What Book Are You Currently Reading?

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and most of the Chester Mystery Plays.

An excellent choice of reading material. How are they to read from an American point of view (i.e. in terms of language)?

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question. I went through a huge Chaucer phase in high school so I'm to some extent familiar with the general shape of English literature during the time period in question. The version that I'm reading from is the 1957 Drama Library edition, edited by Maurice Hussey; if I read this part of the introduction correctly (it was like one in the morning on a psychiatric ward when I started so I was both distracted and tired), Hussey modernizes the spelling but generally not the word choice or syntax, so parts of it are kind of confusing, but overall I don't find it all that much harder to follow than some of the earliest American poets, Anne Bradstreet for instance.

The Sea of Fertility tetralogy looms before me like an inevitability in my development as a reader and I really don't know what to do with how drawn to it I feel.

Do you plan to read them in translation or in Japanese?

My usual habit with Japanese literature is to read it mostly in English but with a Japanese copy on hand as well so that I can see how any particularly striking passages were constructed in the original. This greatly improved my experiences with Snow Country and Twenty-four Eyes.

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highly recommended for everybody, but I suspect Nathan especially would enjoy it.

Rowan Williams - "Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction"

I have it upstairs but have yet to read it. Any particular takeaways I should be on the lookout for when I do?

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no, though he does (implicitly) expect you to be readily able to recall scenes from the four major works (Underground Man, Idiot, C&P, Karamazov).  personally it hasn't been a problem for me though some complain about it.

The only one of those that might be a problem for me is C&P. Thanks for the warning.

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A few days ago I read The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. It's far from Chabon's best, but I think a lot of the criticism of it misses the main thematic point of the story (that [SPOILERS] Sherlock Holmes represents a more genteel, kindlier era in the Western world that never actually existed and is in any case incapable of understanding or addressing the enormity of the Holocaust [/SPOILERS]). Today I reread Smith of Wootton Major as part of my ongoing project of seeing if I remembered correctly how sad Tolkien's late work is (the answer so far is 'yes' and 'crushingly so').

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I'm working my way through The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period by Stephen D. Miller (the poetry translations in the book are by Miller and Patrick Donnelly). Miller, who teaches at UMass Amherst, was my professor for several classes a couple years back and one of the best teachers I've ever had. The book is an epic, astoundingly detailed and thorough coverage of the introduction and development of Buddhist themes in the imperial poetry anthologies through the end of the twelfth century. I'm just starting the section on the Shikashū (Collection of Verbal Flowers) anthology of the early 1150s (the exact year is unknown).

Within the past week I've finished two books about women in pre-Reformation English Christianity, Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary by Sarah Jane Boss and Margery Kempe: Genius and Mystic by Katherine Cholmeley. Empress and Handmaid relies heavily on interpretive frameworks of which I'm a little suspicious--psychoanalytic theory and Frankfurt School critical theory--but I think the specific arguments that it makes are sound. Margery Kempe is hagiographic, occasionally tedious in its author's need to make clear her own piety, but a refreshing antidote to the misogynistic 'hysterical woman' way its subject is sometimes understood.

I've also read My Year of Meats, the first novel by Ruth Ozeki, author of the dark-horse highlight of my 2014 reading list, A Tale for the Time Being. You can tell My Year of Meats is a first novel--themes, conceits, narrative structures, and occasionally plot points and characterizations from A Tale for the Time Being are already present in it but in clearly larval form--but I'm still glad I read it.

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I finished The Wind from Vulture Peak and then read The River Ki by Ariyoshi Sawako. The River Ki is a stranger novel than it looks at first glance; if The Makioka Sisters is a woman-oriented Japanese Seinfeld, then The River Ki is surely a Japanese Gilmore Girls (with eerily similar family politics, the only real difference--admittedly a major one--being that everybody involved has their children in wedlock), crossed with a feminist reworking of the premise of Buddenbrooks. The writing style is lucid but there were some sentences that I had to read several times to understand purely by dint of the fact that I was mostly reading it in bed very late at night.

I'm currently reading Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen, and I'm next going to start two well-known (and dense) series of books, one fiction and one nonfiction: The Sea of Fertility and Jan Morris's Pax Britannica trilogy. I'm not expecting to like Pax Britannica's politics, and I know for a fact that I'll dislike The Sea of Fertility's, but I'm perversely drawn to Mishima's body of work much as a rubbernecker is to the oddly beautiful flames of a bad car crash, and I've resolved to read more Morris partially since I find her writing style endlessly entertaining and partially because she was one of the first openly transgender public figures.

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I've finally started The Sea of Fertility. I'm a little more than halfway through Spring Snow.

What is there to say about a story as absolutely gorgeous yet morally repelling as this?

I will say that Mishima made me root for Kiyoaki and Satoko even though I knew from the get-go that their relationship was doomed (as in the back cover of my copy of the book calls it 'doomed'); that he kind of screwed this up with the way he narrated their first time having sex, which is one example among several so far of the way he makes Kiyoaki break character in an attempt to have him conform to a sexually dominant gender role that the rest of his personality doesn't justify (particularly in light of the 'tumor of arrogance' line earlier on); that Honda is an interesting character of whom I look forward to seeing more in subsequent books; and that 'undoubtedly authentic and totally unpredictable', from the courtroom scene two chapters after the sex scene, is a wonderful turn of phrase and I think I'm going to be using it as a variant of GUBU. Also I've been underlining every single simile in the book because they're all absolutely incredible.

I also read Kitchen and liked it, and might have more to say about it later than I feel like saying right now.

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So why, exactly, did I like The River Ki better than Spring Snow, despite recognizing that Spring Snow is by most 'objective' (ha!) measures the better book? Is it because I preferred The River Ki's focus on women, or because I have a formal preference for traditional straightforward generational sagas? Is it because the characters in The River Ki are presented in a more sympathetic and, frankly, more humane manner than those in Spring Snow, even when they're behaving in comparably repulsive ways? It's probably all of the above. They're both books that are going to stick with me for a long time, but I know which one I'd rather reread.

I'm committed to The Sea of Fertility for the long haul, though. I'll be starting Runaway Horses some time soon.

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I'm giving Spring Snow some time to sink in before I start Runaway Horses so right now I'm reading one of Noor Inayat Khan's Jataka stories every night before I go to sleep. They're very very short and very light. Khan was a children's book writer and artist and the daughter of a Sufi leader who during World War II became an Allied spy and was eventually captured and executed in Dachau; she's a personal hero of mine.

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The Lake, by Yoshimoto Banana. I'm also two chapters into Runaway Horses, the second Sea of Fertility novel, but I'd like to finish The Lake before I go further.

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I started Runaway Horses. I'm in the middle of an absolute bear of a chapter, forty-nine pages in my edition (the book is four hundred and twenty-one pages, and has forty chapters), that reproduces in its entirety an in-universe political/religious pamphlet. One definitely gets the sense that Mishima was way too into this, but it actually makes for pretty interesting reading.

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I finished Runaway Horses.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Speaking of the Beats, I just read (most of) The Dharma Bums. As always, I'm not thrilled with what Kerouac has to say (it's a profoundly sexist book, among other things), but I really like how he says it.

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So Miles is a Nazi now?

Yeah that's...really worrying, 'open mind' or no.

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I finished my Victorian Gothic feminist YA fantasy series and am now reading (parts of) Brain Dead Person by Morioka Masahiro.

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I read Lost Horizon. Realizing that Mallinson had a point will set you free. Wikipedia suggests we see also 'middlebrow' for this novel's author.

Now rereading We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

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Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Don Lopez. Great read by who's apparently a great guy.

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Karl Barth, The Humanity of God. 'The HUMANITY of God?!' one of my floormates cried at one point earlier this semester. 'That's a strange title for a book!' She is in her fourth semester of seminary. You'd think she'd grok the Incarnation by now.

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Doing a partial reread of The Birth of Tragedy for a paper.

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The Kingdom of the Wind by Itsuki Hiroyuki. It has the [insert negative but not outright insulting adjective here: Sententious, overdone, faintly turgid] prose characteristic both of modern Japanese literary fiction and of Meredith McKinney's translation style, and the main characters aren't especially appealing, but I love the concept and the descriptions of places and history.

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Rereading Brideshead Revisited. It holds up to an extent.

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Rereading Northanger Abbey.

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I finished Northanger Abbey. I [Inks]ing love Isabella, I don't give a [Inks]. Life's too short to hate such a brazen manipulative asshole. She's so bad but she does it so well.

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Very good book about the the non-Chalcedonian churches.

Tell me how it is when you're done? This seems right up my alley.

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After a year and change, I finished The Sea of Fertility.