Wuthering
Expectations

At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, ...

  Thank goodness I write these down. FICTION The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up lo...

Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously , The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlot...

I am two-thirds through Cao Xueqin’s enormous The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), volume 3 of the David Hawkes translation, and the next twen...

One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career....

I should do one of these “what I read” bits before October becomes too distant. I should also mention my health.   A little over a year ag...

I have continued on with The Story of the Stone , the 2,500 page 18th century Chinese novel by, or mostly by, Cao Xueqin.  Here I will write...

Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional punctuation, and temporal shifts, mean...

Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-21) is a long stream-of-consciousness novel about a Norwegian painter trying to understand one of his paintings...

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prest...

I left the characters of The Story of the Stone as they were buying drapes and tablecloths for a party.  I will rejoin the party planning m...

Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao Xueqin, the first of the five volumes of the...

Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Che...

My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said it out loud so maybe I will really do it....

My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels a...