Call for the Dead

John le Carré, 1961

(October 2017)

I’d not read any le Carré before, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. A satisfyingly unthrilling thriller about downbeat spies in 1960’s suburbia. An amateur dramatics society plays a significant role. A supporting character keeps bees. The main character spends much of the time in bed. The espionage equivalent of a cosy catastrophe, which is exactly what I needed on a four-hour train ride through rural Japan in the pissing rain.

The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata, 1954 [Edward G. Seidensticker, 1970]

(January 2015)

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

-Joe Haldeman

Usurper of the Sun

Housuke Nojiri, 2002 [John Wunderley, 2009]

(January 2014)

I think I’m going to have to make my peace with Japanese SF, or at least the kind of Japanese SF that’s most easily available in translation. It does so very often exhibit almost perfectly the archetypal strengths and weaknesses ascribed to the genre: strong conceptual explorations, interesting ideas, minimal characterization, woeful prose.