You’ll have to excuse the fact that not only am I writing this days later than I should’ve but I don’t have all my July reads stacked on top of each other in one neat little picture like I normally do. July was my last month in Bellingham so a good part of it was spent packing everything away into boxes, including my books, and the first two books I read this month were leant to me so I had to give them back to their lenders before I left, so they all got split up, and thus I present to you three separate pictures (two my own, one via Google) of the books I read in July.
Ok! Enough! On to the good stuff.
July reads, in chronological order:
Snow Country and Thousand Cranes | Yasunari Kawabata
You may remember Kawabata’s name since I read The Lake a few months ago. That was my first work of his, and this collection of two of his most famous works was my second (and third). “Snow Country” takes place at a ski resort and centers around a frequent visitor to the resort and the geisha he develops a relationship with. I’ll admit, I found this story beautifully written but not as interesting as “Thousand Cranes,” in which a young man comes to develop a relationship with his father’s mistress and her daughter whilst attending a tea ceremony with them after his father’s death. The tradition of the tea ceremony and its rich history make for an excellent vehicle through which Kawabata examines death and nostalgia and desire. Kawabata is subtle in a way that most authors I read certainly aren’t, which is probably why I find his texts both easy and difficult to read; they’re misleadingly simple, but actually require a great deal of close reading.
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1979 | Haruki Murakami
How Many Murakami Books Can Alex Read in 2017? Apparently, quite a few. Like the previous book, this one contains two stories, the difference being that these two are related to each other. Hear the Wind Sing was Murakami’s first novel, with Pinball, 1979 serving as a kind of sequel (it follows the lives of different characters who appear in the first story but aren’t focused on). For someone who’s read my fair share of Murakami’s later works, these stories offered some insight into where his classic Murakami Moves originated. Nameless protagonists, Beatles music, jazz music, whiskey bars, and of course, women, abound here as they do in every other one of his books. While each story was fun and enjoyable in the same way that every other Murakami story is fun and enjoyable, my favorite part was his introduction to Hear the Wind Sing where he writes about becoming a writer and his life before he started writing. You can tell from the introduction how much of himself and his life lives on through every one of his many protagonists, and while my reaction to most of it was “of course, of course,” I found it pretty endearing.
Chemistry | Weike Wang
Ever since I read a review of this book in The Guardian I’ve been trying to get my hands on it, which apparently a lot of other people were doing as well, since it was sold out of my local bookstore for weeks, but alas, I finally managed to snag my own copy, which is great, because this book is great, and I think I need to take a breath here. Okay. All better. I could really learn a lesson from Wang, whose sentences are as incisive and condensed as lines in a Robert Creeley poem. Chemistry is about a young Chinese-American doctoral student studying–you guessed it–chemistry, and trying to reconcile her conflicted feelings about her long-term relationship with her childhood as the daughter of two Chinese immigrants. It’s a smart book, and one that I think anyone with commitment or intimacy issues can relate to. Actually, anyone who’s ever been unsure about anything in life can relate to Wang’s narrator’s struggles.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again | David Foster Wallace
This book came as a recommendation to me by someone to whom I had just admitted that I’d never read anything by David Foster Wallace. This, he said, might be a better stepping stone into Wallace than Infinite Jest–a book I’ve been thoroughly averse to reading after my clumsy, frustrating, and often demoralizing attempt at Gravity’s Rainbow at the start of this year. In many ways, I think he was right. The first impression you get from reading this collection of essays and arguments is “this guy is pretty goddamn smart.” The second impression you might get, and the one I certainly got, was “where is this pretty goddamn smart guy’s editor?” Some of these essays, I’ll be frank, are just unnecessarily long. Redundancies frolic with verbose (though sometimes, yes, amusing) descriptions of things I just can’t quite seem to care about and am simultaneously in awe of and concerned that Wallace even notices (such as, but not limited to, every motherf***ing detail about professional tennis). All that aside, there are some insanely good essays in here. One specifically, about television and the TV generation and watching and being watched had me nodding my head so emphatically I’m lucky I didn’t pull something. The last essay, in which he describes his experience on a Celebrity Cruise, is also quite entertaining, and will certainly strike a chord with anyone else who finds “curated fun” a nauseatingly depressing experience. Reading this book restored my confidence to one day read Infinite Jest, which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing, I don’t know yet, I guess I’ll find out. I’m still trying to figure out if Gravity’s Rainbow did more harm than good to me.
Human Acts | Han Kang
watchtheFruits 