Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes 2 Volume Set
We’ve all dipped into them: an adventure here, a strange case there, a Baskerville hound when we had a little more time, and the stories and novels of Sherlock Holmes are always fine. The ideal way to read them, though, is, as I’ve just learned, to follow the detective and the doctor from beginning to end in one go. The reason for this is that Doyle created in his stories and novels a world, and the best way to enjoy that world is to immerse oneself in it over the time it takes to consume the tales.
I’ll miss Watson and Holmes, my companions over the last month or two.
Until the next reread that is.
And remember: In that world brandy is a cure for everything. Would that it were in our world, too.
- Copeland, Rebecca: The Kimono Tattoo
An academic out of a job getting by as a translator in Kyoto is approached by a mysterious woman in a kimono who offers her a remunerative job translating a novel, chapter by chapter, as it is written. The ostensible author of the novel, long thought to be dead, is the disowned scion of a family that has been in the kimono business for generations; the novel describes a crime: the murder of a woman with a tattoo designed to look like a kimono. Add that the translator’s brother disappeared when they were both children and you have the threads—or most of them—that Copeland skillfully
weaves together to give us a thriller that is thrilling indeed.
Booth, Stephen.: An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets
Stephen Booth writes:
" . . . I have not solved or tried to solve any of the puzzles of Shakespeare's sonnets. I do not attempt to identify Mr. W.H. or the dark lady. I do not speculate on the occasions that may have evoked particular sonnets. I do not attempt to date them. I offer neither a reorganization of the sequence nor a reorganization of the quarto order. . . . On the assumption that the source of our pleasure in them must be in the line-to-line experience of reading them, I have set out to determine just what kind of reading experience that is."
He succeeds brilliantly, and in so doing makes us better readers of the sonnets (and, really, of poetry in general). In so doing he increases the pleasure we take from the sonnets, and makes it less likely that we will attribute that pleasure to "magic." He shows us how each sonnet has within it several different organizing principles that the reader is constantly negotiating, and argues that it is Shakespeare's skill in integrating these various complementary and competing systems into each of his fourteen-line poems that makes them such exciting reading experiences.
This is a book of criticism, published in 1969, endures.
Weinberger, Eliot: The Ghosts of Birds
Eliot Weinberger is our finest living essayist. He’s one of the few—even fewer since Guy Davenport died—who dare to move beyond anecdotal therapeutic personal essays to put the form through its paces, to show us what an essay can be. Like Davenport, he is a modernist (school of Ezra Pound), and as such his essays are rich in information. Happily, the facts he recounts displace the feelings and moralizing that characterize too much essayistic writing.
Boully, Jenny: The Body: An Essay
37. An essay in the form of footnotes*
*To a text that does not exist.ᵃ
a. And probably has not been entirely imagined.
38. See: Incoherence, intentional.ᵇ
b. The parts greater than the whole.
39. Ballard, J.G., “The Index.”ᶜ
c. The index to a biography that does not exist, it
is more satisfying than The Body.
Ed. Note: Typepad will probably not format this correctly.
Houser, Preston Keido: Twenty Villanelles
Most people, if they know the villanelle at all, will have been introduced to the form by Dylan Thomas in his “Do Not Go Gentle,” and there’s a reason they don’t pop up just everywhere. It’s a fiendishly complex form, and as such a hard one to do well. Preston Houser, I’m happy to report, pulls it off, giving us several examples of how to make these tightly structured poems never feel like blank-filling exercises, to always feel alive. The density of some of the strongest poems here recall the experience of reading the prince of the metaphysicals, John Donne.
Nakayasu, Sawako: Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From
Sawako Nakayasu’s first collection in seven years is about girls and also “girls”: the dismissive epithet, but also as the identity that can empower. The collection brings attention to the word “girl” and to words in general (as every book of poetry should do), in part by foregrounding translation: the book contains translations by Nakayasu of herself between English and Japanese, untranslated poems in English and Japanese, and also translations of Nakayasu by others. In forcing us to focus on language she compels us to learn a language, the language we need to understand the poems, and because we are just learning this language, we sometimes don’t quite understand, or perhaps we do understand, but at an angle.
Penman, Ian: It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track: Objects & Essays, 2012-2018
Excellent essays about excellent music, Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track is the sort of music writing that is all too rare. His starting points are icons like, among a few others, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Donald Fagen, Elvis, and movements like the Mods, and from these he spins meditations that resonate and would repay rereading. Sometimes the critical essay seems like the most exciting writing out there.
Conrad, Joseph: Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (Modern Library Classics)
It’s hard to disagree with the critics who have noted that this, Joseph Conrad’s first novel, is not among his best. One actually notices, reading Almayer's Folly, that the prose is, at times awkward. This isn’t surprising when one remembers that English was just one of Conrad’s languages, and not his first, or even his second. Having said that, there are passages of real beauty, particularly in the final chapter when we watch the ruined Almayer try to forget the daughter who has deserted him for a Malayan prince. Likewise the story moves along well enough that we manage to make it past the bumps occasioned by the racial orthodoxies of the time: savage Malays, opium-addicted Chinese, civilized whites. In the end, Conrad does seem to call some of these orthodoxies into question in making a non-white woman, Almayer’s half Malayan daughter, ultimately the novel’s heroine.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Volume One)
I decided, as one does, that the time had come to reread the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, not haphazardly, but in order, so my old Doubleday edition came down off the shelf. I’ve now finished Volume One, which contains The Sign of the Four, A Study in Scarlet, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Taken together, what a grand tapestry they are. Things I noticed this time: how often evil comes from abroad, whether it’s the mystic East or the only slightly less heathen North America, and how often the notion surfaces that “blood” explains people’s character; this must have been a popular notion at the time as it courses through the veins of a great deal of Victorian fiction. It seems quaint now, but I suppose it’s no more naive than the notion so many in our time adhere to that this or that gene directly determines people’s characters.
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