All About Books discussion

So far for January:

1. (short story) The Spike (George Orwell) ★★★★ (4.0)
finished 1/2/23

2. (short story) The Garden of Forking Paths (Jorge Luis Borges) ★★★★ (4.0)
finished 1/2/23

3. Colorful (Eto Mori) ★★★★★ (4.5)
finished 1/6/23

I found this Japanese young adult classic delightful. What I most appreciated was the complex web of mutual human misunderstandings, the way that people who are very close to each other still misunderstand fundamental things about each other. Usually, I find this kind of realization in bleak or nihilistic books, but here, the difficulty just makes human connections all the more precious in the end.

4. (play) Twelve Angry Men (Reginald Rose) ★★★★ (4.0)
finished 1/8/23

5. Binti (Nnedi Okorafor) ★★★★ (3.5)
finished 1/9/23

I very much enjoyed this sci-fi novella, so unique and more than a little odd. I don't want to give anything away because I think it's better to not know where this book is going to go before reading it. But in the first pages, it's already clear this is a book about a "tribal" girl of an isolated community who defies her people to go out to the stars. As a novella, the development is not always deep, but I was highly engaged and will definitely read more by the author at some point.

6. (short story) Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer ★★★★★ (5.0)
finished 1/14/23

7. The Inferno of Dante (Dante Alighieri) ★★★★ (4.0)
finished 1/14/23

An excellent translation that reads beautifully; both muscular and vivid, though given the content sometimes a little too vivid for me. 😃 As far as the source material, it's hard to dispute it as a poetic masterpiece, but I find Dante's need to imagine several contemporaries and near-contemporaries enduring the tortures of hell a bit disturbing. Is there a ring of hell for slanderers? One thing I did like is how Dante mixes Greek and Roman mythology with Christian cosmology. I found myself quite intrigued by his thoughts on various ancient fictional and mythological characters, as well as his take on ancient writers and philosophers. It was the more contemporaneous references that I sometimes had trouble with, striking me as quite political or even occasionally petty.

8. The Haunted Hotel ★★★ (3.0)
finished 1/20/2023

An entertaining read though predictable and a bit melodramatic. I didn't find it boring or overlong as others in the group read did. Still, I'm glad it wasn't longer.

9. City of Ash and Red (Hye-Young Pyun) ★★★ (3.0)
finished 1/16/23
This Korean novel is bizarre and almost impossible to describe. It's ferociously dark, and although at first I found it quite funny in a darkly satirical way, it gradually crossed over into something more disturbing. Even after finishing, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I didn't dislike it and was never bored, but I'm not sure who I would recommend it to. The narrator was something else!

10. A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems: For the Love of Moses (A.E. Housman)
finished 1/21/23 ★★★ (3.5)

The best of these poems are quite beautifully done, but many others feel jingoistic or unsatistfying. There are poems in this book that deserve a much higher rating, but then again, there are others that deserve much less. Also, it's hard to read some of these poems without feeling sad about Housman's tortured state of mind; I wonder if his personality was just not suited to survive spiritually intact with his sexuality and his era's fierce pressure of judgement. It's painful to read the internal conflict implicit in lines like:

"And if your hand or foot offend you,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When your sickness is your soul."

There's no doubt that Housman had a wonderful talent. I just wish he had lived in a less hostile era where he could have come through more spiritually whole.

11. Pawn of Prophecy (David Eddings) ★★★★ (3.5)
finished 1/25/23
This classic fantasy isn't full of momentous events, but it's a quick and entertaining read. I enjoyed the mythology of the various gods and peoples, and I will probably continue the series, even though the characterizations are a little lighter-weight than I usually like.