but the world was changing.

While I was giddy about the first full episode of the Simpson's airing, not so much about Seinfeld, there were big events happening I was consciously ignorant of but come on, I was eight. The Soviets pulled troops out of Afghanistan and Poland was electing a new government. On June 5th an unidentified man in Tiananmen Square stood in front of and stopped a line of tanks moving in to quell protests. The Tank Man or the Unknown Rebel had been filmed and his stolid image became iconic. There were more political changes in the East Bloc. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia all had a change of government. In Romania overthrown President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed, ending an era of uncertainties.

Herta Müller, the 2009 Nobel Prize Laureate, was born in Nitchidorf, Romania on 17th of August 1953. Of German heritage, her mother had been deported to a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union in 1945 until her release in 1950. Müller was a member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a collective of authors in Romania who opposed the censorship of Nicolae Ceausescu's government. Her first book, Nadir, was published in 1982 under, suprise, heavy state censorship. After a failed 1985 attempt, Herta Müller and her husband were finally granted permission to immigrate to West Berlin in 1987 where they still live though now it's just called Berlin and they call themselves doughnuts.

The Appointment, published in 1997, is about a woman who has an appointment at 10 a.m. sharp. It is not her first but she is always afraid of it being her last. She had been caught sewing up hand written notes into suits marked for Italy with the words "marry me", trying anything to get away from Romania and be free. On her way to her summons the narrative divides between the people she is sharing the bus with, her first husband, her previous appointments, her husband Paul, her father, and her friend Lilli. It is a story influenced when Herta Müller herself was fired from her job and harassed by the Secret Police for failing to cooperate. The book tells a story most of us will be unfamiliar with, the effects, psychological and physical, imprinted by living in a police state and a reign of corruption where the will is broken repeatedly and fear imprisons you. Her writing brings up the feelings of desolation, loneliness, and a feeling of dejection.

I find it very interesting to read about lives people were living while I was running around oblivious. I don't have any feelings of guilt but those of wonderment that there is so much difference in the world, the different mindsets you have to acquire to deal with the various hurdles and hardships that can exist where ever you are. I think it is a good book and worth the read, it's the first book of Herta Müller's that I have read but it won't be the only one. Though she has written a fair number of books only a handful have been translated including; The Passport (1986), Traveling on One Leg (1989), and The Land of Green Plums (1996). I would also suggest After the Wall by Jana Hensel for what it was like as a teenager in the final years of the GDR and what it meant for her generation when the iron curtain fell away.

Ok, that's it, that's my review. If you have any questions or comments, suggestions or complaints, or if you just want someone who will pretend to care, feel free to send me an email at doug@zandbroz.com. I'm not saying I'll respond but you could also be saying you're probably not going to initiate. But I lie, I'd respond. I'm often bored and locked away in a dark basement only getting food when I supply one of these poorly written review things.

When it is warm out I tend to drink a lot of water and ice tea throughout the day. It's good for you, it manages your internal temperature, transports nutrients and oxygen into your cells, detoxifies, protects your organs and joints, helps your metabolism, besides hydrating your muscles (75% water), bones (22%), blood (83%), and brain (90%). On hot days it is especially important to keep hydrated as the results of dehydration would not be present on a "Things I Would Like to Experience Today" list. Such as: racing pulse, vomiting, shriveled skin, painful urination, dim vision, seizures, breathing difficulty, chest pain, and unconsciousness. This past Friday was very hot outside, so me being the conscientious and health abiding person I am, drank a lot of water. This I want to break down a little, for my own curiosity really, I don't care what you think. I probably drank at least six glasses of water, no ice cause I'm okay with room temperature water, and about three glasses of ice tea. For the sake of argument we'll estimate each drink was roughly 10 oz of liquid, that would mean I ingested around 90 oz in the span of nine-ish hours. That's around three quarters of a gallon, 5.6 US pints, or 2.8 quarts. And let's say that my body absorbed half of that liquid, which leaves me with a ballpark figure of 1,300 cc's sloshing around inside me. Even if I assume my body absorbed more than that leaving, say only 1000 cc's, the normal human bladder only holds from 250 cc to a painful 800 cc worth of liquid. Onwards.

As I said it was Friday. I had just gotten off of work and ran home as we were going to go see the new and last Harry Potter movie. On our way I picked up a quart of chocolate milk (I'm a hopeless addict) and some cigarettes (...) not to mention another friend who was coming with us. We get there and the previews have started but we wait for a fourth friend to show up and, like aforementioned abiding person I am, I made a quick visit to the sanctuary of porcelain and those nifty automatic sinks because I don't want to leave during the movie. Alas, fate, I have some choice words for you. As a defier of stereotypes, being the only guy out of the four of us, I left twice during the 2 hour and 5 minute movie after jittering around and waiting for an opportune time. They? Not once. Plus, the second time I skipped a step and bounced off the wall to a soundtrack of my girlfriend and friends snickering. Regardless of my unwanted excursions, the movie was good and brought an end to an era that I thoroughly enjoyed. I am a fan of Harry Potter, the books foremost, and not at all embarrassed to admit it.

The comparison I most want to avoid, but the one I'm starting off with, is that between Harry Potter and Max Frei. Do they both have wizards? Yes. Odd creatures? Yes. Harrowing experiences in imaginary lands? Yes. That's really about it, from there they differ and go off in different directions. I usually describe the series as if you mixed a disillusioned Harry Potter and Neo from the first Matrix then had him smoke cigarettes, drink, and kill people, then you would have Max Frei. If you'd want to assume that maybe those were some inspirations for the character, you would be wrong and inattentive to details besides being too lazy for 10 seconds worth of research. Max Frei was first published, in Russian, in 1996; Harry Potter, 1997; and Neo from the Matrix, 1999. So now, you could probably be inclined to think Max Frei had influence over the other two. But you would still most likely be amazingly wrong. Don't be so dumb.

The Stranger, the first book in the series, starts off with a twenty-something reject named Max. He recounts early meetings he had with Sir Juffin Hully who made first contact through dreams until, when Max was ready, they took a sketchy trolley that transported them between worlds. When Max awakes, he is in the Kingdom of Echo and the newest recruit as an agent in the Department of Absolute Order. The series then takes off, following mysteries, solving cases, delving into the politics of Echo and meeting characters with interesting names such as Melifaro, Lonli-Lokli, and others that you'll just have find out for yourself . I think the books are great, a fun escape but you'll have to read between the lines. There is one drawback to this series that many people have pointed out already but I'll start a new paragraph first.

Alright, so the translation leaves a lot to be desired. This isn't just my own guess work, after reading and feeling that something was off, I looked online at comments and read from people who had enjoyed these books in the original Russian (something I am unable to do due to my lingual ignorance) but were ashamed at the english translation. It goes beyond structure and even takes liberties with names, which is rather bothersome. Whatever the case, there is a little bit of a challenge in reading the books. There is a definite story, and a very entertaining one, hidden beneath the publishers poor choice in having a person render this into respectable English prose. And that's it, that is my only complaint with this book and it's sequel.

There are currently only two of the ten books available in English with a third to appear in the not too distant 2012. So be courageous, give the book a chance and if, after halfway through, you just can't get into it, so be it, it's probably just the translation. Something new is always worth trying and who knows, maybe you'll be tossing on a looxi of your own creation to await some sort of film release. Another conciliation would be that it is not about vampires because Christ, I think there is enough of that crap floating in the social bowl. Now get up, brave the heat, stay hydrated, go out and buy the book so you can sit in some idyllic location with a book between your hands and ponder just how much liquid can your bladder hold. Thinking you're so much better than me. Psh. Enough, this is done. I have to go... somewhere.

Nearly a few week ago now I was sitting with my girlfriend at a restaurant and we were discussing, in regards to her upcoming trip to visit her family, what book we would read while she was away. It is usually a book that either one or both of us have been planning to read but have not yet gotten around to for some reason or another. Last year we read V by Thomas Pynchon when she went to Japan and then when we visited Boston we read Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. So while we were eating we were discussing what authors we had been intending to read and suggesting names and titles while debating the merits of both and comparatively with other authors and titles. It makes me blush to think about it, how rife with sentiment I am with all my squishy insides. But we halted our conversation till we could get home and go up to our little library. We agreed to pull only three titles each and then eliminate until only one was left. So when we got home we each placed about five between us and set to cancel them out.

In the end it was a tough choice between two books, the others had been silently returned to their respective spots on the shelves, unread and teasingly touched only to remain unfulfilled until enough days, months, or even years passed before they will be picked up and devoured as they should be. The runner up was The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and it was decided that his novel should be held for a time that would be less chaotic and more attention could be applied as his novels renders it's honest heart to studious eyes. So in the end we had the one book remaining, the one that would hold us both in the same story while being three weeks and thousands of miles apart. Of course she had over half of it finished by the time her plane landed.

Yu Hua was born the 3rd of April, 1960 in the city of Hangzhou, a city with roots that date back five thousand years and hosts an urban population of over 3.5 million. In 1983, after being a dentist for five years, Yu Hua started writing and his first novel To Live came out in 1993 which was adapted into a movie in 1994 that was subsequently banned in China. Yu Hua grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and his novels tend to speak out against the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and it's effect of the lives of people in the smaller towns of China. His writing tends to be simplified, tailored around the vernacular of its subjects, and alternates between being very quirky and humorous to being horribly depressing and graphic. In 2002 Yu Hua was the first Chinese author to receive the James Joyce Award.

Brothers was originally published in China in two volumes that came out in 2005 and 2006 titled Xiong Di and was translated and published into one volume by 2009. Coming in at 641 pages, the novel is a fairly quick read due to its style. The story follows the lives of two brothers, Baldy Li and Song Gang and their exploits through and after the Cultural Revolution. They each become fortunate in their own ways but as always nothing can be sweet without the bitterness. There is a lot of beautiful sentiments in this book and other times where you want to shut the book and hide it in hopes to suspend the ill omens mid-flight so they might not seed into they tragedy that is their fate. The story spans over forty years of depravity and excess and the excess of depravity as you watch these two brothers swear, sweat, love, and suffer. Though written seemingly simple, the story is panoramic and engrossing and I would recommend to you Yu Hua, be it Brothers, To Live, Cries in the Drizzle, or Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.

So read the book already, even if you have to read it alone because there's no one who loves you enough to read it with you. That's not true though, I am here. Since I have already finished, you'll have to take care of your side on your own. But please, don't fret, I'll sit back with smiles and warm words of encouragement until you are done and satisfied. There will also always be other books, other adventures, forays into unchartered territory. And I will always be somewhere, buried between pages.

I am often perplexed by the meandering relation between such things as time and patience. I believe patience has an angle of accelerated maturation in its relative proportion to time which could possibly be measured with a special, possibly alchemic, variation of the sextant and chronometer. Otherwise there has to be some complex mathematical equation that would adequately describe where I am to stand, and in what position, to attain a sense of balance between those two stations, as it has been linked to harrowing experiences throughout my life and brain. And this cretin called time has been especially problematic, even more so with the advent of comfortably intrusive technology which allows one to accelerate the responses on non-physical worlds by physical manipulation which in turn affects the perceived ratio of acceptance in time management.

Example. A month or so ago I was reading Pantagruel by François Rabelais, which is hilarious if you're the type to laugh at 16th century fart jokes (I am) and what was an early "cunning stunt" variant, and was curious to see how close in time he was to William Shakespeare. I had been getting ready to sleep so I gave myself a time limit of 15 seconds to pull up the necessary information on my computer. 15 seconds. I had to wake up my computer, open firefox, click on a bookmark, type in a name, and scroll quick. I made noises to urge on my computer during the process, tapped my fingers, shifted around. I wanted the information immediately and I was becoming impatient over 15 seconds. I question this gift that has been provided to us through technology, will we seek to maintain an allotment of time to enjoy something like reading books? Not counting audio books, pleasant and convenient as they may be.

In the last year, spanning from beginning of June to the end of May, I read 66 books. A personal record that I try to slowly increase every year. Plenty of people read more and plenty read less, I don't care to compare. It is about how much time I am willing to cordon off out of my life to dedicate to something I really enjoy. Finishing a book is a good feeling of accomplishment, sometimes a reward for putting up with hundreds of pages of crap, and on the occasion I start a series, finishing that is a more unique sensation. It is an emotion of closeness and loss, happy for the time spent together but saddened of the finality, I wish some books would continue ad infinitum but if it was absolutely necessary for them to end, I would hope they would end with the same beauty as The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima.

The Sea of Fertility is a tetralogy consisting of Spring Snow (1968), Runaway Horses (1970), The Temple of Dawn (June, 1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971). The series is beautiful, heartfelt, introspective, tragic, historical, expansive in knowledge, and, absolutely intense. I had to take a break after Runaway Horses because I needed to step back from the story for a bit, it is just the way that Mishima writes. He treats you to the plot, feeding you exotic food which he explains is as poisonous as it is delicious and you eat and you chew, slowly, because there is no other way. It is a series you experience.

Honda emerges as the main character after the first novel. Spring Snow focuses on his childhood friend Kiyoaki, and Kiyoaki's fatal love for the beautiful Satoko in the early 20th century. You are walked through the varying political and social climates as Japan approaches the Pacific War and after, as a country struggles for an identity in the modern world where appeasement threatens custom. You see this through Honda as each book picks up twenty years after the last, as Honda is haunted and intrigued by the reincarnates of Kiyoaki who are all marked by fate; Isao, Ying Chan, and Toru.

Yukio Mishima, born Hiraoka Kimitake in January 14th of 1925, started writing at an early age. Raised in turn by his very traditional grandmother and his father who was fond of military discipline, Mishima was was very quiet and seemed to take salvation in books and writing. He published his first poem at the age of 12 and his first novel at the age of 19. Yukio became an internationally famous author by his twenties and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on three occasions while he was alive. He was extremely intelligent and very well read in eastern authors as well as ones from the west. If I started writing more about his life, which is difficult not too, I would need much more time and ask much more patience from anyone who would read this. I will end this paragraph with the date he finished his last book, The Decay of the Angel, November 25, 1970, the day he took his life.

If you can carve out the time to experience this series, only 1,376 pages (compared to the Signet versions of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo at 1,463 pages and War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy at 1,458 pages, both excellent books) which isn't too bad, you will not have wasted your time. I think if we are to survive intellectually in this century and the ones to follow, we must find that balance and take the time to stimulate our minds with the written words and wisdoms of those that preceded us. Not that we need to exclude all of technology because the fact remains, François Rabelais was born in Chinon, France a good seventy years before William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon. And I found that out in less than 15 seconds.

I procrastinate. Or to put it in a more agreeable manner, I would liken myself to a surfer on the wave of conscientiousness whose apprehension rather than skill oft times relegates one to the trough instead of crossing that median to ride high on the amplitude towards the glowing crest of success. Most people who know me would recognize me as such a person or at least concede to the idea that I have certain inherent traits that would define me in such a way which would naturally assign the apt title of procrastinator, or preferably, a circumspect surfer. Yet I'm not even consistently rallied to the plight, I waver in my duties to adhere to such a distinction. It is an issue I will have to overcome at some point if I wish to truly weigh the burden of success rather than an affectation of mediocrity. Maybe I'll start tomorrow.

The first time I heard the name Aleksandar Hemon, or at least the first it was borne into a recognitive name/phrase, was in late 2009 on the eve of the release of the compilation Best of European Fiction 2010 which was highly intriguing as it brought forth an absolute plethora of authors who had little to no demographic in the United States primarily due to the fact that they were, for the most part, unpublished in the aforementioned United States. As an avid reader the idea of introductions to new authors is as exciting as it is humbling because it at once unveils another chasm of ignorance but also opens the adventure of spelunking through and casting light into those darkened corners. So I ordered in the compilation and shortly after the available oeuvre that Aleksandar Hemon had to offer of which it took me a year to add The Lazarus Project to my personal stack of books and nearly another six months to start reading it.

Part of my apprehension on starting The Lazarus Project was my preconceived notion that it was going to be a challenging read and I would have to find the right time to delve into the novel. In 2004 Aleksandar Hemon was awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant" (David Foster Wallace had won this in 1997) a year after getting a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards and accolades that were to come in the years following. And being compared to such names as Vladimir Nabokov and Mikhail Bulgakov helped emphasize this demarkation line of disquiet. But the time came and I was elated at finding the book a pleasing read and embarrassed at my trepidation that had attempted to prevent me from experience it as periodically happens with plenty of other novels.

The story is a dual narrative. One takes place in the Chicago of 1908 with the real murder of a 19 year old Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch in the home of the Chicago Police Chief and his sister, Olga, who is left behind. The other is present day with Brik, a Bosnian immigrant (much like the author) who is researching Lazarus Averbuch and retracing his steps from surviving the pogroms of eastern europe to his bloodied death by the hands of the Police Chief. The first tells of the injustice and anti-Semitic tendencies still shown to the immigrants of early 20th century America and the other of a recent immigrant attempting to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the sometimes subtle differences between the cultures, a Bosnian would never be allowed to leave home with wet hair. It pendulates between pogroms and the Bosnian war, between a Chicago of 1908 and the one we recognize, from dreams of a better life to the fear of adapting.

This novel by Aleksandar Hemon is insightful and extremely worth reading. I would be easy to imagine that he would play a significant role in the literature to develop in the first half of the 21st century. You would be missing out if you passed the chance on familiarizing yourself with an author who has such promise. You can also check out his other books, The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, and Love & Other Obstacles or the Best of European Fiction compilations (2010 & 2011) which is the project he spearheaded to expose many great voices. So let my image of the circumspect surfer on the waves of conscientiousness linger in your mind and be the recruiting poster that reminds you that sooner is always better than later. Don't fail me, I do this for you.

I have a bad habit of buying books. Not that I would consider it a true bad habit juxtaposed against, say, something like heroin or poor table manners but there is this insatiable need to buy books. I have it in my head for some reason that the only way I can prevent an early death is to not run out of books. Strange, stupid even, but it's there in my head. Since I love to read, it's not so much a problem to have more than a handful of books at the ready and yet I still buy more. It's difficult to just buy one book, because I'm pitting it against so many others and I try to tell the ones I leave behind that it's not like I like this one better but that I want to reserve the enjoyment of purchasing the others in a time where it will mean more to me, when the moment will be special. Of course I don't say this around my recent purchase, there are rules of etiquette to consider. Where I really shine is when I buy books en masse. A month or so ago I bought eleven books, all different authors and from all different countries, none of which being in the Americas and there was a feeling of elation and accomplishment unparalleled to capitulating to an erroneous contingent of malicious air pressure defecting in the form of an embarrassing belch, or worse, from the vantage point behind a dinner plate.

With an excess of books at my disposal at home I rarely read a book twice. Not that I don't have favorites, but because I'm conscious of so many more favorites that could be out there I have a problem of going back to revisit. There are a few exceptions though. I have read twice each Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Chosen by Chaim Potok, Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx, and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. The only other book I have read more was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, of which I have read three and a half times and I have urges to read it again and soon will.

There is something about Catch-22 that I am enthralled with, it's difficult to explain. The balance of the book is excellent. The dialogue is hilarious, the book moves really well, it feels like you are in a carnival, and all the characters are developed into such individuals that they take on the characteristics of someone who is more real than fictional and completely memorable. The book has layers and the way Joseph Heller ties in this really dark undercurrent, this scared and depressing solitude, with the bright lights and the comedy, is just really fascinating.

Catch-22 is set on the island of Pianosa, an island between Elba and Montecristo just off the western coast of Italy, during World War II. The story follows a bombardier named Yossarian and a list of a dozen or more people in his flight squadron which include: Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer who runs the syndicate; Orr, who tinkers; Chaplain Tappman, the anabaptist; Crazy Joe, who screams himself to sleep; and Ex-PFC Wintergreen, Major Major, Nately, Aardvark, Doc Daneeka, Nately's Whore, and more. The book is not in chronological order but jumps around almost chaotically yet it still ties together as you get towards the end. It is an anti-war book among many other attributes. Catch-22 was banned for military personnel overseas during Vietnam due to it's questioning of ethics and morality. I don't know what to say, this book has the real potential to change you if you sit down and read it.

With the release of the 50 year anniversary edition of the book, I entreat you pick it up and read it if you never have. If you have, I implore you to revisit it by either reading the tattered well-read copy that you have or the nice pretty and new edition that will become available this first full week in April as I am going to do. You can love it or hate it, I don't really care, but it is a must read book for everyone. You can trust me, because really, what excitement is there in the alternative?

It is especially in times of upheaval that we need to direct a discerning eye not only to the current issues at hand but also towards what events preceded the catalyst. It is never as easy as a + b = c. Why is a? What is b's relation to a? Why b? Is c really the answer or only a popular misconception? There are infinite clashes of ideology and intent, overlapping waves whose interest is not in eroding the beach but an effect from a culmination of events where only a minute faction will focus on the sand amidst the ocean and the land. While there are a number of informed people lost in the populace we tend to hear only a few sound bytes taken out of context and base our beliefs and opinions randomly. We need to inform ourselves to understand what is going on in the world because it's the world we live in and we have to share this space with a multitude of other people and other beliefs.

When I become curious over events taking place or become aware of my vast ignorance over a region or time frame, I look for an author or authors through which I can alleviate some of the obtuseness I feel that has been poisoning my senses. I like to delve into a culture or era so as to get something of a better grasp and to be able to make connections as to the why on certain subjects. There are rarely any definitive answers but in the attempt of aligning your consciousness to common perceptions of said culture or era, a better understanding can be attained.

The first Naguib Mahfouz book I read was a year or so ago when I picked up Karnak Cafe, a short but very interesting novella of conversations and the people in a cafe. The cafe, as a meeting place of regulars was a daily habit of which Naguib Mahfouz was quite a fan of and which he attended until his final years. He was born on a Monday, 11 December 1911 into a Muslim family living in Cairo who raised him in a strict Islamic faith. By the time he died on 30 August of 2006 at the age of 94, he had written over 50 novels and more than 350 short stories, lived through two kings and four presidents, won the nobel prize for literature in 1988, and survived an attempted assassination at the age of 82 when, outside his apartment building, he was stabbed in the throat. Though he managed to live, the nerve damage he sustained allowed him to only write for a few minutes at a time. Naguib Mahfouz was rather political, though raised Muslim he may have grown into more of an Atheist in his adulthood, and strongly opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and their beliefs.

Cairo Modern, written in 1945, is a novel of a student Mahgub Abd al Da'im who comes from a poor family and fights his way up the social ladder while keeping his past behind him. He finds leverage and opportunity in the corrupt government system of 1930's Egypt and starts his tenuous climb. Forsaking family and friends he forges ahead to the wealth and title the he believes he deserves, fueled by greed and ignorance he faces the price of his ambitions. Written in a form that resembles in parts Dostoevsky, Balzac and Goethe, the novel moves forward and is very well paced. Still considered one of his earlier works it shows a comprehension of environment and images of life before the Revolution of 1952 that forced King Farouk to abdicate and instigated a democracy that lasted until the recent overthrow of Hosni Mubarak who fled office on 11 February 2011 after nearly 30 years as President.

With a distinct voice, Naguib Mahfouz has a very approachable style that should not be missed if you are looking into curiosities with Egyptian authors or are just looking to get a well rounded education in world literature. You can also check out his other books which include but not limited to; The Cairo Trilogy, The Beggar, The Thief and the Dogs, and Khufu's Wisdom, a novel set in Ancient Egypt. And remember, ignorance is only bliss until you become fodder for fanatic party run by sound bytes and implied fear. Fight the systems and grab your mental ammunition, life is not for relaxing, it's a chance to die with dignity and to pave the way for a more informed future.

I love alphabetizing. There's no exclamation point there so it's not like it's an obsession where it would be indecent in public. But it gets to a point where if I'm sitting at a friends long enough, they may slowly notice their books being shuffled into order. With my books at home, they are divided into three main sections, Hardcovers, Paperback Fiction, and Paperback Non-Fiction and there are of course sub-divisions. The books are then arranged alphabetical by author and then chronological by title. Whenever I move, as I did just recently, I pack my books with no regard to order because I know, when I go to set them up, I will spend hours sorting and placing the books where they need to go. Even though I may stop blinking and my fingers start flexing sporadically, I find the process soothing. And when all the books are put in their proper spots and everything is lined up I sit back in my reading chair with a smile and look at what I've accomplished, there is always a hint of sadness that I have no more books to organize but I'm always buying more and there is always the choice to shuffle the categories around.

With every process there is the possibility of a fascination with a particular part of that process. It's when the general gets familiar that you start looking deeper, looking more specifically, finding the different niches, the idiosyncrasies, those little relations that start to pick at your brain. It's discovering all these fissures exposing different aspects or just highlighting an idea that suddenly catches in your breath. Those fascinations that become so well rooted in you that make so much sense to you, that when you try to explain it to someone, the petals of the idea start to wilt and it seems that no one else will really understand without first understanding this adventure of tedium and discovery. So you keep the idea to yourself, letting it bloom, because it all makes perfect sense, there is a connection.

In José Saramago's 1997 novel All the Names we meet a clerk in the Central Registry, where all the names are kept; when you are born you get a card, additions are made to the card upon marriage and divorce. When you expire the card goes into the back of the Central Registry, a labyrinth of darkness and paper, with the names of all the dead where they are forgotten. Senhor José, the only character who is named, is the 50 year old clerk who lives in a house connected by a door to the Central Registry. He's been there for years, his routine is the same day in and day out. As a hobby he started cutting out clippings of famous people in his country, making files, checking the newspapers and magazines to add more and more. When he starts to sneak into the Central Registry at night to make the file more official, by copying the persons card information, he accidentally grabs the card of a 36 year old woman. He has her name, her birthday, the address where she was born, the names of her parents and godparents. Her name is etched on his heart.

And so he starts. He visits the house she where she was born, the school she went to, he goes on his quiet adventure until he finds her. It's a novel that would not become a movie, it's far too subtle for that. José Saramago has a unique structure to his novels, but there is a genius in there. Paragraphs that last for pages, run on sentences, a lack of punctuation including quotation marks for dialogue all add to the depth of the novel and demands proper dedication to read. The style of writing is a success when you adjust to it, unlike Autumn of the Patriarch, the 1975 novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which follows the same experimental style but, in my oh so humble opinion, fails. Maybe I need to give it another try but until then, I thought it was the worst Marquez book I have read and I was so relieved when it was finished. But All the Names by the Portuguese author and 1998 Nobel Prize winner José Saramago is excellent, definitely worth more than few paper-cuts and you'll be all the better off by the time you finish.

So in conclusion dear reader, it is a book that you should most definitely pick up and give a try, if not this one as a specific, then a novel by José Saramago for a general purpose and I swear to you, you will be picked on less. By me. On Tuesdays and before noon on Sunday. And really, what's better than having my love and adoration reflected through the glass of an aged scotch and intimately screened by cigarette smoke? Haha! A wheel of cheese would come pretty close you clever and refined reader. I drink to your wit. Maybe some day you could come over and we can alphabetize together, you and I. And you could bring that wheel of cheese. Or just drop off that wheel of cheese, really that would probably work out the best, I await the day.

My sister was in the Air Force, my dad was in the Navy, one uncle was in the Marines, another in the Coast Guard, another was a civilian working for the D.O.D., my dad's dad was in the Navy and my mom's dad was in the Army. It may be that I'm from a military family, grew up on or around bases, or maybe it was just my fascination with things that explode and catch on fire, but regardless, I've become a war nerd. Mostly I've been interested in the European Front of World War II ever since I was kid running around in the woods playing war. It could be blamed on Spielberg with his Indiana Jones defying the Nazis or my favorite movie growing up, the 1987 Empire of the Sun. Or maybe a close second, the John Boorman movie Hope and Glory which came out the same year.

But I believe a huge draw was that of my Grandfather on my moms side. He, as a person, has probably been one of my biggest influences as to who I am, with hope that saying that isn't too much of a disappointment to him. He lives with a gruffness, a character that moves with momentum, an authoritarian voice with the military hair cut to match, a great sense of humor, and a heart the size of which would be near impossible to match. He grew up during depression, is a veteran of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He drove across the United States with an Atomic Bomb in the back of a truck. He was in artillery, he survived Hell's Highway, and he put up with me on visits as a child. He is a survivor of a generation that, year by year, is growing smaller in numbers. The shear tenacity of that part of our families deserves to ever show as an example of the wherewithal and will to not only live but to exceed expectiations and grow beyond the terrors and hardships of the age.

As someone who really enjoys reading, it's wouldn't come as a suprise at all to merge two areas of interest, that of reading and that of war. The first nonfictional book on war that I read was on the Korean War when I was in second grade and now, a couple decades later, I continue to pursue, at leisure, those books of an ideal age where when war was needed, there was an honesty that could justify the action of entering into conflict. I speak of WWII, which was what I consider the last honourable war where the threat of a country's financial interests would not be the main impetus in accepting such a loss of life as mere expenditure to reach the desirable quarterly gains. And as deplorable as war is, it has been essential to humankind and what has pushed us as societies to expand a greater realm of influence to urge, sometimes in retaliation, sometimes as spoils of such war, into what we have become today. With the exception of the Crusades, which happens when you play the whose god is bigger game and you smother science under a crooked secular foot that would rather use a religious victory as a means to pillage, murder, steal, terrorize, and profit by your own agenda rather than something that would best benefit the populace as a whole, like, with flushing toilets and access to water and stuff. Yet with whatever war that is waged, from the Seige of Troy to the ironic War on Terror, they are wars fought not by the portly governments, but fought by individuals who fight to protect their homes, their families, and their future whether they may survive to see it or not.

One such individual was James R. Sheeran who was in the outfit of the 506th Regiment, Third Battalion, First Platoon of the 101st Airbourne Division. A Paratrooper in WWII whose first assignment and introduction into war was on the early morning on 6 June 1944, D-Day, dropping in behind the lines to neutralize the Nazi defences that would further hinder the bombardment of the beaches that were essential in whether or not the largest invasion in history would succeed or fail. What would be ideal would be that you hit the ground, regroup, and assault the evil Nazis and end the day sipping coffee on the peaceful beaches of Normandy. But what is ideal is not always included in a persons particular history. James Sheeran was captured and marched to the nearest prisoners camp, then another, then another. In transport to yet another camp, this one deep within Germany, he and four others made a daring escape, jumping off a guarded train at night by breaking and cutting through the one available window in an overcrowded box car. Of five, one was shot during the escape, the others split into groups of two and ran for their lives. James and his friend Burnie Rainwater eventually found their way into France where they met up with the Maquis, part of the French Resistance who were integral to the success of the Allied Forces.

The book could end there and I would still have been impressed, but after months of hiding out, ambushing the Nazis when the opportunity presented itself, and being hidden by the French Underground in peoples houses who risked their own lives for the cause, James and Burnie found their way back to the Allies. James then volunteered for Operation Market Garden and later fought during the Battle of the Bulge. No Surrender is the perspective of one soldier who fought for his family and for a cause he believed in and who was willing to impart his experience so that we may be witness to the realities of conflict.

This book will end up on my shelf sharing the space with the 1949 To Hell and Back, the amazing memoir of Audie Murphy; Band of Brothers (1992) by Stephen Ambrose which was then expanded on by the personal accounts of other Easy Company soldiers like: Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends (2007) by Guarnere and Heffron; Easy Company Soldier (2008) by Don Malarkey; Call of Duty (2008) by Lynn "Buck" Compton; and Beyond Band of Brothers by Major Dick Winters to name a few for those who are curious.

Reading books like these I feel like I'm getting that much closer to my Grandfather. I'm sure his experiences were as much different as they were similiar and I'm continuously in awe that what were nearly children were witness to an ultimate juxtaposition of horror and honor. And to add the much used quote "War is Hell", it is, and the realities of war should be in the forefront of the mind of every single person who would with such disregard will individuals into such settings unless in situations of the utmost urgency and then with only the greatest of caution.

When I was asked if I'd like to write reviews I was like, "Sure, why not". And why not indeed, I order the books here in Sioux Falls and I like to read a fairly wide range of books so why not share something about one here and there? I've never written a review before, much to the surprise of the few people who read these, I'm sure, but I read a ton of reviews. I consider it part of my duty to seek out information on whether or not a new title would get along with the ones that we have now for they are at times rambunctious and self-indulgent yet warm and cuddly if and when they get used to you.

So it's been a challenge to write reviews. Not in the difficult sense where I don't know what to say but the challenge was in the format. Almost every review I've read either restates what you can read on the back of the book, over-critiques the book according to the reviewers own taste, or fawns pro or con in short barely comprehensible squibs. It's like asking someone who went to Disney World what they thought and hearing "Oh we went on some rides and ate at Epcot, long lines, I'm glad we're back." Sure, that's about what I could figure doing an internet sweep, but what was the experience like? Overall where did it put you? That's what I want. To relate where a book put me, what memory it triggered, what connection I felt with the book, something real to me. Sure, I could just tell you what books I like and you can tell me they suck and that I suck for liking a book that sucked that much and I can have a few choice words for you but in the end, you'll just think you're better and I'll just know you are wrong.

I had overheard a couple people asking about this book and overheard myself saying "no" and "pigeon" simultaneously then just phasing out again and staring at the monkey standing next to a giraffe. I think the monkey wants a hug but I am validly suspicious. Then my sister lured me into Cracked.com website which, through intelligence and humor, entertained me ever so much when I was bored. It just so happens that the Editor in Chief of Cracked is also David Wong, the author of John Dies at the End. And the circle is complete. But I'm not hugging that monkey.

Published in 2009 in book form, the story follows David and John, who in high-school were the non-entities, closer to the losers than the popular kids. You know the ones and if you don't, you were one of them. The book has them in their mid-twenties, nothing special, nothing really interesting about their lives. Until you throw in some drugs, an exploding clairvoyant rastafarian, cops, a one-handed sister, a talking dog, and a walking meat monster that has a dead turkey as it's head. Oh, and Korrok. It's 466 pages is a fairly evenly paced quick read. This definitely falls into the junk food book category. You don't feel like you've learned anything essential to life by the end but it's entertainment to keep you warm while your friends don't call you back.

Being the first book in an assumed series, you should try it out for nothing else than, when the others come out, you can claim to have read it before it became commercialized and that his first book was way better. Totally dank. Or whatever crap word is out there to express goodness. Or read it to bathe in the rays of the aforementioned entertainment qualities the book offers. If you turn the last page and spit on it just remember, it's your opinion against mine and really, I'm probably more righter than you are. Take that, stupid grammar.

I turned ten when I was living on Sigsbee Naval Base in Key West, Florida. It was a nice place, they filmed the 1993 movie Matinee with John Goodman in my neighborhood shortly after we moved away and some good scenes from the 1987 Russkies with a preteen Joaquin Phoenix and Ralphie from A Christmas Story were filmed in the harbor we used to troll for lobster and where, incidentally, I discovered the horrifying reality that there was a consciousness beneath the waves. We lived on a man-made oval coral island filled with duplex housing with one road to get into it and a footbridge to connect it to another part of the base. We lived on the canal side, a red dock stretching out where I had a canoe fitted with the engine that would take me out into the gulf or up the canal under that footbridge that I would take on my way to school.

Spanish was mandatory in my school and I detested it. I've maintained an abhorrence for the Spanish language ever since, not the culture or anything, just the spoken language. For that I blame Mrs. Gonzalez. She was old, mean, spiteful, and little, at least the way I remember her and I cringe whenever I hear the Spanish language spoken slowly as if to children. It's an image and a pattern of voice that, twenty years later, still sends a condescending shudder of disgust up my throat. And it took years for me to smother that old hag out of my head so that when I read a book that hints at the language or regions relating to the Spanish language, I don't throw the book across the room in disgust.

The first story I read of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner, was A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, it was for a class and I honestly didn't care for it. There is a lot of hype surrounding Marquez and I don't like to judge an author by only one work so I picked up Strange Pilgrims, a collection of short stories and really got into it. By February of 2008 I was on my fourth Marquez book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, first published in 1984, which weighs in at only 120 pages but is really amazing. It stands as one of my top three favorites of Marquez so far and I've read all but two or three of his works of fiction. The story is repetitious, gritty, sweaty, repetitious, and maddening.

Santiago Nasar dies. Not just falling over off a ladder from a heart attack, but his life ends grammatically punctuated by the metal of two brothers. I'm not giving anything away, you find that out pretty quickly but it's the way the story unfolds that really pissed me off when I read it, which is a good sign that the story can be believable. It's not a good vs. evil story, with each retelling you feel sympathy for the characters, even the brothers, you see the machine at work, trudging forward and think that maybe, just maybe it'll turn out alright, someone will hit the kill switch and it won't have to end like this again. But no, you are a witness with no power, like an intelligent liberal in an insufferable red state, there's just nothing you can do but watch it all blunder forward.

Blunder forward it does, despite all reason. It's just so frustrating even these twenty-two months later I'm angry at that book like twenty years later I'm still angry at Mrs. Gonzalez, for different reasons mind you. I know that I probably just hated Mrs. Gonzalez because I was lazy and didn't feel like learning Spanish, that she is someone's mother, grandmother, sister, or whatever and quite possibly dead by now. She will live on in me, like some sort of cancer who is dependent on a specific emotion and I will keep her alive yet for decade after draining decade until I myself am either dead or senile or both. Chronicle of a Death Foretold will stay with me equally as long mixed with part anger and awe, as it will for you too when you pick up your own copy, preferably at a locally owned bookstore if not at Zandbroz Variety itself rather than those soulless empires. We want your heart, not your money... well, maybe a little of your money, but only so we can stay open and serve you, our loving patrons, more dutifully in the future.

Ah, winter. The curtains are being drawn and we are about to watch an historic drama about Percier and Fontaine's debates over parquet flooring in conjunction with the candelabra on the night stand. Or would it be wall lighting? A play by first graders. Based on the "fund-da-nen-tills of trufs" in palatial decoration. "How adorable!" you scream with pealed back eyes and an out of breath laughter, turning your head from side to side like an infected automaton making sure everyone else saw how cute that was and even more, that they know how cute you thought it was, because really, would it be so bad to just slip in to a hibernating fur coat of insanity to ride out the winter? I think not.

But really, the cold is not so bad. Sometimes. Brief moments really. Like having a cigarette outside at four in the morning, sitting under a light and watching the snow from earlier being blown around by the wind and hearing that wind approach and wincing in anticipation because you know it's going to go right through you. And it's so quiet, hauntingly quiet. The world slows down, everything looks so crisp with a back drop of snow, you can hear everything that is nothing. In those moments where you can sit and force yourself not to shiver, you can exhale slowly and escape like your vaporizing breath, move up into the exposed trees and watch the world on pause. Brief moments that feel like a change is coming and I will ride on it's frozen wings like a pre-Prometheus Icarus with much the same result.

Watching reflections off of a frost covered window, some movements burn into my mind. That is what reading a Modernist writer feels like to me. Modernist literature was a movement taking ground from the early 1900's through the First World War. It was a branch from the Naturalists, like: Émile Zola and Joris-Karl Huysmans; which was a branch from the Realists, like: Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and Honoré de Balzac, literature that had formed a significant break from the Romantics of the earlier 1800's. Robert Musil is considered to be one of the most important Modernist writers, an Austrian born in 1880 who in flight to escape the rising Nazi party in 1938 was exiled from his homeland, taking his wife Marthe with him to Switzerland. Eight people attended his services in 1942 at the age of 61, he had never finished his most ambitious and exalted work, The Man Without Qualities, and he was never to see his home again but died frustrated and destitute.

As a child I had plenty of dreams, none of which consisted of attending a turn-of-the-century Austrian military academy. Strange I know, but I feel relieved now, if I had, my hopes would of been crushed under the boot of cruel reality. Having written The Confusions of Young Törless in 1906 with personal experience at such an academy when he was young, the story is slightly on the scary side. The Confusions of Young Törless is the story about three friends Törless, Beineberg, and Reiting and when they catch their classmate Basini stealing. What follows is the established dominance and the destructive power the friends assert over Basini; blackmail, threats, psychological torture, physical beatings, and rape. Framing the state of mind of an era that would bring about the Great War, Musil analyzes not only his generation but also that of the previous, those that gave direction and order, those that put children in uniform and gave them ranks. These were the children who would, as adults, climb into the trenches and form a line from the mountains to the sea.

I wasn't expecting to get into this book when I read it in August of 2009 but it kind of crept up on me. The story telling is a bit dismissive but it builds a tone and carves out this stark reality that reminds me that there never was a golden age, not even respectively, that we are our own alchemists trying to pass off base metals for riches when it so suits us. The most I can wish for are those brief moments, where despite the cold, I can find something for me, some fleeting beauty that I can fashion into a pyrite landscape and softly smile to myself as I listen to the wind approach.

My first crush, that I remember, was on a girl named Katja. We would take canoe rides, hold hands, look into each others eyes, fall asleep next to each other, and cry if we wet our pants. The canoes that were the vehicles of our vectitation would be filled with sand so that, as far as anyone could see, we were stationary in the playground outside the pre-school we attended. Ah, to be four years old with romantic feelings for a cootie ridden enemy of the gender. I also remember trying to brag or one up my sister by hinting that Katja and I may have kissed by the water fountain before lunch one day, which was an utter fabrication, also of which my sister believed and teased me relentlessly despite the fact that my first kiss wouldn't be for another twelve years.

A horrible twelve years it was, I moved around a lot, learned how to meet people but also not to get close enough so as not to be ripped apart at the inevitable departure being a tragically sentimental person. I was shy, and still am, unless I had something in common that I could talk about but as soon as the topic would run dry, I was silenced and retreated into my shroud of obscurity. Which made me really awkward. I would develop crushes and hide them inside, blissfully deep within my solitude yet the emotions would become turbulent when waves of reality threatened to merge the two worlds. I was entranced by looks, smells, gestures, nuances of individuals. Regaled by the beauty I would be terrified at the same time. I would worry about the "Sneeze Effect", where you lock eyes with someone and she seductively lowers her eye lids, you make a move only to have her sneeze full force into her arm. Misperception is a fear of mine, along with spiders and closet doors. I've admired those who go forth with conviction, whether successful or not.

Raymond Radiguet was a womanizer and well known for it by the time of his death in December of 1923. In his life he wrote a few volumes of poetry, a play, and two novels; Le Diable au corps which came out early in 1923 and Les Bal du comte d'Orgel which came out posthumously in 1924. Raymond Radiguet was twenty years old when he went on vacation with his mentor Jean Cocteau where he contracted typhoid and died. With his last words he spoke that "There is a color that moves and people hidden in the color"' and when asked if he wanted them sent away he said "you cannot send them away as you cannot see the color." Creepy. Though I admit, I hope I have something so profound or enigmatic to whisper with a dry breath and wet eyes as my last words rather than a comment about the soon to be soiled state of my pants.

Written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen The Devil in the Flesh is profound in it's scope of understanding, the logic and the illogic behind the scenarios. Raymond Radiguet was very insightful for his age and very passionate. The flow of the book seems a little impatient but makes up for it with the raw emotion that defies translation. Francois is a sixteen year old boy who falls in love with Marthe, a married woman whose husband is away at war. An illicit affair ensues, just the range of emotions Radiguet describes seems like it would come from a travel worn aged writer.

The style of writing alone is inspiring because it resembles that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who would pick up where Fitzgerald left off. And even more so because Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise came out across the Atlantic as Radiguet had finished his own first novel. And to be repetitive, the sheer passion with which he writes is amazing. I recently finished reading The Boy with the Cuck-coo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu, lead singer of the french band Dionysos, who has a very similar hold on the ability to portray that passion, even if the story seems rushed. Maybe it's a French thing. Either way it's a must read, if for nothing else than a study of evolution that styles of writing have transpired.

When I first learned that I too could use the "f-word", I went at it with gusto, a wild reckless abandon, in ways that would have made George Carlin proud. It was the later eighties and my red headed friend next door and I would not only sprinkle our declarations with the word, we would build a world around the word, experiment with various endings and placements, our emphasis and gestures. The word was so forbidden it created an awe-inspiring aura around itself that garnered respect if not adulation. It was a source of pride if you could yield such a word on the playground and have it roll off your tongue so naturally it was like you were breast-fed by the word itself. Of course it had to be held restricted to whispers because if the teachers heard, or some traitorous classmate with predilection to the praises of the faculty rather than the student body, you would go to the principals office. And they would call your parents. It wasn't until middle and high school that the word had worked itself into more casual sayings but it lost that forbidden luster as it had when it fluttered off the mouths of children.

How raunchy something was, how full of filthy language and explicit scenes it had, was backlit like the holy grail. The temptation was overwhelming and made me smile a nervous smile, eyes a-glitter with anticipation of breaking through into restricted areas. Blood, guts, decapitation, nudity, and of course the abominable language, whether in books or movies or video games, it was for me, all for me. What horrible adverse effects has this gutter culture had on me? To date I have sworn in front of my mother three times, twice it was called for in an anecdote, once out of empathy, and all three after I was into my twenties and never once the grandest word of them all. I've continued to read, my tastes have admittedly changed and I watch movies with a desensitized feeling towards violence and gore although seeing open wounds in real life produces something of a vertigo effect.

Banning a book or even just challenging a book is an insult to the comprehension level of not only the general public but to the smaller percentages who could possibly use that information in a manner relevant to personal growth and or social benefits. The 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger has been attacked since it's publication. A teacher was even fired back in the '60s for assigning the book to her class. A story about a boy's confusion and anxieties as he tries to grow up on his own. He swears, there are prostitutes, some violence, and a lot of questioning. So what. It meant something to me when I first read it and it may mean something to others, a kind of coping or relating, something that teachers and parents are too far removed to be able to assist.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906 has been in print in it's censored version for the last 114 years. Banned in multiple countries, challenged in the United States and the printed version is censored. Why? Because of it's socialist leanings, the five chapters were cut because of politics and the sensitive minds of the populace. A book whose meanings were transposed, it was first and foremost about workers conditions and secondly about food industry sanitation, Sinclair quipped, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, written in 1937, banned and challenged as recently as 2007. Reasons for the challenge? It contains "racial slurs, profanity, violence, and does not represent traditional values", or as a Kansas parent puts it, it's a “worthless, profanity-riddled book” which is “derogatory towards African Americans, women, and the developmentally disabled.”

Other banned or challenged books include:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1969)
Which was actually burned in Drake, North Dakota in 1973

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
Because it uses profanity and questions the existence of God.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
For language and sexual references.

The Sun also Rises, Ernest Hemingway; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle; The Call of the Wild, Jack London... The list goes on, you can look at lists by the ALA, American Library Association, thanks to whom I was able to reference some of this information.

It's true, there are an untold number of books out there that suck, especially since the literary rate has climbed so much since the 1800's and people who assume that since they can write a sentence, they can write a novel. So many horrible books, not that they don't make money, some have even been on the New York Times Bestseller List, then made into movies, all very profitable. Popular doesn't necessarily mean good, market to the lowest common denominator and watch the profits accelerate like drivers in Nascar. But what infuriates me is that books can be banned at all.

Yes, some books are sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, violent, sex-laden, profane, anti-establishment, socialist, leftist, rightist, or pro-gum chewing. It's absurd, and where do you draw the line? Which God is okay to blaspheme? Whose government is best? Which school of thought trumps overall? Is a preference to Speyside scotch better than that of the peaty Islay scotch? Is the social economic context to be taken in to account? What about consequences of actions? Raskolnikov maliciously murders pawn-broker and her sister, and what happens in the end? The inability of some to grasp the greater meaning of a book does not necessitate the gross outcry to censor or ban said book. We each have in our power the ability to filter information, to derive what is important and in what context, and what information is conducive to our line of thought. These abilities need to be cultivated, in some cases supervision may be needed but more important is someone who is able to understand and field questions when they are raised to get the best understanding possible. Censorship is a practice of ignorance, laziness, and the failure of our society to acknowledge the capabilities of its peoples.

Often I have pondered the relationship I've held with books, when it started, which ones were friends and which ones were held in a more passionate embrace. For me it was a tumultuous beginning, I was scattered and read what I thought was funny or interesting or what someone else was reading. I never made that connection, I had acquaintances but I hadn't yet met that first friend until I was seven when Johnny Tremain ushered in tragedy and anger.

We were living in Pensacola, the Escambia Bay Bridge, I believe, was recently opened. There was a daybed in the spare room at our house and after dinner and before bed for two weeks I would lay on that bed with the lamp on and hold with both my hands Esther Forbes's 1943 classic Johnny Tremain. I had discovered a friend. Through him I saw the beginnings of the American Revolution. I was excited when he became a silversmith apprentice. When he disfigured his hand I was horrified but wanted him to succeed. I was enthralled and glued to the pages, two weeks ticked by and I was still immersed in the adventures on the streets of Boston and I was there when tea was dumped into the harbor. Two weeks of excitement, of bonding with my friend and one night, as I lay on my back with book in hands, my sister walks by and in the only way an older sibling can, says "You know it's not real right? It's all fake." I was crushed, devastated, and humiliated too because I had become friends with someone who was no longer. I learned something that night; not to let someone so close, beware of happiness, and beware of my sister, the killer of friends.

I have long ago reconciled with my friends for their lack of physical being and my sister for her murderous rampage. I'm on my own adventures now, seeking out foreign lands and scrutinizing their peoples. Foam of the Daze by Boris Vian is an adventure that was given to me as a Christmas gift last year and I believe books are the best gifts and great books are just a crossed eye salivating pleasure.

L'Ecume des jours was originally published in 1947 and three translations followed: Froth on the Daydream in 1967; Mood Indigo in 1968; and Foam of the Daze in 2003 put out by TamTam books and the only edition readily available. One thing that gets me is the inability to properly translate the title, L'Ecume des jours, the foam of days (literal translation), TamTam got so close but failed the follow through just like John Hinckley Jr., though when that happened, Boris Vian had been in the grave twenty-two years and some months, expired from a heart attack at a film premiere. When Boris Vian was 12 he had contracted rheumatic fever further complicated by typhoid which put a tremendous amount of strain on his heart that burst as, at 39, he stood up and yelled "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!". Indeed.

An engineer, inventor, writer, and a jazz musician, Boris Vian was in all directions and befriended people like Raymond Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis. You can imagine all their influences in his writing which is very heartfelt, musical, and surreal. Foam of the Daze follows the love of Colin and Chloe, their chef Nicolas, his niece Alise, her obsession with Chick whose love for her comes in second behind his fanaticism over the author Jean-Sol Partre. A novel where the absurd is commonplace and the physical environment adapts to emotions tells one of the greatest love stories through the comic and tragic words of Boris Vian where the tranquility and beauty of a water lily is transformed and the sun beams no longer dance.

"The heart has reasons that reason cannot know." Blaise Pascal. Foam of the Daze is written with heart and when it doesn't make sense it's only the interpretation of the heart and the meaning survives it's translation. About ten years ago I finished Johnny Tremain. Two hours to read cover to cover and I was able to find a friend I had lost long ago and introduce him to friends I have since discovered and whose number grows with each passing page.

I've often thought about making a book sling or altering my jackets to have a large inside pocket but a book sling would look like a little satchel which would look like a purse. You could call it a “book satchel” but it would still be a book purse. Maybe something manly, like a book holster. Like straps across the chest and a giant leather shoulder holster to hold and protect your precious bound literature. When confronted with the evils of ignorance you can deftly dispatch the rising storm with a sun-in-your-eyes stare, the opening of your jacket and following the blood bath your silhouette walks off into the setting sun and the town rejoices, the virgins are saved, the children can go back to school, and the bartender can overlook your tab for the heroic deeds committed that day.

That or you'd just be ridiculed unceasingly. So I'm in favor for altering my jackets, it will be done in the not too distant future so I can carry around books like this one by Pasternak on an inside pocket so when I walk to work I can have my start-o-the-day cigarette in one hand and keep one arm free to swing around and touch my nose when I cross the street, I do that when traffic is coming and I don't want to run screaming and flailing out of fear of becoming a road smear.

I'm excited about reading this new translation of Doctor Zhivago, the first new translation since the original by Max Hayward and Manya Harari back in 1958 only one year after the first publication in Italian. This new one, released on October 19, 2010 is translated by the married couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the duo who have been busy since their translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky back in 1990. Since then they've teamed up to translate a total of eight novels by Dostoevsky, two by Nikolai Gogol, two by Anton Chekhov, one by Mikhail Bulgakov and three by Leo Tolstoy including Anna Karenina that won great acclaim and the nominal feat of War and Peace.

Part One? Yes. There will be a part two when I finish the book but as of yet I'm only on page 66 of 496. I have a life when I'm not inside a book and it's a love/hate thing. When I'm not reading I'm thinking that I could be reading. I've taken time out of reading for you, see how much I care? It's endearing how much I care about you, it makes me feel all warm, feverish, and slightly contagious.

There's not a lot I can tell you about the book thus far, it's in the build up stages, creating the characters and doing that Russian standard thing that we all love so much. From what I've read, and being a fan of Pevear and Volokhonsky, I am already enjoying their linguistic skill, their refinements, and structures. It is strange how you can just about taste the Russian country side, it has been great with visuals. Following the characters is difficult right now, I've only been reading in small doses which is the wrong approach, but I can't just wait till I have a large block of time, I keep peeking and I don't want to stop.

So why aren't you reading this yet? It's available. And for those who have read it before, this is the new translation, it will be the new standard edition, don't get left behind in the times. How embarrassing would that be at your next dinner party to make that social faux-pas of referencing the Hayward and Harari edition? People would think you're "so quaint" and other diminutive terms depicting you as a mental miscreant. Remember, I like you, I don't want this to happen to you, to be quietly pushed to the margins of society and you losing that glimmer from your left eye. I beg of you, don't let yourself get left behind. Knowledge is empowerment and the times, they are a changin' (did you see? It was a music reference... in a book review! how absolutely quaint!).

I love the water. I was raised on the Gulf of Mexico. Throw in a beach, the sun burning down from a blue sky, and the sound of waves and I'm happy. Give me a pack of cigarettes and a vodka tonic and let me lay in the sand with my hand resting over my eyes and I'll pull my legs into the fetal position and shed tears of gratitude. It's one of those idyllic scenarios, to escape and forget. I'm not on the Gulf anymore, there are no real beaches near this land locked city of ours, but the past few summers I've gotten the chance to go sailing with a friend, to go out into a lake and catch the wind with views of the bluffs raising out of the Missouri River. When I get the chance, I briefly live out that idyllic scenario. It makes me feel at peace, harmonious, sometimes less than sober. In those times you almost feel like you're dreaming, but a dream with awareness, you know you're dreaming but it's alright, you feel complacent and slightly lethargic. And that's how I feel when I open the pages of a Haruki Murakami book, immersed in a sleepy remembrance.

Norwegian Wood was Murakami's fifth novel, published in Japan in 1987, published in English in 2000 (China, 1989; France, 1999; Germany, 2001; Russia, 2003), read by yours truly as his seventh Murakami book in June of 2009 after reading Alexandre Dumas' La Reine Margot and before reading Thomas Wrights' Built of Books.

And what did I think of it? I liked it. Murakami is definitely in my top three favorite contemporary authors. Norwegian Wood isn't what I'd consider one of the best of Murakami's works but it's on here for two reasons. 1) This was his break-out book, the one that made him internationally known. Ever heard of the “Murakami Phenomenon”? Look it up, he's doing something crazy that's uniting groups of people who would normally hate each other. He's like the Henry Kissinger of literature but without Nixon and not as creepy. 2) The film comes out December 11, 2010 by Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran... in Japan. Not really a quick frenzied car ride away but it starts a countdown for when it will be released in the US which will, I hope, be quicker than the thirteen year span it took for the translation.

The book. Love triangles, two of them, one remembered and one taking place freshman year of college in sixties Japan. There's love and tragedy and the whole bit, pretty basic stuff. There's Toru, the main character; Kizuki as his outgoing and charismatic best friend; Naoko who is sanitarium bound; Reiko the piano teacher; and Midori as the daring and independent interest. It's the way the story is presented that matters, that's where I find Murakami amazing. It's racy, it's honest and it's on our shelves, it should be on yours too. Haruki Murakami is famous world-wide, America is just slow on the uptake, not blaming the broadband diet or the digital pulses that tend to rot rather than revive the impulses of the alliterate but really, it's true. Among other ready-made excuses for those without a book in their hands it is just disgraceful.

Norwegian Wood is a good starter book to the words of Haruki Murakami. He writes from the land of Magical Realism, contemporaries the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Steven Millhauser, Jorge Luis Borges and more. Take care the wells, beware of INKlings, and listen to the sheepman.

Reading Confessions of a Young Novelist Umberto Eco

11*2012 The Wreck of the Titan Morgan Robertson

11*2012 The Doctor is Sick Anthony Burgess

11*2012 Nanjing Requiem Ha Jin

10*2012 This Book is Full of Spiders David Wong

10*2012 Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet Gerry Davis

10*2012 Foam of the Daze Boris Vian

10*2012 The Flying Carpet Richard Halliburton

09*2012 The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Umberto Eco

09*2012 Witch Grass Raymond Queneau

08*2012 A Discovery of New Worlds Bernard de Fontenelle

08*2012 Doctor Who and the Cybermen Gerry Davis

08*2012 The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal

08*2012 The Misadventures of the New Satan Anton Tammsaare

08*2012 Memed, My Hawk Yashar Kemal

08*2012 The Vendetta Honore de Balzac

08*2012 The Corsican Brothers Alexandre Dumas

08*2012 Phantoms on the Bookshelves Jacques Bonnet

08*2012 The Stranger's Magic Max Frei

07*2012 The Sound of the Mountain Yasunari Kawabata

07*2012 Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters Malcolm Hulke

07*2012 The Girl Who Lept Through Time Yasutaka Tsutsui

07*2012 The Cape Kenji Nakagami

07*2012 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Italo Calvino

06*2012 Sugar Street Naguib Mahfouz

06*2012 Palace of Desire Naguib Mahfouz

06*2012 Palace Walk Naguib Mahfouz

05*2012 Doctor Who and the Crusaders David Whitaker

05*2012 Little Man, What Now? Hans Fallada

05*2012 I Am a Chechen! German Sadulaev

05*2012 The Great Fire of London Jacques Roubaud

05*2012 Doctor Who and the Daleks David Whitaker

05*2012 Beauty and Sadness Yasunari Kawabata

05*2012 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford

04*2012 Locus Solus Raymond Roussel

04*2012 The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

04*2012 No Word From Gurb Eduardo Mendoza

04*2012 Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer

04*2012 Cloud Atlas David Mitchell

03*2012 Heartsnatcher Boris Vian

03*2012 Streetwise Mohamed Choukri

03*2012 The Bird Oh Jung-Hee

03*2012 For Bread Alone Mohamed Choukri

03*2012 Ghost Soldies Hampton Sides

03*2012 The Village Ivan Bunin

03*2012 The Last Day of a Condemned Man Victor Hugo

03*2012 Sanshiro Natsume Soseki

03*2012 The Train Georges Simenon

03*2012 My Life in the CIA Harry Mathews

02*2012 Metropole Ferenc Karinthy

02*2012 The Marquise of O- Heinrich Von Kleist

02*2012 Jamilia Chingiz Aïtmatov

02*2012 Beautiful Image Marcel Ayme

02*2012 The Lake Yasunari Kawabata

02*2012 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer

02*2012 The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt Eduardo Mendoza

02*2012 A Free Life Ha Jin

01*2012 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas

01*2012 The Dalkey Archive Flann O'Brien

01*2012 Journey by Moonlight Antal Szerb

01*2012 Nowhere Man Aleksandar Hemon

01*2012 The Jinx Théophile Gautier

01*2012 Faithful Ruslan Georgi Vladimov

01*2012 Atala & Réne Réne de Chateaubiand

01*2012 Death in Venice Thomas Mann