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Thanks, OG- and Lines. I think I'll read it...

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

The Face of Another, by Kobo Abe.

I also just read the 40-page interview of Brian Michael Bendis in The Comics Journal #266. I haven't previously read any of Bendis's comics, and I'm not in any rush to do so after reading what he has to say, but it's an interesting perspective on the industry anyhow.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski. Not at all as good as Post Office.

Just finished The Martian Chronicles last night. Such a beautiful book. Bradbury is poetry in prose.

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I read that last summer and yeah, it's great. I like it much better than his novels that I've read.

The other day I read Secret Rendezvous, by Kobo Abe, which means I've now finished reading everything of his that's been translated to english.

For those unfamiliar with Abe, he was a Japanese author who wrote novels, plays and short stories from around the early 50s up until his death in the early 90s, and gained an international reputation for his novel Woman in the Dunes (which was adapted to film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964, followed by a couple other adaptations by Teshigahara). His novels are characterized by elements of science fiction and mystery, very loose plots, and a lot of heavy symbolism. He's often compared to Kafka but I think his writing is more cerebral and also shares a lot of ground with Samuel Beckett.

Secret Rendezvous, along with Kangaroo Notebook and Inter Ice Age 4 are his weaker novels in spite of some really amazing ideas (Rendezvous is framed as a series of notebook reports written in the third person by a man trying to find his wife in a hospital).

Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, The Ark Sakura and The Ruined Map are his better novels. Of his plays, my favorite is Friends - which is about a man held hostage by a communally oriented family that has invaded his home - followed by Involuntary Homicide.

For a great introduction to his work, try and find his short story-collection, Beyond the Curve.

Abe sounds damn cool...I will try to dig one of his novels up. Are there any translations that are better than others?

Meanwhile:

Foundation - Issac Asimov

I've read Secret Rendezvous and checked out Beyond The Curve but never got around to reading it. I'll check it out again sometime.

OK

Just read a couple reviews of Woman in the Dunes (not that I don't trust Line's exquisite taste in film and literature, as I do), and it seems very interesting. I'll pop it next on my list of stuff to read...Most reviewers cite the book as one of the most important japanese novels of the 20th century.

As far as I know there have only been three translators. E. Dale Saunders did the earlier novels (Woman in the Dunes -> The Box Man), Juliet Winters Carpenter did the later ones (Secret Rendezvous -> Kangaroo Notebook), and Donald Keene did the plays.

For the novels, I can't really say - Winters Carpenter's books are probably easier to read (with the exception of Woman in the Dunes) - but I haven't read Abe in the original Japanese so I can't say who translates him best. If you're interested in comparing the two, I'd suggest checking out Saunders' translation of The Ruined Map, followed by Carpenter's translation of the title story of Beyond the Curve (which is actually just the epilog from "Map") - I think that's the only time where he's had the same thing done by two different translators.

I did however get to compare Keene's translation of another text, Kenko's Tsurezuregusa, to the original when I was translating parts of that, and I really think the guy's a genius. Very easy and fun to read and he really captures the feel of the original text (Tsurezuregusa). Of Abe's stuff, the one I had the most fun reading was Keene's translation of Friends.

That sounds about right. Woman in the Dunes definitely would definitely make my short list of great novels. For 20th century Japanese authors the only one who I can think of whom I might like better than Abe is Kenji Miyazawa (mainly for his short stories and poems). In any event I hope you do check Abe's stuff out, he's definitely one of a kind and worth seeing for yourself what you think of his writing.

What did you think of Secret Rendezvous, Garret? Did it make sense to you or did you find it a little too full of holes, also? The Ark Sakura was also really all over the place, but I felt that one was able to bring the ideas to a more satisfying and coherent conclusion than Kangaroo Notebook and Rendezvous, where a lot of the threads I think are just arbitrarilly thrown out there.

I found it a little hard to follow at times. In short, I felt a little worn out afterwards and that's probably why I didn't start in on Beyond The Curve.

(Not to go off topic but I've been meaning to ask: what did you think of Steamboy?)

Bah, what I want to say just isn't coming to me right now. Steamboy is okay though, I'll try to write a review tomorrow.

-Edit- new reading: Counter Clock World, by Philip K. Dick and The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum.

Today I finished reading The Taking by Dean Koontz. Good book. It's an alien invasion story about a husband and wife that go hunting for lost and lonely children through their nightmarish town, which is being taken over by gross alien fungi, dead people, UFOs, and other scary Dean Koontz concoctions. It deals with the theme of never turning to despair. The end unfolds as a spiritual message and a theory about space and the afterlife. Halfway through, it starts to drag a little and you're waiting for a lot of action, which does come, though nothing action-packed. This is a creepy shindig that also features a child murderer and a bee from hell. I recommend it.

Recently I've read Notes From the Underground, the first Harry Potter book, and several school books. I'm also slowly marching through Don Quixote (Cervantes), the Jungle Books (Kipling), and Burmese Days (Orwell). Meanwhile, been rereading some of Kenji Miyazawa's short stories: The Earthgod and the Fox, General Son Ba-yu, Ozbel and the Elephant, the First Deer Dance and the Bears of Nametoko.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet by James Mannn

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"Believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!"
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom

The Revelation by Bentley Little

The man who delivered such masterfully shocking and bizarely original short stories in The Collection delivers a pretty generic and unimpressive tale of man vs. Satan.
Are there any Bentley Little fans or at least people who have read his other work that could recommend onbe of his other novels to me?

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"Like all dreamers, Steven mistook disenchantment for truth."

"The Innocent" by Harlan Coben. I could not put it down. I read half in one night and the other half the following day.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons.....for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.

Just re-read Catch 22 by accident. Started browsing the first pages and got sucked in again.

B4 that, The Science of Discworld III - silly title, fun kind of book (unless you like Intelligent Design theories, then it is an evil little book ). Plenty of bite-size examinations of evolution theories, genetic complexities and ways to travel in time . Oh, and a story about making the least-theological Darwin possible .

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Confessions of a Crap Artist & Our Friends from Frolix 8 (K. Dick), Malone Dies (Beckett), Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Mishima), Once and Forever (Miyazawa), Don Quixote Part I (Cervantes), Ender's Game (Card), Jungle Books (Kipling), The Castle (Kafka), Can You Feel Anything When I do This? (Sheckley), Burmese Days (Orwell), Lolita (Nabokov), Other People (Martin Amis), Harry Potter books 2-5, Hamlet (Shakespeare).

I finally read On the Road by Kerouac. I liked it, I guess, but I have to say I became a bit bored in the middle of it.

Finished: Foundation and Empire (Asimov)

Started: Second Foundation (Asimov)