What are you currently reading?

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Unfortunately, it was nowhere near as good as Convenience store woman. Wouldn't recommend it as a starting point with Murata.

I heard about Convenience Store Woman, and was going to get a copy.  The below are some works by other female writers in Japan. I haven't read Strange Weather, but many people told me good things about the book. Kitchen and Housekeeper are enjoyable works.

Kitchen/Banana Yoshimoto
The Housekeeper and the Professor/Yoko Ogawa
Strange Weather In Tokyo/Hiromi Kawakami

[aligreto]

I haven't read the work. The plot sounds very interesting. I will get a copy!

I am sure that you will like it.

Love Among the Haystacks, D.H. Lawrence. I like the subtlety and nuance of the story.

Interestingly, the other day I was pondering what to get my teeth into once I have finished reading through my Somerset-Maugham collection and I was considering my DH Lawerence collection.

[Artem]

I heard about Convenience Store Woman, and was going to get a copy.  The below are some works by other female writers in Japan. I haven't read Strange Weather, but many people told me good things about the book. Kitchen and Housekeeper are enjoyable works.
Kitchen/Banana Yoshimoto
The Housekeeper and the Professor/Yoko Ogawa
Strange Weather In Tokyo/Hiromi Kawakami

I will add Strange Weather to my wish list. I think I saw it in a book shop here. Thank you for pointing it out.

I've been in the mood for reading contemporary Japanese and Korean female writers. Most of the books that I've read in that line like Ogawa's Memory Police or Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs were good, but not like life changing of anything. They do give a good snapshot of their time and concerns, I suppose.

However, Hiroko Oyamada is really good. Her two books, The Factory and The Hole, are very much worth reading.

[SimonNZ]

Covering the ten years between acting in her first student production to her first Academy award. A little light and gossipy in briefly covering her pre-drama years, but once in a solid almost oral history from everyone who remembers her on the challenges and development of her early years. An especially well detailed recreation of the brutal trial by fire dictatorial years that were the Yale Drama School of the time.

[ritter]

Starting Louis Aragon's 1944 novel Aurélien:



The book, widely regarded as its author's most successful novel, is supposed to be about the "impossibility of the couple", is also a depiction of the "lost" leisourly bourgeoisie of the interwar years in France, and I've read also permitted Aragon to look back at his surrealist years "without bitterness".

I'm only about 20 pages into the novel, but so far it is beautifully written and very engaging, and already I've detected two or three really worthwhile quotes.

[Florestan]

Starting Louis Aragon's 1944 novel Aurélien:



The book, widely regarded as its author's most successful novel, is supposed to be about the "impossibility of the couple", is also a depiction of the "lost" leisourly bourgeoisie of the interwar years in France, and I've read also permitted Aragon to look back at his surrealist years "without bitterness".

I'm only about 20 pages into the novel, but so far it is beautifully written and very engaging, and already I've detected two or three really worthwhile quotes.

Could you please share them?

TD

Luigi Pirandello --- The Old and the Young



Two chapters in. The setting and atmosphere is quite similar to Lampedusa's The Leopard. Love it.

[vers la flamme]

I will add Strange Weather to my wish list. I think I saw it in a book shop here. Thank you for pointing it out.

I've been in the mood for reading contemporary Japanese and Korean female writers. Most of the books that I've read in that line like Ogawa's Memory Police or Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs were good, but not like life changing of anything. They do give a good snapshot of their time and concerns, I suppose.

However, Hiroko Oyamada is really good. Her two books, The Factory and The Hole, are very much worth reading.

I just found a copy of The Hole in one of those take a book, leave a book boxes at a local park. Excited to read it. I've heard good things about Oyamada.

Really enjoying Kafka on the Shore. Compared to the other Murakami I've read, this one is a truly sprawling epic.

[ritter]

Could you please share them?

This, right at the beginning, I found rather apt:

"Cela lui fit mal augurer de celle-ci qui portait un nom de princesse d'Orient sans avoir l'air de se considérer dans l'obligation d'avoir du goût".
The name in question is Bérénice (and a line from Racine's tragedy —"Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée..."— is used as a sort of leitmotif in the first pages).

"Il y a des vulgarités qui retiennent"
So true  .

That Pirandello looks very appealing, BTW!

Good day to you, Andrei.

[Florestan]

This, right at the beginning, I found rather apt:

"Cela lui fit mal augurer de celle-ci qui portait un nom de princesse d'Orient sans avoir l'air de se considérer dans l'obligation d'avoir du goût".
The name in question is Bérénice (and a line from Racine's tragedy —"Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée..."— is used as a sort of leitmotif in the first pages).

"Il y a des vulgarités qui retiennent"
So true  .

Thanks, nice indeed.

That Pirandello looks very appealing, BTW!

It's a page turner. Love and politics in the context of the end-of-19-th-century Sicilian disillusionment with the Italian unification. This is one of the numerous testimonies I've read according to which for the former Kingdom of Two Sicilies the unification (actually, a military conquest) was rather harmful to the common folks.

Good day to you, Andrei.

Good day, Rafael.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Interestingly, the other day I was pondering what to get my teeth into once I have finished reading through my Somerset-Maugham collection and I was considering my DH Lawerence collection.

Sounds like a wonderful plan. Love the novels and short stories of Lawrence.
Now reading Daughters of the Vicar.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

However, Hiroko Oyamada is really good. Her two books, The Factory and The Hole, are very much worth reading.

I just found a copy of The Hole in one of those take a book, leave a book boxes at a local park. Excited to read it. I've heard good things about Oyamada.

Really enjoying Kafka on the Shore. Compared to the other Murakami I've read, this one is a truly sprawling epic.

Oyamada's works are considered to be genuine, artistic literature, for the sake of artistic merit, rather than entertaining readers. Interesting to hear positive opinion in the West.

[vers la flamme]

Been meaning to read some Lawrence. Last week I picked up Sons & Lovers and read the first chapter, but decided I wasn't quite in the mood for it. Is this generally considered the best place to start? I ought to try again soon.

[Brian]

About to start "Circe" by Madeline Miller, a retelling of bits of the Odyssey.

[Florestan]

Been meaning to read some Lawrence. Last week I picked up Sons & Lovers and read the first chapter, but decided I wasn't quite in the mood for it. Is this generally considered the best place to start?

The only Lawrence I tried. I started it many, many moons years ago and never finished it. He doesn't seem to be my cup of tea.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Maybe there is no chemistry between you and Lawrence, and nothing is wrong with that. 
Btw, Katherine Mansfield is a good writer with a similar style. Her short stories, such as Garden Party and Her First Ball, are pretty good, I think.
She is like a half Lawrence, half Chekhov.

P.s.. James Joyce is similar to me. When I read his works, nothing happens to me.

[Florestan]

Maybe there is no chemistry between you and Lawrence, and nothing is wrong with that. 

Maybe, and of course.

Honestly, Far from the Madding Crowd (not Lawrence, of course) started as a humorous page turner but ended up less than half way as a complete bore. There's nothing wrong with that, I hope. 

Pirandello, otoh...

It's a page turner. Love and politics in the context of the end-of-19-th-century Sicilian disillusionment with the Italian unification. This is one of the numerous testimonies I've read according to which for the former Kingdom of Two Sicilies the unification (actually, a military conquest) was rather harmful to the common folks.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Maybe, and of course.

Honestly, Far from the Madding Crowd (not Lawrence, of course) started as a humorous page turner but ended up less than half way as a complete bore. There's nothing wrong with that, I hope. 

Pirandello, otoh...

I was disappointed by Pasternak's Zhivago. It is one of very, very few books not as good as movie adaptations.

[Florestan]

I was disappointed by Pasternak's Zhivago.

Hah! I loved it more than the movie --- especially the appended poems.

[Mandryka]

Been meaning to read some Lawrence. Last week I picked up Sons & Lovers and read the first chapter, but decided I wasn't quite in the mood for it. Is this generally considered the best place to start? I ought to try again soon.

Women in Love for me, and maybe The Rainbow. In truth I can't remember much about the latter except really being impressed, the former has things which I find totally unforgettable. Sons and Lovers was OK but didn't impress me as much, despite some touching family scenes.

For a different tack, try Sea and Sardinia. I vaguely remember Mornings in Mexico was OK too.

[vers la flamme]

^Going to have to see if I can check out those books sometime.

Anyway, discussion on this page has me remembering that I ought to really check out Pirandello, Pasternak, and also Mansfield, about whom I know little to nothing... Too many interesting books on the world.

Still hooked on Murakami's Kafka. I'm burning through it, with about 70 pages left. God, it's such a fucked up book—deeply flawed, really, but there is something beautiful at the core of it. I'm almost reminded of a book I read this time last year and really loved: Hermann Hesse's Narcissus & Goldmund, a similarly twisted epic of self discovery. But it's pure, peak Haruki Murakami, all cats & classical music & missing persons & twisted sex. The more of his I read, the more I find Haruki Murakami to be a writer with many flaws, very significant ones, perhaps unforgivable for some. But I'm hooked. For better and worse I find this stuff very relatable. It's good to be getting back to his work, which I really discovered late last year, after a few months of reading many other writers.