Home > Blog

Book log

For the past few years, I’ve been writing my simple little thoughts on the fediverse and elsewhere about the books that I’ve read, but I thought I’d put those thoughts all in one place because I’ve needed to migrate away from two fediverse servers so far (RIP), and I do enjoy looking back on these notes (however brief). This page mainly exists for my own records. (I’ve added some extra details in square brackets and corrected some typos in the text.)

博士論文を書き終わってから、しばらく読み書きする気力が消え失せていました。数年間かかりましたが、最近は多少読める余裕ができ、SNSで短くて軽い感想文を書くようになりました。様々なSNSで運営方針の変化やサービス終了があったりしたので、今後はSNSの投稿と並行でこのページにて読書録を書くことにしました。本当にゆるい感想しかないので、あまり期待しないでいただきたい。


田中美穂編『胞子文学名作選』 (read c.2021?)

動物でもない、植物でもないキノコ類に憧れを持っているので、新聞の広告欄に『胞子文学名作選』というタイトルを見ただけで買いたくなった。実物を見て、装幀とタイポグラフィーの遊びっぷりにびっくりした。好き


村田沙耶香作『コンビニ人間』(read 2021-05-30)

『コンビニ人間』読了
なんか悲しいというか、寂しい気持ちになるが、いい本だった


相沢沙呼作『medium 霊媒探偵城塚翡翠』(read 2021-08-23)

媒師探偵城塚翡翠、面白かった〜! はじめからラノベのような雰囲気で完全に甘く見てしまっていたので、オチを見て仰天した。自分はほとんどミステリを読まないが、ミステリが好きな人もそうでない人も楽しめるように書かれている。すごい


Dubliners by James Joyce (read 2021-11-04)

ジェイムズ・ジョイス『ダブリナーズ』、よかった。今度『ユリシーズ』読もうかな。

Joyce’s Dubliners was really good - lots of sad little stories. Gonna try and tackle Ulysses next


Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki; translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan (read 2022-01-01)

This is good stuff - I’ve read through two of the stories now and I really like the raw style of expression in the dialogue in particular
[the next day] This was good - complex relationships and characters with frank analysis of their feelings

原文読んでないけど、訳文がいいわぁ。鈴木いづみいいわぁ
(翌日・読了後)面白かった。訳文にイギリスの俗語がふんだんに使われていて、故郷を感じるなどした


October by China Miéville (read c.2022-08-11)

about to finish reading October - the events and factions were hard to follow (I should have taken notes) but the style of writing was vv nice.


The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett (read c.2022-09-23)

“a misery wrapped in an enema”
Good lord Pratchett is amazing
[a few months later] Got round to reading The Fifth Elephant. Such sharp wit - really funny. Want to read more Discworld later, but first I’ll get back to Don Quixote


Don Quixote (Volume 1) by Miguel de Cervantes; translated by John Ormsby (read 2022-12-28)

“The next day he received the four thousand crowns, and with them four thousand perplexities,”
don quixote is great - i love the flowery language it pulls off

[several days later] Don-Quixote-posting again. What a wonderful little passage:
“[Dorothea and Lucinda] asked her to take off her veil, and thereupon she removed it and disclosed a countenance so lovely, that to Dorothea she seemed more beautiful than Luscinda, and to Luscinda more beautiful than Dorothea”

[several days later] Finished the first volume of Don Quixote - I like its wit and its grandiose language, but it’s a bit long so I’m going to read something else before I continue to vol 2


Violent Phenomena, edited by Dr. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (read 2023-01-15)

The difficulties with translation from Telugu began, then, with a split in my self. Or to put that statement in reverse: the very knot of identity for me is connected to problems of translation, of what can and cannot be transmitted across borders. If assimilation were easy, if one life and one identity could be converted smoothly into another, I would not need to translate. But the different parts of my self sit in jagged, disproportionate relation inside me, and Telugu and English are two languages that almost never meet in my current North American life.

this passage comes from very different circumstances than mine, but it has similarities to the kind of feeling I was thinking about [a feeling of having a rift between my two main languages inside myself].

The whole book is definitely worth a read if you ever think at all about translation. It’s a collection of essays—and of personal experiences—rather than a dry book of theory or what have you. It might feel different to what you had expected, but that’s precisely the point of the collection.

Published by Tilted Axis Press—they have an ebook version available too (all the entries in the ebook’s table of contents pointed to the last page in my app, for some reason. shame about that but not a huge issue)


The Stranger by Albert Camus; translated by Stuart Gilbert (read 2023-02-18)

カミュの『異邦人』(英訳)を初めて読んだけど、面白かった。身体がフィクションに飢えていたようだ。

I was exhausted today after swimming, but reading Camus’s The Stranger for the first time helped a bit. I sometimes have these bouts of hunger for fiction that manifest as lethargy. I had actually intended to read The Plague, but I think I’ll come round to that one soon too


グレゴリー・ケズナジャット作『開墾地』(read 2023-02-18)

グレゴリー・ケズナジャットの『開墾地』、すごい良かった。ストーリーは割とよくあるような話だと思うけど、それが日本語で、且つ『群像』に発表されたことに意味がある。自分の子供が大きくなったら読ませたい。(こちらの日記にも記載あり

Breaking my twtr silence to say that Gregory Khezrnejat’s “Kaikonchi” is really good - looking forward to his future work


Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki; translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O’Horan (read 2023-05-03)

鈴木いづみの英訳短編集『Hit Parade of Tears』読了。前の英訳短編集『Terminal Boredom』は、SF度が高く、訳文にイギリス英語のスラングがふんだんに使われていて、好きだった。今回は舞台が「日本」になっている場合が多く、日本の文化・現代史に慣れていないとわからないようなところも、意訳(ローカリゼーション)せず、ソノママ翻訳されていた模様(原文見てないからたしかなことはいえないが)。考えさせられるものがある。今回はイギリススラングがやや控えめだったから、個人的に少し残念だった。でも話はすごく面白かった。複雑な人間関係と唐突なオチが毎回楽しい

Finished reading Izumi Suzuki’s “Hit Parade of Tears”. This collection had more stories set in Japan, with lots of jp-centric references and cultural touchstones, as opposed to the previous translated collection called “Terminal Boredom” which had many stories set in space or a nondescript country iirc. I haven’t compared it with the original, but it’s interesting to see how the translation seems to have intentionally not localised these references (I don’t think this is a bad thing).
The stories are all really good - I always enjoy thorny relationships in fiction and both of the collections are chock full of those. Some of the stories have really abrupt endings, too - she’s intentionally avoiding any sort of realistic or gentle cadence, and I respect that choice a lot (it’s very entertaining - kind of like the chaos that happens in a dream just before you wake up). I kind of prefer the first collection, but this one was good too.


The Divided Self by Ronald David Laing (read c.2024-01-19)

Read The Divided Self the other day - very good. it was interesting to see an example of someone saying that societal expectations “forced” someone to do something that they secretly wanted to do but couldn’t admit, because I had a similar experience myself. all the chapters lead up to the final chapter, which is a case study that demonstrates all the theories presented until then. I can see how it may have influenced eva (according to an obi I saw on a ja translation of it a while ago)
[addendum: I want to write a meandering post about this as well, but this book demonstrates an example of “applied literature”—using the tools of literary analysis to analyse real people and their feelings. perhaps I’ll get the chance to explain myself more fully one day]


Portraits by John Berger (read c.2024-04?)

I finished reading Portraits a while ago and I was intending to write a meandering post about it, but it was very good. Lots of different perspectives on art as well as interesting personal stories as well - rich life experience helps so much in creating and appreciating art. I was surprised with one uncharacteristically venomous passage aimed at Francis Bacon, but it seems like he eventually dropped his beef with Bacon (pun not intended) after that particular piece was published


Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (read 2024-05-03)

Finished reading Perdido Street Station. I really liked the descriptions and the setting, which grabbed me from the start. The plot was elegantly put together for the most part but it kind of lost me at the end. This is an extremely petty point of criticism but I got a little bit tired of seeing a handful of go-to turns of phrase come up repeatedly. Even still, I did enjoy reading it a lot and I think I’ll come back to it for inspiration later. Don’t think I’ll read the rest of the trilogy for the time being though - the first book felt decently self-contained.


Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (read 2024-07-03)

Entangled Life was very good - lots of very cool facts. The last two chapters went a little bit wild with speculation and musing but the book is intended to inspire and it does a great job at that


黒島伝治作『二銭銅貨』『橇』『渦巻ける烏の群』(read 2024-07-12)

Read some short stories by Denji Kuroshima after Renkon recommended them. The stories really emphasise the drudgery and futility of war, as well as the careless decisions that happen at every level. You can read his works for free via Aozora Bunko in Japanese or get this translated collection here for basically the cost of shipping [at the time of writing]

黒島伝治の短編集、よかった


The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (listened c.2024-08-26)

Finished The Left Hand of Darkness (library audiobook) the other day - powerful and unconventional love story with delicate depiction of the characters’ emotions as they struggled to understand each other. The down-to-earth delivery by George Guidall suited the protagonists very well. [addendum: Also, now that I’m writing this on a site where people can’t reply, I’m gonna go ahead and say that even Le Guin wasn’t completely impervious to Orientalism with the references to the yinyang and the game of go. I do see why the yinyang symbol was invoked—it does make sense in the story, but it was interesting to see.]

『闇の左手』、良かった。さすが『ゲド戦記』の作者だなぁと思った。登場人物が自分と異質の人とわかり合えるようになるまでの過程が細かくリアルに描かれていて、好きだった


Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (read 2024-09-06)

wow I’ve only read the start of it but Prophet Song is really good - very urgent writing style that mixes all voices and thoughts together in the same paragraph. [several hours later] oh my word this book is utterly terrifying. [several days later] I finished reading it and it was very good (I particularly liked the poetic asides that meandered into memories and visions of a future to be) but I don’t think I was quite ready to read it
[addendum: I liked the way the book shows the children constantly drinking milk—it comes off as a metaphor with the milk being a surrogate for their mother who does not save them. Could she even have saved them? I don’t know.
addendum 2: it still haunts me to think that her husband was reluctant to go at the last moment but she coaxed him on despite protesting before.]

昨年のブッカー賞受賞作『Prophet Song』、ちょっとしか読んでないけど結構面白い。セリフは引用符なし・改行なし、ピリオドがあるべきところにカンマが使われるなど、登場人物の不安と焦りが文章の形式でも表れている。


Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (listened 2024-09-23)

Finished Midnight’s Children (library audiobook). Really liked how it threads recurring events, metaphors, and even simple phrases (“full-tilt” etc.) through the story. I wouldn’t have been able to finish it if not for the audiobook though - it’s good but long. Gonna read more Booker winners, but my fav is still The Remains of the Day

『真夜中の子供たち』よかった。物語の中で、作者が様々な現象や比喩、そして特定の表現を繰り返して使うことで、独特な記号体系を築き上げている。主人公の大げさな語り口が好きだった。ブッカー賞受賞作をすこーしずつ読み進めてるけど、今のとこの一番のお気に入りはカズオ・イシグロ作『日の名残り』


Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (listened 2024-10-25)

I’ve only listened to the first few paragraphs of Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars but I can tell it’s going to be really… “good” isn’t the right word - it’s a bit hard to describe when its position as a commercial product resembles that of the “curios” it refers to at the start (I imagine the author was well aware of this too)
[one week later] Finished listening - this was really good. There is so much in it - it spans multiple generations with different narrative styles and the audiobook has a different person voicing the chapters for each character. Their struggles with assimilation and identity really resonated with me (though my own experience is obv different). Despite the somber tone, it has frequent wordplay and silly banter between characters, neither of which feels out of place.

Tommy Orange作『Wandering Stars』、良かった。アメリカの「開拓者」による罪が何世代にも影響を及ぼす過程が丁寧に描かれていて、読んでいて胸が痛む。登場人物が、差別や様々な形の「依存」に苦しみながら、自分たちの居場所、徐々に失われていく土着民族の文化との向き合い方を探っていく物語。


Guardians of Language by Florian Coulmas (read 2024-10-26)

Nice introduction to the history of language policy. It looks at the lives and actions of 20 people around the world who influenced language. It had an interesting take on how the charisma of these individuals played a part in changing language use. Each chapter has a section called “The Last Word” in which the author asks questions to each individual and writes their answers for them by paraphrasing from their published work. The gimmick unnerves me in ways that I can’t fully explain but I will admit that it made the book feel more light-hearted and approachable.

世界の言語政策史の入門書のような位置づけで、結構面白かった。全20章で、それぞれ一人のひとの生い立ちと活動を紹介し、一人ひとりの言語に対する思想の背景がわかりやすく書かれていた。


My Friends by Hisham Matar (read 2024-11-01)

The first half of the book is particularly tragic. It’s not a true story per se but it bears so much truth, especially considering the author’s own background. It bears truth like a heavy load, like a responsibility. The second half becomes more mundane but gives many delicate yet cutting descriptions about the realities of friendships—things are not always so rosy.

I find it slightly interesting to think about what has gone unsaid in the book. Perhaps I read through it too quickly, but the protagonist seems to make a rather large jump through time in his narration, suddenly skipping from when he is around 30 years old to 45 years of age, when he notes that he has not married or started a family. He does have romantic relationships, but these are obstructed in the first half of the book by the aftershocks of his suffering and the subsequent secrecy he must maintain to protect himself, and again obstructed in the second half of the book seemingly by his fear of letting go of his own daily routine. He is aware of the first obstruction but does not mention any explicit reasons for not “settling down” once his life has calmed down.

When the regime that took away so much from him finally topples and he gets the opportunity to return to his family, he continues to prevaricate, feeling that his old life in Libya is nonexistent—not even worth being called a “shadow”. These kinds of observations about living in another culture away from home resonated with me.

Hisham Matar作『My Friends』、良かった。前半は胸が苦しくなる展開ばかりだったけど、後半はまあ救いがあった。舞台がロンドンだったから、懐かしい地名がたくさん出てきた。


Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (listened 2024-11-02)

Short but moving. It was interesting reading and listening to these two books back to back, as in this story the protagonist feels suffocated by his day-to-day routine.
I don’t really care too much either way about using or avoiding the word “said” in prose but this book did a good job at using other words instead of “said”.

Claire Keegan作『Small Things Like These』の朗読を聴き終わった。直前に読んだ『My Friends』では、主人公が大変な思いをしてようやく日常を手に入れる物語だが、この話では主人公が「仕事・食事・睡眠」の繰り返しに意味があるのかと疑問に思うようになり、ついには自分と自分の家族の日常を壊してしまう決断をすることになる。


Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (listened 2024-11-03)

I thought the book would start and end on this odd premise of the author being confused for another Naomi (Wolf), and it does do that, but it touches on so many other topics in between. The author threads them all together with the concept of a despised or wilfully ignored other being a reflection of the self (for example, with colonialism defining sections of the human race as uncivilised and undeserving Others). It’s a gut punch in the way it shows how we all look away from many inconvenient truths as we try to stay in our little bubble of normalcy. The author tries to be optimistic in the end by inviting people to carry out collective action (which she argues is the only way to solve any of the issues she touches upon), but this is another gut punch for me sitting on a rare day alone in my house trying to derust in Tetris: The Grand Master while listening to the audiobook after doing a bit of work, rather than going outside and possibly interacting with other human beings at Seika de Pon in Kyoto or the Digital Games Expo in Tokyo or an art gallery or literally anywhere else. It is quite hard for me to socialise in person—perhaps what I cannot do face-to-face I may be able to do online, but perhaps I am just trying to look away and shirk my own responsibility.

Naomi Klein著『Doppelganger』の朗読を聴き終わった。かなり重い内容だったが、良かった。一部、Norman Finkelstein著『The Holocaust Industry』と重なる話もあったが、この本に引用がなかったっぽい。ちょっと残念だったかも。2023年9月に出版されているが、2023年10月から一年間以上経った今になって読むと、やはり胸が痛む。


My Family by David Baddiel (listened 2024-11-05)

I listened to this one while playing—and getting a new high score in—Radirgy De Gojaru! (I don’t play it often but I have an odd fondness for it. I think it’s a really good podcast game), as well as on the train back home from Arxial Rendezvous 4. Am I sneaking diary entries into my book log? Yes, but maybe that isn’t all that bad.
Anyway, I decided to borrow this audiobook because I wanted to know more about the author’s experience as a Jewish person in London. Well, the book did have stuff about that, but a lot of it was about his very odd parents (of course, we all have odd parents but they are odd in different ways, to paraphrase that well-known quote) and about caring for them in their old age. I also found out that the author is related to one of my teachers from school—a staunchly orthodox and highly opinionated individual with a strong anti-zionist streak. I think I may have heard rumours about them being relatives when I was in school, but it sounded too far-fetched to truly believe, and I never thought to look it up before.

It was both funny and frank, and I did enjoy it for the most part, but I got itchy to have it finished when I was close to the end. I found myself playing it at 2.5x speed to get it over with quickly, but it started to feel pointless, so I ended up just skipping the last 45 minutes.

イギリス生まれのユダヤ教徒コメディアンによる回想録。子供の時のトラウマから親の介護のことまで、半生の中の様々なエピソードをユーモラスに紹介している。


Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (read 2024-11-11)

A story about controlling the narrative. This is made clear at the very start, with the introduction by the author saying that they are making a generally faithful reproduction of a book that they happened to find, except for changing the chapter titles to make them easier to read, and putting a message from the original author’s wife at the end, because putting that message at the start would make readers of this reproduction doubt the veracity of what is being told, as the author/reproducer steadfastly believes it to be true. There are multiple layers of ascribing false premises to other people, and I would have got a lot more out of it if I spent a bit more time poring over it and taking notes to get a good grip on each character’s perspective and how they are trying to control the narrative. I didn’t really have the energy to do so, though, and I felt a bit anxious to return it early as other people were waiting for it.

『哀れなものたち』の英語原作小説、よかった。映画版はどのような構成にしたんだろう。気になる。


Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (listened 2024-11-17)

Really compelling read. Each character is holding onto an impossible dream to help endure the present, but they all end up succumbing to the grim reality of their situation. The only exception is a single grim wish which was not made in earnest, but ends up being fulfilled by the hands of the wisher himself.

There are layers of depersonification going on here—this is a core aspect of the story, and is present all the way to the climax.

One interesting linguistic/translation theory thing I noticed was a common turn of phrase that went something like this: “She stared at him, as though to value his worth”. I’ve seen a lot of remarks from translators and editors about how the construction 「〜するかのように〜した」 shouldn’t be translated literally, but here we have an example of an equivalent construction in English written by a Nobel winner.

叶わない夢にすがる登場人物の中で、一人だけ叶ってはいけない願いが叶ってしまう。
「働かざる者食うべからず」の世界。余裕のない世界。
話としてさすがに非常によくできている。伏線がなんとなくわかっていても、結末が衝撃的だった。話の中で、一人の登場人物が繰り返して同じ言葉を使ってもう一人の登場人物に向かって苦言を呈しているけど、最後で、怒られる方の人がその繰り返しの「日常性」に安定感を覚えるようになる描写が興味深かった。


Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (read 29-11-2024)

Entertaining. This book is packed with wisecracks, skeletons, cool magic, and will-they-won’t-they. It veered into the realm of a mystery novel unexpectedly midway—you might be able to tell what comes next if you’re good at whodunnits, but I’m not.

There are a lot of characters (who are referred to in several ways each) in this book, so don’t be afraid to check the appendices to keep track of them. I foolishly didn’t—I wasn’t sure when I was “supposed” to read those appendices and flipping back and forth in an ebook is a bit of a pain. I lost out by not reading them earlier.

I enjoyed the magic systems in the book. It had all sorts of creative ideas, and lots and lots of ways to describe skeletons and bones. It always has its tongue in its cheek, even amid major conflicts. On the other hand, the story’s pacing didn’t quite gel with me—it felt like twists and new revelations came rather abruptly. Again, I think I missed out on a lot because I didn’t keep track of the characters well enough.

There’s one phrase that will stay in my mind and nourish me for a while, and that is the name of a lesson called “Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone”. It’s so silly, and the author knows it too—she repeats it more than once in the same page, which makes it even funnier. It nourishes me because it is so daft, and it reminds me that great humour can come from commitment to a simple but well-crafted joke.

面白かった。日本語訳も出てるらしいけど、イギリスジョークが結構入ってて、訳しにくそうだ。魔法の設定が面白くて、主人公達のラブストーリーも良かった。続編はあるけど、図書館のアプリで借りれない。シリーズの続きは気になるけど、買ってまで続編を読みたいというわけではない。


The Vegetarian by Han Kang; translated by Deborah Smith (listened 2024-12-05)

This one was a lot. It has physical, verbal, and sexual violence, and the book highlights how this violence is embedded within society and how it used to enforce social norms.

There’s a part in the middle of the story that had me finding every kind of human desire repugnant. The irony is that the character with excessive desire ends up being treated better than the character with an almost absence of desire.

『菜食主義者』の英訳、良かった。父親がつい最近までヴィーガンだったから、思い出と重なる部分が少〜しだけあった。

男の社会・肉食社会の様々な「暴力」。その暴力に反抗したり、逃げようとしたりする人は、また暴力を振るわれるはめになる。話の所々に出てくる「鳥」のモチーフで、登場人物の「不自由」を逆説的に強調している。


Orbital by Samantha Harvey (DNF listening 2024-12-08)

The start is poetic with lovely metaphors. The author works skillfully to express the awe of space exploration and space itself into words. After going through so many books with heavy or tragic stories recently, I was bracing myself when starting this book, but it turned out to be less of a gut punch and more of a gently outstretched hand.

It has a similar overall cadence to a documentary—a bright start, a few mildly sad or poignant moments, and then (presumably) a happy ending. It never cuts too deeply or allows things to get too dark at any time. The “no-plot” structure wasn’t a big issue for me—I was fine with that concept.

However, I’m afraid to say that I couldn’t finish this five-hour audiobook. I think the opening two chapters or so were very nice with uplifting and lyrical language, but the Japanese astronaut came across like a collection of ideas that felt Japanese to the author rather than an actual person. Along with some scientific inaccuracies (for example, one character is described as casually picking up some space debris while doing a space walk, as if it was a sweet wrapper in a park and not a projectile moving faster than a bullet. A quick web search showed that the ISS makes course corrections to avoid space debris, too) It put me off the book. It started to feel like the author was writing about her own ideal of space and her own ideal of each nationality or something, while remaining at least partially ignorant of the reality. I couldn’t bring myself to go through any more of it at the three-hour mark.

The treatment of the different cultures and languages of the different characters overall felt very monolingual, very “normie”. Basic-level “it’s a small world after all” observations. It didn’t start off as a huge thing but it gnawed at me more and more. It bothers me all the more knowing that this book got the Booker Prize this year.

Great opening but the rest was definitely not for me.

Here’s a list of things that bothered me about the depiction of the Japanese astronaut.

うーん、冒頭部分は文章がきれいですごくいい感じだったけど、日本・ロシア・アメリカなどの宇宙飛行士の人物描写がステレオタイプじみていて、またファンタジーでもないのに科学的事実とちょっと違うなと思うようなところもあって、途中で「not for me」になって最後まで聞けなかった。きれいな表現にしようとして、結局現実から離れてしまってる印象を受けた。これが今年のブッカー賞受賞作になったのががちょっと意外だった。


The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (listened 2024-12-16)

“Convention has never done any woman any good”

I don’t really like Oxford much at all. “Gown and town”? As if you can separate the institution from the location? I’ll tell you where you can stick that gown, you…

Ahem. But honestly, I can’t stand the mountain of conventions that stratify and make a pecking order between and within each of the various colleges. It’s not just sour grapes about being rejected for joining as an undergrad student, honest (I didn’t prepare at all for the interview! I didn’t stand a chance!). I have a rather complicated relationship with convention and tradition in general.

Having said that, I do greatly value the Oxford dictionaries—I use them practically every day in my work. I wasn’t curious enough to look up the history of the OED but I’m glad I read this book that includes a lot of facts about it.

I like how the book looks at women’s issues as well as poking a toe into class issues. The way it shows the protagonist growing up was very nice, too. I also noted the nice descriptions of people meeting or not meeting one another’s eyes—it made the interactions and tensions between people hit more strongly. I liked the eloquence in the letters from Edith Thompson.

It was kind of meh to see that the protagonist’s issues were generally solved through her social standing and her family’s and friend’s means, rather than through her own effort. Speaking of which, a lot of her decisions are made for her by her father and godmother when young, and again by her godmother and society in general when older—it would have been nice to have seen her take more control in her life later on. I’m a bit ambivalent about the treatment of the maid in the story, however favourable her conditions may have been. There is a lot that could be explored about class, about people born to be “in service,” but the book ends up tying it up in a saccharine ending.

I feel like the book could have ended at several points midway; each resulting in a slightly different effect. This is just personal preference, but I would have found the story more poignant if it ended when [redacted] left the country.

The title and blurb suggest that the book would place central focus on the fringes but it is ultimately a celebration of the OED rather than the protagonist’s own collection of women’s words, and the ending and appendices reflect this. Personal grievances aside, I did enjoy the book a lot.


The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (listened 2024-12-25)

“A fella builds his own sins right up from the ground”

I really liked this. Richard Armitage did a great job reading this one. He acted out the characters with a lot of feeling, and I just really liked listening to his voice.

The story is a one-way trip to despair that keeps getting worse and worse as the protagonists grow more and more desparate.


Dune by Frank Herbert (listened 2014-12-30)

I don’t know how much of this is “Seinfeld isn’t funny syndrome,” but the book wasn’t the mind-blowing experience that I was expecting it to be. It was okay. I liked the setting a lot, and I think the power struggle between the various leaders within the empire was thought out well, but I don’t really enjoy epic tales of kings and conquests and conspiracies. I think I prefer smaller-scale, more personal stories, but I can’t fault the book for what it is!

I didn’t really like the protagonist and his mother that much, but after doing a bit of searching around once I had finished the book, I realize that that was mainly the point—it’s supposed to demonstrate how heroes can get swept up by their legends and how they are not always the nice people one may imagine them to be. I do wonder if it was a marketing decision rather than a creative decision to give the protagonist and his mother very common English names in a world full of fantasy names. It was a bit odd to see one of the antagonists being called Vladimir as well, and it was also weird to hear the narrator use a vague sort of Russian accent for one of that antagonist’s lines only to completely abandon the accent for the rest of the story. I wonder why JRR Tolkien seemed to not be impressed too much by the book.

The voice acting in this didn’t feel nearly as good as Richard Armitage’s work in The Grapes of Wrath that I listened to immediately before this, but I got used to it. I did like the evil cackles from the voice actor for Vladimir though—those were great.

[addendum: I did like the way this book portrayed looking into the future—not as a clear vision of what will happen, but a maelstrom of many different futures clashing against one another like waves in the sea.]


Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (listened 2025-01-01)

I have a lot of time for this. The vernacular makes the characters very approachable (though the protagonist is rather nasty), and it was wonderful to hear it read by the author himself as well. You can kind of see the ending coming but it still comes at you with such pathos—I really liked it, and I’m glad I happened to come across it. This book made me want to learn more about ancient Greece and Greek plays—I hope to get around to that some time.


安堂ホセ作『ジャクソンひとり』(read 2025-01-07)

「絶対に自虐を使わないところにエックスらしい臆病さを感じた」(「エックス」は人物名)

面白かった。展開を予測できず、スリリングな物語。途中で、ジャクソンたち四人が服を貸し合って、入れ替わりごっこをしてみる場面があり、それがなんと周りの人にバレずに済んでしまう。ステレオタイプに開き直っているというか、ステレオタイプを逆手に取って行動している描写が興味深かった。

独特な言い回しが随所にある。意図的だろうけど、少し舌足らずに感じられた。インタビューで、著者はラップのような文体を目指していたと話しているので、声を出して読んでみたら面白く感じられたかもしれない。

なにより、マイノリティーの文学が芥川賞候補作になったことが嬉しい。どちらかといえば、同じ時期に候補作になった『開墾地』のほうが好きかもしれないけど(『開墾地』の主人公のほうが自分に似ているということもあるかもしれないが)、両方にそれぞれの良さがある。


川端康成作『雪国』 (listened 2025-01-11)

「鏡」「徒労」「清潔」「悲しいほど美しい」

ちょっと難しかった。朗読で聴くより、文字でじっくり読むほうがよかったかもしれないけど、今は残念ながら時間をかけて読んでいる余裕がない。背に腹は代えられない。

聴いていて、この作品が何を表そうとしているのか、何を伝えようとしているのかよくわからなくなってしまったので、途中でWikipediaであらすじや評価を調べてみた。すると、川端康成の言葉が出てきた。

「島村は私ではありません。男としての存在ですらないやうで、ただ駒子をうつす鏡のやうなもの、でせうか」

話の最後の方まで聴いて、その意味がようやくわかった気がした。島村は話の中であまり行動しないし、考え方が変わったりすることもない。話は島村の視点で語られているけど、主人公は駒子の方だ。

話の中に鏡がたくさん出てくるから、島村も「鏡」として機能していると考えると、ちょっと面白くなってくる。

まだちょっとしか理解できてないから、また今度紙の本で読み直すか、朗読で聴き返すかしたい。ただ、正直に言うと、奥さんと子どもを残して一人で毎年のように温泉街に行って芸者と遊ぶ島村が人として嫌なんだよなぁ(笑)


Mythos by Stephen Fry (listened 2025-01-25)

This was really good. I had started to listen to A Brief History of the Greek Myths by Stephen Kershaw with the hope of learning something about the myths, but it was a bit too academic and rather hard to follow in audio. This book by another Stephen is told in a lively way that really suits the stories as a collection of tales (“myth” means something that is told). He embellishes and exaggerates in a way that seems effortless.

I particularly liked the way he did the conversations with Echo so that she would only echo the last few words of the other speaker but it still resembled an fairly natural back and forth. I also liked the way that he described only the rhyming words of a poem (“a poem that rhymes ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘lad’ with glad’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’”, and so on) rather than writing the whole poem—it’s fun to imagine the rest of the words on my own.

There were lots of stories about people turning into trees and plantlife. I’ve always been fascinated with the idea ever since reading Kobo Abe’s Dendrocacalia. I know many stories of people changing into animals, and even some about transforming into minerals, but I hadn’t heard any that covered vegetables. But after hearing these myths, I guess that these may have inspired Kobo Abe. I can now also see why Ovid’s Metamorphoses has that title, as well. Here’s a page with summaries of all the stories of people being turned into trees, citing Mythos as its one and only source. I’d like to make a similar list on my site too, including Dendrocacalia and any other examples I come across.

There are a lot of names of people and places and it’s quite a lot to take in at once. I might listen to this again, but I might try A Brief History of the Greek Myths again now that I have a bit more familiarity with the mythology.

One more thing: I went to a Jewish school and so I was brought up to regard the ancient Greeks and Romans as the enemy (though admittedly Alexander is said to have been great enough and kind enough for Jewish families to use his name for their children ever since). I never learned “the classics” and I only recently had the desire to start. I’m no man of letters but seeing that I have occasional jobs that involve fiction, I felt that I had a professional obligation to learn more of the tales that have influenced storytellers so often over the years. I’d like to learn about the myths from as many cultures as I can—it’ll take a while, I’m sure.

One last thing: Every time Stephen Fry mentioned the Acropolis or the Parthenon (which thankfully isn’t as often as you may expect) I remembered this clip from the game show QI and had to pause the audio for a while to collect myself.


A Brief History of the Greek Myths by Stephen Kershaw (listened 2025-01-31)

I did get back to this in the end—it was easier to follow after listening to the stories in Mythos. It seems to cover all of the Greek myths from the start of the universe all the way up to the Illiad and Odyssey, and even includes the story of Atlantis described by Plato. The book only describes each story briefly but it goes over the main points and also describes how certain scenes have been popular in later artistic works, which was nice. It’s rather academic but it has a very subtle and dry sense of humour that I enjoyed.

Now that I know the basic structure of the Odyssey, I might be ready to try tackling James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’d like to listen to Stephen Fry read his adaptation of the Odyssey first if I could, but it’s not available in my library app, unfortunately. I do have his audiobook of Heroes reserved though.

何を血迷ったのか、最近ギリシャ神話について少し勉強しようとしている(勉強と言っても、ギリシャ神話を取り上げたオーディオブックを聴いているだけだが)。ユダヤ系の学校だったからか、授業では全然取り上げられなかった。「古典」の授業といえばモーセ五書とタルムードだった。ラテン語や古代ギリシャ語を勉強する代わりにヘブライ語とアラム語の文法を習った。それもそれで貴重な経験だった。

それはさておき、とにかく、ギリシャ神話のことはほとんど知らないので、ちょっとでも覚えておこうと思った。上記の『Mythos』は、最初の方の神話を面白おかしく書いた本だ。「神話らしく」脚色してるから、聞いていて楽しかったし、内容も覚えやすかった。

今回の本は多少アカデミック寄りだったし、ギリシャ神話の全史をカバーしてるから、一つ一つの話の紹介がかなり簡潔だった。でも、一通りの神話のあらすじをまとめてくれてるからありがたい。後代の芸術作品に良く取り上げられる場面も、作者と作品名を含めて解説するところもあって、勉強になった。


清水俊史著『ブッダという男』(read 2025-02-05)

著者の自画自賛的なツイートが入ってきたのがきっかけだった。初心者でもわかると主張していたので、仏教に関しては初心者である(仏教に関して「も」初心者である、というべきか)自分が読んでみたくなった。

確かにわかりやすかった。今までの仏教研究の欠点をいくつか指摘し、また、初期仏典でのブッダの教えを、ジャイナ教やバラモン教などと比較し、その特徴を説明している。学会の大先生を批判しているようなので、出版するにあたって色々と大変だったのだろうと想像できる。実際、本書のあとがきを読むと、著者の研究書『上座部仏教における聖典論の研究』(2021年、本書の2年前に出版されている)の刊行準備中に、批判の対象になっている研究者の恩師にあたる方に「大学教職に就きたければ出版を諦めろ」と言われた、というコワイ話が記されている。

それはさておき、この本を読むことで、仏教の独自性と成り立った背景が少しだけわかってきたので、非常にありがたい。そこで、どうして仏教がここまで普及したのか、また後代において仏教の捉え方や思想がどのように変化していったのか気になってきた。本の最後に紹介されている『教養としての仏教思想史』や、『インド宗教興亡史』、『入門 近代仏教思想』が面白そうだ。新書よりも、もうちょっとしっかりした本を読みたい気持ちもあるけど、残念ながら研究書をじっくり見ている余裕がまだない。

This was a great introduction to the background behind the origin of Buddhism, and the portrayal of Buddha in the early texts. Let’s see if I can summarise it here to aid my own memory.

There is an air of mythos even today about the man, with people ascribing various attributes to him after the fact. They may base their claims on various parts of early Buddhist texts, but the author argues that these claims are either founded on an unsuitable interpretation, or come from texts written in verse that were not actually considered part of the canon in early Buddhism. There’s nothing necessarily bad about creating new myths for Buddha the man (on the contrary, the author argues it is an integral part of Buddhism evolving with the times), but it is not an academically honest thing do to (apparently the current trend in Buddhism studies is to analyze Buddha as a historical person).

The author then examines several claims made about Buddha’s beliefs in recent times.

The second half of the book gives an analysis of Buddhism within its historical context, and notes what makes it unique.

There was a lot to take in and I’m sure I’ve misunderstood parts of it, but it was really interesting to learn about the context of Buddhism’s origins. I’d like to learn more about how Buddhism became so popular and how its teachings have been interpreted over the years.


Heroes by Stephen Fry (listened 2025-02-08)

This was good, like Mythos before it. I think I preferred Mythos, but I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was the more vivid scenes in the age of the gods, or maybe—maybe—I’m getting a bit fatigued from so many myths in one go. I have Troy (the next book in this series) reserved next, with a fairly long wait time, so I’ll enjoy some other things in the meantime.

I wasn’t really a fan of the accents that he put on at the start, but he seemed to drop them for the most part midway through the story of Heracles (who, as a result, was born with a country accent but grew up to inherit Stephen Fry’s ordinary posh way of talking).


So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (listened 2025-02-08)

Oh yeah, this is more like it! I had missed short stories like these. Maybe I should have listened to the myths at a slower pace by leaving a gap between each story, because those were short enough, too.

Anyway, this story puts a spotlight on the ways people conveniently try to forget or devalue the hurt they do to others. While I was listening to the author read the story in a tragic tone of voice, I found myself being proud of myself for not being anything like that nasty little man, but by thinking this I feel that I am doing something similar to that character by making myself out to be a “nice guy”.

In one scene, the author makes the simple act of throwing something in the bin feel ominous and full of allusion to the nature of one of the characters.

The novel is set in the modern-day Republic of Ireland so it was a bit of a surprise to hear the characters go to Tesco and Aldi but pay in Euros.

By mojilove on 2024-10-19
Last updated on 2025-02-08

Back to blog index