Those With Tales to Tell

Sonja Arntzen and Ito Moriyuki, trans., The Sarashina Diary: A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan (by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume). This is brief but delightful. Its author is one of the most relatable historical figures I have ever encountered, book-obsessed and delighted by the written word.

Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. The modern world, the Korean-American experience, a dozen other things in a score of emotional ranges. Sometimes I find it interesting to contemplate which volumes of poetry resonate me and which with similar descriptions leave me cold. This one resonated.

Christopher Hale, A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia: Multiculturalism and Prosperity: The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers. A bit too much Singapore in the balance for my taste--I have no objection to Singapore, but if you're putting both Singapore and Malaysia on the cover, I want both. This is more a starting point than an ending point in the history of this region, but that's valuable too.

Reginald Hill, An Advancement of Learning, An April Shroud, Bones and Silence, Child's Play, A Clubbable Woman, Deadheads, Exit Lines, A Killing Kindness, A Pinch of Snuff, Recalled to Life, Ruling Passion, Underworld, and The Wood Beyond. Rereads. And here we come to the reason this is one of the easiest book posts I've written in ages: I'm 2/3ish of the way through rereading the Dalziel and Pascoe series, and I find them more or less where I left them--the early ones are fine, and now I'm into the part of the series that's quite good, with the best yet to come. Gosh I'm glad I read them out of order originally. The exception to finding them where I left them is that three times through is enough for me on A Pinch of Snuff, I do not expect to find it worth my time for a fourth go-round.

Natalie Shapero, Popular Longing. This is also poetry engaging with the current moment. Like the Franny Choi collection, it is frequently angry. For some reason it doesn't resonate for me nearly so well--I find it more grating in places but most often it's just that Shapero's gears and mine don't mesh. Ah well.

Tom Stoppard, Plays: 5 (Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood). Rereads. I'm passing this on to a young theater-lover in my life and read it on the way out. One masterwork, one mid-century adultery play (YAWN), two attempts at reckoning with colonialism very much from a colonizer viewpoint, and a spy thing that is less clever than he thinks about quantum mechanics. I have another copy of Arcadia, I'm not sorry I read the others, but I'm also not sorry to hand them on.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor writing as A. Merc Rustad, So You Want to Be a Robot. Reread. Remains varied, wrenching, and brilliant, one of the best debut collections of our generation, yay.