In Cold Blood

A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences

Truman Capote, 1966

(March 2011)

I started reading this after Jessie Lamb, before realizing I wasn’t quite in the mood and needed something cheerier. Then the film adaptation pops up in 69 as an hilariously self-inflicted cock-block, which I took as a sign not to take too long in getting back to it.

Plain Trains and Automobiles

By training I’m a geographer. Geography’s a fairly amorphous subject – if you push it too far in any one direction it becomes something else: ecology, demography, vulcanology, etc. It exists in the blurred, smudged area where dozens of different disciplines overlap. It’s a pretty good fit for me in that respect, in that I’m interested in quite a bit and I know a reasonable amount about a fair number of fields, but I’m certainly not an expert in any one thing. Plus I really like maps.

There's a turtle under there, somewhere

Habibi

Craig Thompson, 2011

(March 2012)

I really don’t know what to say about this. The only definite thing is that this book is gorgeous, inside and out. The publishers have given it a very worthy binding and the illustrations are beautiful - stunningly so. I’d love to get some of the original artwork, but it’s probably well out of my reach. As for where I stand on the rest of it, I’m not sure.

  

69

Ryu Murakami, 1985 [Ralph F McCarthy, 1993]

(March 2012)

I deserved this one. After a Japanese novel in translation – which was dire – and a short book about a teenager – who was suicidal – I end up reading a short Japanese book in translation, about a teenager. Fortunately it isn’t dire and the protagonist actually seems to want to live.

Künstlerroman

On Saturday I’ll have kept this blog going for 6 months, which is about 5 more than I thought I’d achieve when I started. Well done me. After 3 years at my last school, I also got transferred to a new one this month (which is why my comment responses have been a little sporadic, new schedule and all). Given all that, it seems like a good time to take stock, give some thanks, and indulge in a little bit of self-absorbed introspection. Like that’s not what this isn’t all about anyway.

There's something I've been meaning to tell you...

On Efficiency and Redundancy in Information Transmission

Or, No Point Teaching Granny to Suck Eggs

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers, 2011

(March 2012)

So after harping on about the misogyny in the last book I read, this one opens with a teenage girl being kept prisoner in a spare room, with bicycle locks around her ankles and only a bucket to piss in. Plus ça change.

  

Past Future Present Tense

In some fields Japan is years ahead of the rest of the world

Gina Calver/Alamy

Another article about Japan in the Guardian (well, Observer). Another opportunity for a collective facepalm by any and all of us who know anything at all about the country.

One ha' penny, two ha' penny

Hot cross buns.

If you have no daughters,

Paprika

Yasutaka Tsutsui, 1993 [Andrew Driver, 2009]

(March 2012)

A Japanese master to be ranked alongside Haruki Murakami.

This is what it says on the back cover. Tellingly it doesn’t say who this Japanese master is. I have a hard time believing it’s the author of this book, and this is meant to be his ‘masterpiece’. Maybe they weren’t ranking writing ability but some other skill-set. Ballroom dancing perhaps, or maybe speed-eating.