2014 July-Sep zdino book log

Books read recently by J. Zimmerman

Disclaimer. Links. Booker Prizes. Chocolate.
Books read. Best books read in 2014.

Best book read in 2013:
Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists: a Novel (2012); short-listed for the 2012 Booker Prize.

Set in Malaya during and after WWII. Nakamura Aritomo is a Japanese master gardener adept at all aspects of Japanese gardening but especially the skills of shakkei ("borrowed scenery").
The narrator is Teoh Yun Ling, a Chinese-Malayan woman. With her sister, she was harshly imprisoned by the Japanese during WWII but survived the camp while everyone else there died.
Beautifully written.
Blog entry.

Best writers of poetry and prose
Harry Potter; also Harry Potter en Español.
Why read a book?.
New books on Spirituality by Pagels, Ehrman, et al.
My chocolate of choice:

Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:
Skip pages Not read Not finish Not defend your tastes

Believing they were whole, while they were brave; That they were rich, because their loot was great; That war was meaningful, because they lost their friends.
Christopher Logue,
All Day Permanent Red: War Music continued (2003).

{ September : ku-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2014 }

(9.30.2014)

2014: Gusts No. 20, a tanka journal edited by Kozue Uzawa. This issue includes two tanka by me.

(9.28.2014)

2011: Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child.

It mocks popular quasi-biographies that unearth and sometimes, if lacking the data they need, invent "what really happened".

Good prose writing. Interesting observations on people and memory, e.g. Daphne Sawle-Valance... (the woman who appears in all-but-the-final sections and time periods of this novel, marries three times, and has numerous affairs — one does tend to sketch little snatches of family trees each time a new section begins a decade or a generation later with new characters) p. 383:

she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6:45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonishing reports of what she had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her — though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. "

The plot is somewhat better than his 2007 Booker victory: The Line of Beauty, though it still has a hammer-nail quality (if you're a hammer ... ).

(9.27.2014)

1936: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's comedic play You Can't Take It with You, a wishful romp where Bohemian meets the 1%.

(9.26.2014)

2005: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much delightful interleaving of knitting insights and self-confessions with quotables.

(9.25.2014)

2012: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don't,
One of the best books read in 2014 despite rather a lot of typos.
Notes on Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise

(9.20.2014)

2014: Robert Galbraith's The Silkworm,
The author's name is acknowledged on the book end-flap as a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. The Silkworm is more interesting and with a clearer plot line than her The Casual Vacancy. But like the first book, it has the same problem of whip-lash between the very horrible and the rather too nice. OK in fairy stories but not so much in grown-up books.

(9.19.2014)

2012: J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy.
J.K. Rowling's first non-Potter book has a high ickiness factor, replete with nasty people, bullying, self-mutilation, abuse, neglect, diaper accidents, drugs, and teenage sex guffawed over by teenage boys.
Some Amazon reviewers say it has "dry Britcom humor" and "sharp comic wit" — apparently new synonyms for "devoid of jokes". Did JKR save up a decade of troubled Muggles that she could not fit into Potter-world? Although there was immense cruelty in the Potter books, and some of it was done out of ignorance, most of the causes were localized to You-Know-Who, the Dementors, and other recognizable foes, not spread around to pretty much everyone.

(9.14.2014)

2011: Henning Mankell's A Treacherous Paradise, set in 1904 in Sweden and then Mozambique, where a 19-year-old woman leaves home, marries, and remarries, briefly runs a brothel, and takes one stand after another against her fellow white colonials and in support of many Africans she meets. Well written, full of apt details. Based on a minimal historical record of a woman of that time who ran a brothel and paid prodigious taxes.

(9.10.2014)

Euripides' Medea in Robin Robinson's 2008 translation and commentary.
Flawed by clichés and clunky expressions. Based on the Greek text in the Loeb Classical Library edition, edited by David Kovacs.
Not as clear or as well-written as the John Harrison translation. e.g. Robinson (L. 624-5): "I can tell you're keen to get back to the palace / and your hot little playmate."

(9.9.2014)

Euripides' Medea in John Harrison's 2000 translation and commentary.
Very clear presentation with the translation on the right-hand page faced by notes on the left-hand page. Sections (based on the Greek text edited by J. Diggle for Oxford University Press):
- L. 1-120: Prologue.
- L. 121-202: Parodos (Entry of the Chorus).
- L. 203-398: First Episode (Medea); includes (e.g. L. 312-318) Stichomythia (passages of single-line dialogue).
- L. 399-424: First Choral Ode (1st Stasimon);
- L. 425-608: Second Episode (Jason, Medea);
- L. 609-639: Second Choral Ode (2nd Stasimon);
- L. 640-802: Third Episode (Aegeus, Medea);
- L. 803-836: Third Choral Ode (3rd Stasimon);
- L. 837-944: Fourth Episode (Jason, Medea);
- L. 945-968: Fourth Choral Ode (4th Stasimon);
- L. 969-1050: Fifth Episode (Medea);
- L. 1051-1086: Choral Interlude;
- L. 1087-1225: Sixth Episode (Medea);
- L. 1026-1271: Fifth Choral Ode (5th Stasimon);
- L. 1272-1396: Exodos (Exit of the Chorus).

(9.8.2014)

1998: Medea: A Modern Retelling (translated by John Cullen) by Christa Wolf.
Just as Euripedes' Medea re-envisions the Greek hero Jason as both political manipulator and pawn, Wolf's novel re-envisions Euripedes' problematic-but-possibly-blessed Medea as a good and wronged feminist who (spoiler alert) murdered no one. It's a little too extremely feminist to take seriously, but an intriguing read.

(9.7.2014)

A brilliant staging of Euripides' Medea performed by the National Theatre of Great Britain with Helen McCrory in the title role; in a new version by Ben Power, directed by Carrie Cracknell.

While Medea, on stage for the majority of the play and dominating it, is the primary character, the second major character is the chorus, a dozen people representing the women of Corinth and providing a sympathetic interpretation of Medea's passion, struggle, and murders.

In The Guardian (Wednesday 27 August 2014) Helen McCrory is quoted as saying:

I think Euripides intended the play as a word of warning; a cautionary tale. Athens and its entire economy were supported by women and slaves. And, for me, Euripides was saying, "Before you mistreat your women, remember what they're capable of. What if one of them takes revenge? What if one of them were a goddess? What then?"

(9.5.2014)

After four attempts to read, finally abandoned Zadie Smith's NW: a novel. Wildly popular with book critics (e.g. James Wood included it in his 'Best Books of 2012'), I found its characters dithery and annoying and so I left them to it.

(9.4.2014)

Dipped into Granta: 70, the Australia volume.

(9.3.2014)

Finished dipping into The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952-1998.

(9.2.2014)

Delighted to read W.S. Merwin's The Moon Before Morning (2014),

Luminous poems written in his 80's, of his life now and of his memories from his youth.

e.g. part of "Relics" on p.40:

Before I knew words for it
I loved what was obsolete
crumpled at the foot of a closet
lost in the street
left out in the rain
in its wet story
from another age
in a language that was lost
like the holes in socks

One of the best books read in 2014.

(9.1.2014)

Abandoned Milan Kundera's annoying and predictable identity: a novel.

{ August : hachi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2014 }

(8.31.2014)

Yiyun Li's The Vagrants (2012),
Very powerful story of life in a Chinese town in 1979.
One of the best books read in 2014.

(8.30.2014)

(1996): The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep: Poems by Linda Gregerson.
Large leaps in the rather prosy poems, many fragments, and insufficient context often leave me untouched by the poems. Sadly the ones that do make sense (like "For the Taking" documenting a child's abuse) are poems of horrors.

(8.29.2014)

(1995): Beware of Men who Part Their Hair and Other Bytes from the Cosmic Apple surreal and exuberant prose poems by Morton Marcus.
Some favorites include: "The Girl who Became my Grandmother", "My Father's Hobby", and "The Manual for the Twentieth-Century Man (and Woman)"

(8.28.2014)

1798-1803: Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, (sister of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth) in a 1971 edition edited by Mary Moorman.
In 1798 the Lyrical Ballads co-authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was published. William Wordsworth began The Prelude. In 1802 William Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. In 1803 Dorothy Wordsworth accompanied William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a Scottish tour, Mary not being so much of a walker. How full of the people, the places, and the times!

(8.27.2014)

Farewell to Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 3rd Series, edited by George Plimpton and including interviews with 14 writers including Blaise Cendrars, William Carlos Williams, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter, Lillian Hellman, and Edward Albee.

(8.26.2014)

Also farewell to more of the books on Ancient Greek I last perused five years ago including:
- unspecified: Classical Greek Vocabulary Cards over 3,000 Greek words in a set of 1,000 cards from Visual Education.
- 1960-1992: New Testament Greek (Teach Yourself) the 'complete' Koine of the first century A.D., by D. F. Hudson.
- 1942: Handy Dictionary of the Greek and English Languages (Greek to English) by Karl Feyerabend.
Farewell again to Ancient Greek part I and Ancient Greek part II and Ancient Greek part III.
And back I go, with unjustified optimism, to studying Japanese!.

(8.25.2014)

Sandra McIver's Knit, swirl!: uniquely flattering one piece, one seam swirl jackets, forward by Cat Bordhi, apparently the indentrix of the Mobius cast-on, of which I am currently enamored, and which is a magnitude wonkier than the Baby Knits experience!

(8.24.2014)

Attempted Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a nominee for the 2014 Booker Prize. Somber: concerns Second World War prisoners of war working for the Japanese on the infamous Burma Railway, and their captors. Despite the intense topic, the book did not hold my attention so I abandoned it. Nice to see quotations of a few haiku though.

Despite me, this is the 2014 Booker Prize winner. (8.23.2014)

2011: Ken Jennings' Maphead: charting the wide, weird world of geography wonks, a conversational history of map-making. Lots of anecdotes, making it fun to open the book and dip in randomly, but it becomes boring for sustained reading. The high 'author as personality' quotient also made this book easy to abandon.

(8.22.2014)

End-of-summer cleanup & review for donation to Spanish-language students of books on learning Spanish:
- 2003: Quick Fix Spanish Grammar (Teach Yourself) by Keith Chambers.
- 2001: 'Quidditch a Travé de Los Tiempos' by Kennilworth Whisp by J. K. Rowling.
- 2001: Two CD set of audio for the Plazas text.
- 2000: A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish by John Butt and Carmen Benjamin.
- 2000: Outreach Spanish (Barron's) by William C. Harvey.
- 1999: Spanish Verb Manual by Alfredo Gonzá Hermoso.
- 1996: 1001 Most Useful Spanish Words by Seymour Resnick.
- 1988: The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse by J.M. Cohen.
- 1977: University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary by Carlos Castillo and Otto F. Bond with D. Lincoln Canfield.
- 1973: 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish (Barron's) by Marion P. Holt and Julianne Dueber.
- 1944: Learn Spanish Pronto by Mario Valadez.
- 1943: How Spanish Grew by Robert K. Spaulding.

(8.21.2014)

Let go of Norman F. Weeden's A Sierra Nevada Flora (1975), a dichotomous key to identify ferns and flowers.

(8.20.2014)

Let go of Rutherford Platt's 1001 Questions Answered About Trees (1959).

(8.19.2014)

1994: E.C.Pielou's A Naturalist's Guide to the Arctic, a fascinating description of the life of the Canadian tundra (the treeless barrens, separated by the tree line from the boreal forest and closer to the pole). Richly illustrated with attractive and clear line drawings.

(8.17.2014)

Holidays on Ice, six stories by David Sedaris, most of which have previously been presented on NPR. Some more of a hoot, some less so.

(8.16.2014)

1987: Robert Bly's translation and commentary Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge (the Norwegian poet) in a parallel text.

(8.15.2014)

2013: Where the Moon Isn't, the first novel by Nathan Filer.
Winner, under the title used in Britain, The Shock of the Fall, of the 2013 Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Award for best first novel.
One of the best books read in 2014.

(8.14.2014)

1996 (2000 English translation) The Fifth Woman, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1997: One Step Behind.
- 1996: The Fifth Woman.
- 1995: Sidetracked.
- 1994: The Man who Smiled.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.
- 1991: Faceless Killers.

(8.13.2014)

1987: Dorianne Laux's Awake, poems that tend to the domestic narrative and have some very fine stories, particularly "Tooth Fairy" (p. 29).

(8.12.2014)

Frogpond (37:2, 2014), excellent haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by J. Zimmerman and a haibun by J. Zimmerman.
Paul Miller offers his definition of authenticity in haiku in his essay "Haiku and War" in this Frogpond:

An authentic haiku is defined by a reader's ability to engage a haiku with the minimum of distractions.

(8.11.2014)

1994 (2005 English translation) The Man who Smiled, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1997: One Step Behind.
- 1995: Sidetracked.
- 1994: The Man who Smiled.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.
- 1991: Faceless Killers.

(8.10.2014)

Finally recognized that five years have passed since I opened:

An Introduction to Ancient Greek:
A Literary Approach
by C. A. E. Luschnig.

Farewell to Ancient Greek part I and Ancient Greek part II and Ancient Greek part III.

And back to studying Japanese!

(8.09.2014)

Read Stanford Forrester (editor)'s bottle rockets 16:1 (aka number 31) (2014).
Its 76 pages of short verse contain a haiku and a haibun by moi. Also Michael Fessler's "A Haiku Miscellany" mulling haiku-related books and allowing a broad definition of hauku; and a section of haibun.

(8.08.2014)

Ribbons (10, 2) Spring/Summer 2014 issue. Includes a couple of Tanka by J. Zimmerman.

(8.07.2014)

1991 (1997 English translation) Faceless Killers, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1997: One Step Behind.
- 1995: Sidetracked.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.
- 1991: Faceless Killers.

(8.06.2014)

2013: Finished slogging through The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. A slow, conversation-light start leads into a book that is too long and ripe with monologues. The book tends to go into geek-mode with non-fiction lectures, especially on furniture restoration. Also suffers from a tendency to lean on coincidental meetings.
The protagonist is, based on the actions he reports, a skilled and instinctive liar and thief. Accordingly, one can wonder if the end of his story is a true change or is a long-con on the reader.

(8.05.2014)

1976: Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown. A tale of the destruction of the traditional communities of an Orkney island, and their possible rebirth.

(8.04.2014)

2009, 2002: The Restored New Testament, a 1485-page translation by Willis Barnstone. It includes the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas. Almost 300 pages are Barnstone's foreword and afterword essays, and each section (gospel, letter, etc) has a multitude of notes.
Barnstone, a poet, translates much of the work in blank verse or free verse. He uses the Hebrew name (Yeshua) for Jesus and the Hebrew title (Mashiah) rather than its attribute "anointed" (traditionally anglicized as Christ).
His essay writing style can lack of clarity due to his tendency to write longish sentences with a referent error. Sometimes I question his word choice, such as his use of the verb "compliments" instead of "complements" on p.90.

(8.03.2014)

1997 (2002 English translation) One Step Behind, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1997: One Step Behind.
- 1995: Sidetracked.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.

(8.02.2014)

2014: Contemporary Haibun: Volume 15 edited by Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones.
It includes my haibun "Mile Three".
See also:
- 2013: Contemporary Haibun: Volume 14.

(8.01.2014)

1995 (1999 English translation) Sidetracked, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1995: Sidetracked.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.

{ July : shichi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2014 }

(7.31.2014)

1995: Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom by Sung Po-jen (a Chinese 13th-century poet), translated by Red Pine, with commentaries.

(7.30.2014)

1965: On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke Edited and with an Introduction by Ralph J. Mills.
While Roethke was not a skilled theorist, and sometime curmudgeonly in phrasing, this collection of heart-felt essays reflects a dedicated poet.

(7.29.2014)

Presence #50, the haiku journal.
Haiku, tanka, haibun, articles, book reviews — and an obituary for Editor Martin Lucas (1962-2014), who died as winter was ending. (Saddened by his death, I'd been unable to submit work for this issue.)

(7.27.2014)

1946: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, who dedicated this book to his great friend and reader of an early manuscript: the poet Philip Larkin. This book also has a convoluted plot, but so much clever word play that it's a joy to read rather than an Eriksson-type slog. A delight to dwell in this murderous humor and to see the kindness and evil that lurked in the hearts of Oxford folks.
Books by Crispin:
- 1946: The Moving Toyshop.
- 1945: Holy Disorders.
- 1944: The Case of the Gilded Fly.

(7.25.2014)

2005: The Demon of Dakar by Kjell Eriksson. Dreadful convoluted plot that capitalizes on chance and the reader's suspension of disbelief. Too many unconvincing characters and unbelievable situations.

(7.24.2014)

2014: The Shelf: From LEQ To LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose.

What was originally supposed to be a random shelf turns out to be rare, forcing Rose to relax her criteria :

I would not read a shelf that contained more than four books by one author . . . [Later revised to:] There had to be several authors represented on the shelf, and only one could have more than five books . . . there had to be a mix of contemporary and older works, and one book had to be a classic I had not read and wanted to . . . I could choose no shelf that contained work by someone I knew. . . . I devised a new rule that if the shelf was well-balanced overall, . . . I could include not just one but two longer runs, of which I had to read only three books in each run. [pp. 10-12]

Attractions of the shelf she finally chose included Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (of four translations, Natasha Randall's might be the best) and Alain Le Sage's "Gil Blas, the granddaddy of picaresque fiction".

Rose starts beautifully for three chapters but bogs for the next three chapters in too much polemic on lack of opportunities for women writers, saying nothing new but taking a long time over it.

Best to skim them to get to the rest including the CREW (Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding) guidelines that use the "a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness":

M: Misleading, inaccurate, outdate.
U: Ugly, irreparably damaged.
S: Simply superseded by a better account or edition.
T: Trivial; without merit.
I: Irrelevant to the interests and needs of the library's patrons.
E: Elsewhere available, including on the Web. [after p. 164]

This can help even the home de-accessioner:

For nonfiction, the CREW formula might be 8/3/MUSTIE, which would mean "Consider a book for elimination if it is eight years since the copyright date and three years since it has been checked out and if one or more of the MUSTIE factors obtains." But for fiction the formula is often X/2/MUSTIE, meaning the copyright date doesn't matter, but consider a book for elimination if it hasn't been checked out in two years and if it is TUIE — Trivial, Ugly, Irrelevant, or Elsewhere. [pp. 164-165]

(7.23.2014)

2014: Lost for words: a novel by Edward St. Aubyn (whose Mother's Milk was a nominee for the 2006 Booker Prize).
A jubilant quick read for a summer evening — a send-up of the Booker Prize in the form of the Elysian Prize. A great send-up of judges, writers, and novels. Light but a very welcome interlude between Mankells.

(7.22.2014)

2002 (2005 English translation): Before the Frost, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.

(7.21.2014)

1945: Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin. A delight to dwell in the murderous humor of the late great Crispin, and to see the kindness and evil that lurks in the hearts of church folks.
Books by Crispin:
- 1946: The Moving Toyshop.
- 1945: Holy Disorders.
- 1944: The Case of the Gilded Fly.

(7.20.2014)

1992 (2001 English translation by Laurie Thompson): The Dogs of Riga, a Kurt Wallender novel by Henning Mankell.
Mankell's Wallenders read:
- 2007: The Man from Beijing.
- 2006: Italian Shoes.
- 2002: Before the Frost.
- 2000: The Return of the Dancing Master.
- 1998: Firewall.
- 1992: The Dogs of Riga.

(7.19.2014)

1944: The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin. A delight to dwell in the murderous humor of the late great Crispin, and to see the kindness and evil that lurks in the hearts of theatrical Oxford folks.
Reminiscent of some of the humor (though Crispin's hero is more interesting) of Evelyn Waugh's hilarious 1937 satire Scoop.

(7.18.2014)

1997: A tour of the calculus by David Berlinski. Quirky humor and shaggy stories that get boring after a while. The calculus is not so bad but often gets buried under Berlinski heavy-handed attempts to entertain. Includes:
- "The basic axiom: brings the real numbers into existence."
- "The calm and profound invention: the mathematical function."
- "The deep property: continuity."
- "The crucial definitions: instantaneous speed and the area underneath a curve."
- "The ancillary definition: a limit."
- "The major theorem: the mean value theorem."
  df(x) f(b)-f(a) ----- = --------- dt b-a
"The fundamental theorem":

(7.17.2014)

1981: The Peacock's Egg: Love Poems form Ancient India translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson.

(7.15.2014)

2003: Haiku: Asian Arts and crafts for Creative Kids by Patricia Donegan.

(7.12.2014)

1968: Li Po (701-762)'s poetry in Bright moon, white clouds: selected poems of Li Po, edited and translated by Jerome P. Seaton.
Li Po, one of the greatest poets of China's Tang dynasty and was the first Chinese poet well known in the West, called himself the "God of Wine", enthusiastic for nature, wine, and wandering.

(7.9.2014)

1968: Chira Obata's Through Japan with Brush & Ink.
A beautiful collection of brush sketches with annotations.

(7.8.2014)

Finished dipping in to The Sierra Club Guide to Sketching in Nature by Cathy Johnson. Well illustrated throughout. The central chapter on sketching in color is an especial delight.

(7.7.2014)

1937: Evelyn Waugh's hilarious satire Scoop.
Naturalist and home body accidentally William Boot became a British newspaper foreign correspondent and even more accidentally becomes a star of British super-journalism, in a three-way switch of mistaken identities. The innocence of the hero and the conniving of everyone else make this well-written book a joy to read.

Love, patriotism, zeal for justice and personal spite flamed within him as he sat as his typewriter and began his message.

(7.6.2014)

Finished Haiku Journal, 5, 1 (1981) and Haiku Journal, 5, 2 (1982), essays and haiku.
See other Yuki Teikei Haiku Society publications.

(7.5.2014)

2007: Finished dipping in to Thom Hartmann's Cracking the code: how to win hearts, change minds, and restore America's original vision, an application of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) especially to politics.
In four parts:
1. "Telling your story".
  The importance of story. People can be [p.15-16]:
  - Unconsciously incompetent, unaware of the impact of words; their communication is often misunderstood.
  - Consciously incompetent, aware of communication tools but not applying them.
  - Consciously competent, starting to apply communication tools but have to think them through.
  - Unconsciously competent, applying tools for communication automatically.
2. "Feeling comes first".
  People interact with the world in different ways. Some people are visual primarily, some auditory, and some kinetic (movement-oriented).
3. "The meaning of a communication is the response you get".
  A listener may not have the same response we have to a story. Techniques that can move their response towards ours include a "learning trance" (voice for auditory people, something to look at such as an object swinging on a chain for visual people, or a particular sensation for kinesthetic people). An effective learning trance includes anchoring between our feelings and the story, shifting between modalities to keep our attention focused on the action, and drawing the listener's attention back to the story by means of rhythm, tempo, and pacing (such as pausing to get attention).
4. "The map is not the territory".
  We filter our experiences through distortion (we misrepresent reality, often as a way to simplify experience), deletion (because our minds can't hold more than seven or so pieces of information at once), and generalization (labeling a lot of what we experience without thinking of specifics).

(7.3.2014)

2013: Abandoned Jo Nesbø's Police: A Harry Hole Novel (Harry Hole #10), translated by Don Bartlett.
Too sadistic. Also unremittingly not funny: the gristle, grue, and gore overwhelm the narrative.

(7.2.2014)

Skimmed Barry Lancet's Japantown: A Thriller (A Jim Brodie Novel).
An antique-dealing PI takes on a ninja private army in the process of trying to decipher a kanji (Japanese character) left at the crime scene. The most interesting aspect is the author's knowledge of Japanese culture and history.

(7.1.2014)

Began consolidating Japanese kana (the hiragana or 'flat' syllabary, and the katakana or 'side' syllabary) using P.G O'Neill's Japanese Kana Workbook, first published 1967. Over a thousand questions each with immediate feedback: my last best chance to retain the more elusive kana!
Finally, work to its end after 115 days!