What I’m Reading: past entries (2005)

The Current Reading List (2007-2008)

To see “The Current Reading List” entries from 2006, click here. For those from 2005, click here. For those from 2004, click here. To see those from 2003, click here.

Peter Robinson, The Look of Goodbye (2008). The latest collection from the British poet (and NOT the Canadian detective novelist, a distinction lost on certain befuddled reviewers at Amazon.com), most of these were written earlier this decade as he was preparing to end his long sojourn in Japan and return to the UK. He describes with intelligence and a keen eye how it feels to know you are out of place: "we've coped with the solitude,/the postal disappointments or delays/chewing seaward cloud/and other enigmatic food" ("As Like As Not"). (7/08)

P.G. Wodehouse, The World of Mr. Mulliner (1974). I return after a couple of decades to these wonderful short stories, the funniest things Wodehouse ever wrote, and this time I get to read them at bedtime to my eleven-year-old and make her laugh out loud. (7/08)

Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). An exploration of what it might mean to pursue the humanities after the First, Second, and Third Worlds collapsed into a single domain called globalization. Denning argues for the continued importance of cultural studies, one of the legacies of that old three-world order, as well as for the re-emergence of certain forms that faded from view during that period -- including the one-world ethic of the proletarian literature movement. (7/08)

Bill Holm, The Windows of Brimnes (2007). The latest collection of poetic essays from the bard of Minneota, Minnesota. The windows of his Icelandic summer home provide the central metaphor: they open up not only onto the beauty of nature and culture in his second homeland, but also on the gilded ugliness that characterizes much of contemporary American life. Walt Whitman is smiling somewhere. The final essay on “Fog” will take your breath away. (6/08)

Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2006). An intelligent study that combines quantitative analysis of publishing trends with close readings of fictional works previously excluded from the canon of High Literature. Contrary to much recent scholarship, Zwicker argues for continuity across what he calls Japan's long nineteenth century. (6/08)

Nakajima Kyôko, FUTON (2003). Ambitious debut novel that caused a splash when it was first published in Japan a few years back. It follows a Japanese-American college student, her middle-aged Anglo-American lover (a scholar of Japanese literature whose rewriting of Tayama Katai's 1907 novella "Futon" is interspersed throughout the narrative), and her 95-year-old grandfather who wanders the streets of today's lowertown Tokyo, marveling at how his native land has changed. In the way it merges Meiji-era literature with contemporary Japanese life, it reminds me of the works of Takahashi Gen'ichirô, who contributes the cover blurb for the edition I am reading. (6/08)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938). After my recent trip to the UK, I'm returning to one of the fonts of my adolescent Anglophilia and enjoying it immensely. The nonsensical plot follows a cow-shaped silver cream pitcher and the rival collectors who want it, but the real source of joy here is the language and the tremendous characterizations of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Madeleine Bassett and the rest of the usual gang. (6/08)

Tom Kitts, Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else (2008). A fine new critical biography of the leader of the Kinks. Kitts is very good at picking out a telling detail (images of the sun in song lyrics, for example, or strains of Wordsworthian romantic individualism) and then tracing through its impact on Davies' songs dating from the 1960s to the present day. (5/08)

Kurita Yuki, Hamizabesu (2005). A collection of two novellas by a young Japanese writer who has been thrice short-listed for the Akutagawa Prize. Stylistically and thematically, she belongs to the generation that grew up reading Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana. The title story traces the daily life of a young woman on the verge of adulthood after she loses a father she never knew, inherits a 33rd floor condominium from him, and takes on the responsibility of caring for a hamster. The odd title comes from the name she gives her new pet: a combination of the Japanese pronunciations for "hamster" and "Elizabeth." (5/08)

Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006). Fascinating, often brilliant study of how a number of African-American performing artists refracted stereotypical patterns of body language to create opaque blockages that disrupted the established machinery for representing race. (5/08)

Charles Baxter, Saul and Patsy (2005). Terrific fourth novel from one of my favorite writers. Saul has moved with his beloved wife Patsy from the city to rural Michigan. He doesn't fit in: he's too intellectual (Schopenhauer sits on his bookshelf) and too Jewish for the neighborhood, but he remains driven by a desire to bring enlightenment to his high school students. As it turns out, the small town changes him more than he changes it. Funny and beautifully written, this has me pausing every three or four pages just to savor slowly one of Baxter's tour de force passages. (5/08)

Tsuka Kôhei, Shôsetsu Atami satsujin jiken (The Atami murder case: A novel; 1976). Winner of the Naoki Prize when it was first published, this comic novel -- based on an earlier stage piece by Tsuka, who is best known as a playwright -- revolves around the perplexing murder of an ugly woman (why bother?, the message seems to be) and the preening, image-conscious police detectives who interrogate the chief suspect. (4/08)

Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jôdo: waga Minamata byô (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease, 1969). The powerful work of reportage by which Ishimure brought home to the rest of Japan the horrors, large and small, that Minamata Disease was wreaking in the small fishing villages surrounding the chemical plant that released toxic methyl mercury into the ocean. Also available in English translation by Livia Monnet. (3/08)

Mikael Niemi, Popular Music from Vittula (2000). Funny and imaginative novel about stumbling into puberty above the Arctic Circle in Sweden just as the Beatles hit. Niemi is particularly adept at capturing the imaginary life of a child on the verge of adolescence, in which the smallest of incidents expand into grand narratives. (3/08)

Jon Hassler, The Staggerford Flood (2002). I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s reading the first nine novels in Hassler's wonderful Staggerford series, but then somehow lost track. In the intervening decade, he's published three more titles, extending the lives of his wonderful roster of ordinary, yet extraordinary, characters in rural Minnesota. Schoolteacher Agnes McGee is now in her eighties, well into her physical decline and yet as feisty as ever. (3/08)

Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy: A Novel (1990). Semi-autobiographical fiction of a young au pair who travels to New York from the West Indies in the late 1960s. She awakens to her own sexuality, to her identity as an immigrant, and to her own anger at all the personal and global history she must carry around inside. (3/08)

Baseball Prospectus 2008 (2008). Because it's that time of year again. (3/08)

Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973 (Expanded Edition, 2000). Collected rock journalism from early in the career of the Dean of American Rock Critics. As always, entertaining and informative. Who would of thought that John Fred & His Playboy Band deserved a second listen? (3/08)

Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (2006). Intriguing new study of how exoticism, parody, gender and translation intersected in the fiction and drama of the Meiji era. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature (2004). A study of the creation of the modern notion of "hometown" (furusato) in the works of such Japanese writers as Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Toson, and Shiga Naoya. (3/08)

Olaudah Equiano, The Very Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789). Remarkable autobiography of Equiano, who was kidnapped into slavery from Africa as a boy, spent his early manhood drifting in and out of freedom in the West Indies, North America, and England, and finally settled down as a gentleman and abolitionist activist in London. (2/08)

Jim Reichert, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (2006). Fine new study of how the widely accepted practice of nanshoku (male-male sexuality) gave way to a medicalized discourse of homosexuality in the culture of Meiji Japan. (2/08)

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). I'm reading this theory of tourism with my class on travel writing. The tourist is the quintessential (post)modern figure, MacCannell argues: convinced that reality lies elsewhere and driven by anxiety over his own artificiality, he keeps moving from attraction to attraction, hoping that authenticity lies around the next bend. (2/08)

Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (1999). Fascinating study of how ghosts and other supernatural phenomena were civilized and enlightened during Japan's leap to modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (2/08)

Kamei Hideo, Meiji Bungaku Shi (History of Meiji Literature, 2000). In my graduate seminar we're reading this revisionist account of the rise of the modern ideologies and techniques of literature, including the production of the author, the reader, and media culture. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (1542). Another text assigned for my course in travel writing this quarter. Quite interesting: Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish imperial official who was shipwrecked in Florida in the 1520s and spent several years living with local tribes before returning to Spain to write this account. (1/08)

Sherman Alexie, Flight (2007). The hero of Alexie's latest novel is a badass fifteen-year-old, a self-proclaimed "half breed" who is articulate, funny, and angry at the world. On the verge of committing a horrendous crime, he begins to travel through time, reliving the history of violence against and by Native Americans. The plot device feels a bit forced, but Alexie's writing as always snaps and crackles, with only a few pops. (1/08)

Abe Kôbô, Moetsukita chizu (available in English translation as The Ruined Map, 1967). Abe's now-classic existential novel on the crisis of personal identity within the anonymity of middle-class 1960s urban Japan. (1/08)

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611). This is on the syllabus for a course in travel writing I"m teaching this quarter. I hope I can do justice to Mr. Foley, my high school Shakespeare teacher who introduced me to the play, thirty years ago. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (2001). Pathbreaking study of the creative complexities of popular music in China during the 1920s and 30s, when the newly globalizing media of records, radio, and film took over. (1/08)

Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996). Another useful study of how blackface minstrelsy provided a technology for becoming "white" for a peripheral immigrant group. (1/08)

Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (2007). Brilliant new study of Japanese mass culture from the 1920s and 30s: astonishing in its breadth and ambition. (12/07)

William Haver, The Body of this Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (1996). A difficult but immensely rewarding meditation on death, life, and their relatedness. Although not a Japan Studies book per se, its chapters on Tanizaki, Nishida Kitaro and Hiroshima literature are among the best things written on those subjects. (11/07)

Nakata Seiichi, Montin Lupa no yoru wa fukete: Watanabe Hamako no shogai (2004). Biography of Watanabe Hamako, the popular singer of "China melodies" in 1930s and 40s Japan. (11/07)

Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). One of the first works to take minstrelsy seriously as a historical and cultural phenomenon. (11/07)

Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003). Crucial study of the introduction of modern discourses of medicine and hygiene in Japan. (11/07)

E.B. White, One Man's Meat (1944). Essays on country living originally published in Harper's magazine. (10/07)

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2003). An exhilirating new theory for how we should think about and live our bodies. (10/07)

Murakami Haruki, Umibe no Kafuka, vol. one and two (Kafka on the beach, 2002). Finally getting around to reading this; I think of it as a good way to prepare for the inevitable Nobel Prize.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1974). One of those books I've been meaning to read for years and years and years.... (10/07)

Mizuno Rentaro, Chosakukenho

(Copyright law, 1905). Transcript of the first Japanese university lecture course on copyright law. (10/07)

Posted on 6/25/07:

Esther Forbes' Newberry Medal winning novel, Johnny Tremain, was (alongside Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) pretty much the greatest book ever written, or so I believed when I was ten. I must have read it twenty times. Last month, my own ten-year-old responded skeptically when I suggested it as our next bedtime reading book -- after all, there are no wizards or dragons pictured on the cover. But I held firm, and now she is hooked.

Revisiting this childhood friend after thirty-plus years has been great fun for me, as well. Moreover, the book holds a few surprises. I had forgotten, for example, how Forbes portrays Sam Adams as something of a manipulative demagogue, or how sympathetically she depicts the British characters (it occurred to me that this might be a byproduct of the book's appearance in 1943, in the midst of WWII). The descriptions of African-American characters aren't as awful as in many other works from the same period -- they still speak the degrading "dese" and "dem" lingo, but they also act as intelligent and active participants in the politics of the day.

Posted on 6/16/07:

By simple coincidence, I am simultaneously reading the debut novels by two writers who subsequently went on to enjoy tremendous acclaim and fame (and a little scandal, as well). Though written a half-century apart and on different continents, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) and Murakami Ryû's Kagiri naku tômei ni chikai blue (1975, available in English translation as Almost Transparent Blue) reveal a kind of sibling resemblance.