Wuthering
Expectations

The Makioka Sisters (1946-8), Junichiro Tanizaki’s UNESCO-stamped novel, was a puzzler.   It has two conceptual levels.   One of them took ...

Lately I have read a number of novels that depend on Big Historical Ironies.   The Big Irony is a big part of the point of the novel.   I me...

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994, tr. Stephen Snyder 2019) is a conceit-heavy fantasy about a novelist who lives on an anonymous island...

The title of Mes Amis ( My Friends , 1924) is ironic.   Our narrator, poor Victor Baton has no friends.   In each of the short sections of ...

Since I was complaining that I read too many great books, I will poke at a couple of not so-greats I recently enjoyed. The pleasure in Eve...

Bookish Twitter now and then has a cathartic freakout about someone or another destroying a book for some reason or another.   Living, as I ...

This is a piece about how readers change.   And about food. The long dinner chapter of To the Lighthouse (1928), Chapter XVII of “The Win...

Seven Japanese Tales (1970, tr. Howard Hibbett) by Juichiro Tanizaki.   Four of the “tales” are short stories from the 1910s and 1920s, pre...

I read only a few new books last year, but two of them starred Fools - the capital F kind – Kehlmann’s Tyll and Marly Youmans’s The Book of...

One of the new books I read last year, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017 in German, 2020 in Ross Benjamin’s English) was from the future.   I ac...

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (2019) is as good as everyone says, so what do I need to say.   It’s a travel book where the locations are ca...

One angle I might take, if I were to write something about reading not fewer books but fewer great books, would be a “pop” approach.   It d...

How I enjoy “year in review” posts on book blogs.  I read all of yours.  Well, I was celebrating the holiday and then on vacation, and my re...

My reading is tipping towards London, which I will visit for the first time in January – if you are there, let me buy you a pint.   The Lond...

The thing itself, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin as translated by Michael Hofmann. Franz Biberkopf (BBK, Beaverhead) is an...

The yakuza in Confessions of a Yakuza takes over the gambling racket in 1920s Asakusa, a part of Tokyo I, like most tourists, had visited ...

I’ve been spending my time in the 1920s, and the German Reading Month organizers kindly picked Alfred Döblin’s fragmented, jittery, pessimis...