What I'm reading now

 My last post on this topic was in May, so I have some catching up to do. Here is what I have read and am reading since then:

A quick and easy read where the novelist Tom Wolfe takes a stab at explaining the origins of all the remarkably ugly post WWII architecture.

Ishiguro certainly appears to be a Japanese novelist, but his family moved to England in 1960 when he was six years old, so he could equally qualify as an English novelist. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a delicate and sensitive account of the fading of some aspects of English culture, a bit like Downton Abbey. But it is rendered in pastel tones.

Gogol's short stories are bordering on madness: witches, crazy peasants, weird costumes and weirder tales. However, this collection contains the absurd short story The Nose that Dmitri Shostakovich set as his first opera. Worth a read for sure.

Friedrich Schiller wrote the poem that Beethoven used as text in the last movement of his Symphony No. 9. He was a renowned playwright and aesthetic theorist. Unfortunately I got almost nothing from this collection of essays other than a headache. Too much foggy German abstraction.

Bashō is the great 17th century Japanese poet famous for his haiku. He wrote the most famous haiku of all:

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond

A frog jumped into water --

A deep resonance

The book is a collection of several travel sketches where Bashō recounts his lengthy travels in prose and poetry. The beauty of nature is the central theme. A wonderful book.

This novel is weird in a way that I suspect only an Icelandic writer could be. I really have no idea what it is about. A young man is tasked with traveling to a remote village to check up on whether the local pastor is doing his job properly or not. The village lies next to a glacier which plays an important role. Why was someone buried on the glacier instead of in the graveyard? Why is the church boarded up? Who is this mysterious woman who appears? You don't find out the answers to these and many other questions. For all that, it was an enjoyable read. I'm just not sure why. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

* * *

Those books were all completed. Here is what I am reading right now:

The Bhagavad Gita is the most popular portion of the epic poem Mahabharata and was composed sometime around the second century BC. Peter Weir used a quote from the Third Discourse as the theme to his wonderful film The Year of Living Dangerously. In the film the quote is "wisdom is clouded by desire, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust." The Bhagavad Gita bears a vague resemblance to the Tao Te Ching in its collection of contradictions that might lead to wisdom.

Vincent Van Gogh was a surprisingly good letter-writer. These were mostly written to his brother Theo with whom he had a close relationship. I'm only a short way into it so I don't have anything to say, but it seems quite promising. Decades ago I read the similar collection Dear Theo but this is a new translation.

I was given a copy of this years ago by a girlfriend but I never got around to reading it. Now that I am, about two-thirds through, I can say without hesitation that this is a horrible book about a horrible character who commits horrible crimes. It is fascinating in the way a traffic accident is fascinating. The literary hook that the book hangs on is that a portrait is painted of a handsome young scion of the nobility. As he ages, he retains his good looks while his portrait takes on the ugliness of his soul. Unfortunately Dorian Gray is simply a fanatically narcissistic sociopath who can wreak emotional damage on the vulnerable, murder a friend and blackmail another friend into disposing of the body and do it all without the slightest moral conscience. I wonder if my girlfriend was trying to tell me something?

* * *

What am I listening to?

This gorgeous collection of Haydn's "Sturm und Drang" symphonies with Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert. In many ways the finest symphonies ever written. You be the judge, here is the first symphony in the box: