2013 Readings

Thought it was about time again to catch up with listing some of my readings outside of Japanese literature, at the beginning of the year I was tempted to compile a list of predicted reads but find that when I compile these lists for myself I find that my reading veers off on a completely different course, so perhaps I'll list what I've read so far and then list some books that are potential reads.

 

 

Read so far -

 

Ernst Junger - The Glass Bees

Adalbert Stifter - The Recluse

Gustave Flaubert - Three Tales

Alfred Jarry - The Supermale

Paul Farley - The Dark Film

Otto dov Kulka - Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Jens Peter Jacobsen - Mogens and Other Stories

Guillame Apollinaire - The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories

Rawi Hage - Cockroach

Gerbrand Bakker - The Detour

Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn and Child

Elie Wiesel - Night

Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

Joseph Brodsky - Watermark - An Essay on Venice

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm

Joseph Brodsky - So Forth

Philippe Besson - His Brother

Potential reads -

 

Rene Daumal - Mount Analogue

Erich Kastner - Going to the Dogs

Erich Kastner - Let's Face It - Poems

Herbert Rosendorfer - Architect of Ruins

Javias Marias - Dark Back of Time

Charles Brockden Brown - Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker

Bruno Schulz - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Gabriele D'Annunzio - Pleasure - (Forthcoming in Penguin Classics)

Manuel Puig - Pubis Angelical

Jens Peter Jacobsen - Niels Lyhne

James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Gaito Gazdanov - The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

Laszlo Krasznahorkai - Satantango

Jean Echenoz - I'm Off

David Gascoyne - Collected Poems

Marc Auge - No Fixed Abode

Alexander Kluge - Air Raid

 

I hope among all the other books that I'd like to read that I manage to get to these, out of the contemporary books that I've read recently Hawthorn and Child probably stands out as being the one that impressed the most, I've read that it'll be published in September by New Directions, it is everything that it's been hyped to be, although in truth it's a book that really doesn't need to be hyped at all, it impresses entirely on it's own merits. I greatly enjoyed Rawi Hage's Cockroach, his IMPAC prize winning novel De Niro's Game is being reissued in the near future by Penguin, and I'd very much like to read it. Otto dov Kulka's book was a book not easily forgotten, which led to a reading of Night by Elie Wiesel which I've been meaning to read for a long time, another being Fateless by Imre Kertész which I've had a copy put aside to read longer than I care to contemplate. Kurt Tucholsky's only full novel - Castle Gripsholm is a novel that deserves a reprint/reissue, it looks like it could make an ideal candidate for a NYRB classics title, which reminded me of Erich Kastner's novel Going to the Dogs which seems like an ideal novel to head for after reading Castle Gripsholm. I'm not too sure what to expect of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly which is half of the allure, the title alone attracted my attention, other than Sky-Walk or The Man Unknown to Himself which I think at the moment is a little more harder to come by, his fascination with somnambulism seems very curious. Among my reading at the moment I'm just about starting out on Premendra Mitra's Mosquito and Other Stories, Penguin India - and also perhaps Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, but these lists are always subject to, (constant), change.