The July Update

Like everything else I do, it has to be rushed, and I can't really think or write quickly, but what must be must be.


A List: The Arabian Nights..........................................................781/823
B List: Swinburne, Atalanta and Calydon........................................xi/98
C List: Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe...................................vii/324(?)


Winding down the Arabian Nights. Just finished in the last few days the famous stories of Alaeddin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, with which I was previously unfamiliar. They really are great stories despite being completely ridiculous in many ways. They both have a spiritedness and good humor that carry them to much greater heights than they have any right to go to.


Given that in this month I have only read 2 plays for the B list and subsequently spent 2 weeks producing the essays I make myself finish before I can move on to the next book I had to read more from the C list than I normally would. I got through the entire third volume of Knausgaard since the last update. I thought the first 100 pages of this one, which dealt entirely with his childhood up to about junior high school, were not very interesting, but it picked up and was about as good as the other ones in the end, though overall I guess I would rate it my least favorite so far. When it starts getting to the age when he and his friends are constantly kissing and groping and otherwise ingratiating themselves with girls (at one point he inserts a disclaimer that no one if they knew the spirit and emotions involved could regard some of the rougher and more aggressive behaviors he describes as sexual assaults, and of course I want to believe him, but they seem to be exactly the sorts of things people have in mind when they refer to something by the name of sexual assault) naturally it is extremely depressing for me to contemplate my own life, with its dearth of such action, all of which leads back to, well, everything. No time to get into it here. I have heard that the 4th volume is perhaps the best of the series, as it gets into his college and drinking young adult years. Giving that I still have to get through a number of shorter readings and their accompanying essays for the IWE list I will probably be getting to it sooner rather than later.


I also read the comic book/graphic novel (though it really is not like reading a novel) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi which I think was quite good, at least it told its story in an unusually vivid manner. Not having read much of this type of literature I don't know how it compares with other notable efforts in that mode. But this seems like it must be better than average. This is the second work by a contemporary Iranian woman I have read in recent months. There are some similarities in terms of nationalistic pride (though Satrapi, perhaps because her education and ex-pat life were in France, comes off as more favorably inclined to the West than the other author, Solmaz Sharif, who had the misfortune to land in America), but these observations, which I can make because I have nothing else to do and no one to please in my literary endeavors, I am actually saving for a post in my other blog, which I have not abandoned but have just not been able to work on at all. But it is not dead, for any readers here who also look at that other site.

It was not my fate to be as handsome as Knausgaard, but I think several of my sons might be.

May Update

A List--The Arabian Nights (Burton Translation)................................................143/823
B List--Gladys Hasty Carroll--As the Earth Turns...............................................263/339
C List--Jane Austen--Persuasion..........................................................................228/252


This is the first time I have ever read the Arabian Nights. Most of the stories I am finding to hold my interest so far, I have not yet been struck with a grand conception of the whole. Wife-murdering for the crime, or in some instances suspected crime, of infidelity, is a common theme. It's happened at least three times already. I am reading the Modern Library edition, which is a selection, as the complete Burton translation runs to 16 volumes, and I am not sure if the various sources that recommend these stories really intend that everyone should read all of it. When I was younger I was much more of an absolutist and wanted to read everything whole so as to be sure of not missing anything that might be of value, but I have become less so, at least in cases where it is generally agreed that the high esteem which a work enjoys is concentrated in specific parts of it that can be easily detached from the rest.


Persuasion was the only Jane Austen book I had never read, and now I sit 24 pages from having completed her entire oeuvre. I don't who else I can say that about, other than people who only wrote one or two distinct works, Homer, Proust. Even Emily Bronte wrote poems, and Henry Fielding wrote 30-something plays. I like the story in this one, though the characters are not as well-developed as in her better books and her snark is looser and more undisciplined throughout this one, which is also a detraction. I would rank it fourth among her books, after the two obvious ones and Mansfield Park, which I like a lot. I think I like this one better than Sense and Sensibility, which I remember as kind of lackluster compared to the other ones.


I was going to write something about a contemporary book of poetry I read, Look by Solmaz Sharif, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2016. But given the time constraints I think I will try to do that in a separate post.

I had no idea there was a film of this book.