Tag Archives: 4 Kafkas

Four Major Plays, Volume II, by Henrik Ibsen (1881-1896)

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Prior to this I’d only read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, and while these four plays are less significant, they built off of the other Ibsen I’d read while covering more thematic ground.  Ibsen was a progressive decades ahead of his time, and today these plays seem more relevant than ever, covering environmental protection, the place of women in society, the dangers of populism, parents wielding control over children, and choosing money over love.  I enjoyed the denser John Gabriel Borkman much less due to its heavy exposition, but maybe also because I haven’t gotten old yet.

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Ghosts 

An Enemy of the People  

The Lady From the Sea  

John Gabriel Borkman  

Fight Scenes, by Greg Bottoms (2008)

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Fight Scenes is about growing up in the 1980s with your friend whose dad keeps naked pictures of women he’s slept with under his bed; it’s about dealing with bullies and looking at porn with girls you like and sitting in front of the 7-Eleven and smoking pot in the woods and fending off crazy racists at the local Popeye’s.  Bottoms shows us these moments in a series of vignettes that all say more than they seem to at first glance, so that the book shows us both his ridiculous middle-school adventures and how fucked up life can be.

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Where I Got It

A 2016 Christmas gift from the same friend who got me Rose of No Man’s Land, which is also pretty rad.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan (2001)

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In 1935 Britain, a thirteen-year-old girl’s overactive imagination and accidental brush with the c-word lead her to send an innocent man to prison for a sex crime.  While the first half covers the misunderstanding, the second deals with the grim early days of World War II, both on the French front and in the hospitals.  Everything about this book feels like it shouldn’t work (historical fiction, child narrator, loaded politics) but it does, which speaks to McEwan’s skill as a storyteller.  Though the prose is often slow, there are enough hard-hitting dramatic moments to make this an intense read.

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Where I Got It

From a friend who was getting rid of books in the summer of 2015. I have mixed feelings about movie cover tie-ins, but this one pulls it off quite well.

Villa Incognito, by Tom Robbins (2003)

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Like every Tom Robbins novel, this one starts out with a chaotic bang: a large-scrotumed talking tanuki parachutes into nineteenth century Japan to drink sake and sleep with girls; meanwhile a band of ex-GIs in southeast Asia panics when their drug-smuggling comrade gets caught in the act. Robbins takes a while to tie his scattered opening together, but when he does, the plot feels surprisingly coherent. We also go along with his writing because it’s devilishly funny and wittily intelligent as we fall into his bizarre world where we never quite know what’s coming, but feel okay with that.

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Where I Got It

From a friend in spring 2015 who thought my writing reminded him of Tom Robbins’s.  He gave me this one along with Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, which I read last year before I started this book blog.

Golgo 13: Supergun, by Takao Saito (1979 & 1997)

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Golgo 13 is Japan’s longest-running manga series, chronicling the exploits of super-tough, laconic sniper Duke Togo, alias Golgo 13.  The two jobs in this collection involve an Iraqi ballistic superweapon (a story where both Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein feature prominently) and a mafia hit and run, plus a background dossier on Togo himself.  If you’re looking for an intro to pulp Japanese action manga, start here—the drawings are dark and the midnight cityscapes majestic, with plenty of guns, planes, action, and sex to capture the feel of an ‘80s action movie in comic form.

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Where I Got It

Christmas 2016, from a friend who knew I loved the Golgo 13 NES games. While every convenience store in Japan sells the Japanese manga books, I never got to the chance to check them out when I lived there since English translations are harder to find, .

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Wikipedia

Playthrough video of Golgo 13 – Top Secret Episode on the NES

The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (1967)

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Marshall McLuhan is the guy Woody Allen pulls from offscreen to prove his point to the pretentious academic in Annie Hall.  His work in the 1960s tackles the power of media and its ability to deliver information in different forms; this book is a short, coherent explanation of how media affects us, assembled by graphic designer Quentin Fiore with black and white photos to enhance McLuhan’s points.  There are comics, two-page spreads, ‘60s pop culture, and a page printed in backwards text to keep things interesting, pushing the limits of what the printed form can do.  Very cool.

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Where I Got It

Found in a free box outside my apartment building with a bunch of other textbooks and books on programming, sometime in the fall of 2015.  This was the only one that looked interesting.

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Official site

Aphorisms on Love and Hate, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1878)

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This pocket-sized British edition of Nietzsche reflections is pretty awesome: it’s more manageable than the full-length essays by Nietzsche I’d read previously, but more substantial than the 140 character Nietzsche Twitter feed.  The editors picked 55 pages of reflections from Human, All Too Human that tackle such truths as how we despise the people we pretend to like, how we can’t ever really promise to always love someone, why rich people just don’t understand their own cruelties, and why those who seek to understand life will always undergo struggle.  Nietzsche’s ideas are relatable and real, so check ‘em out.

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Where I Got It

Picked up from the break room free table at the university press where I used to work, sometime in the spring of 2015.

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Nietzsche quotes on Twitter

Nietzsche on Love (essay)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

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Is fleeting greatness worth the ultimate cost?  How many of us can reach that greatness?  Furthermore, what happens when we feel that greatness lies within our grasp but just can’t seem to reach it?  These questions feel more pronounced in the Wicked + The Divine’s second collection, where mere mortal protagonist Laura tries vainly to reproduce the teensy little miracle we saw in Book 1 and questions her relationship to the Pantheon of reincarnated gods that the world continues to fawn over.  Fantasy works best when it tackles real-world values in relatable ways, and this series does it beautifully.

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Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 1).

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Book trailer on Youtube

Longer review, with pictures

 

Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger (1990)

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I have zero interest in football, but I enjoyed Bissinger’s book because it’s mostly about the all-encompassing influence that football holds over midwestern culture.  Bissinger spent a year in the west Texas town of Odessa following its high school football team to the state championship, and shows how completely football trumps academics and leads the town to build a $5.6 million stadium for its high school.  He also discusses how racial tensions and Reagan-era politics affected the region—history seen from ground level.

There’s a lot of football play-by-plays too, but I kind of skimmed over those.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online a few weeks ago, part of the research process for my new novel.

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Bissinger reflects on Friday Night Lights 25 years later (Sports Illustrated)

Interview with Bissinger on the book’s 25th anniversary (NPR)

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925)

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I found Mrs. Dalloway more accessible than other Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read, possibly because it’s also shorter.  The stream-of-consciousness novel shows a day in the life of a fiftysomething socialite reflecting on the mundanity of her married life, the passionate love of her youth, and her deeply hidden feelings for a female friend.  My favorite scenes, though, were the surreal and hard-hitting takes on WWI shell shock in the hallucinatory ramblings of ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith.

There’s a lot to like here, but it’s still high modernism and can get…dense.

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4-kafkas

Where I Got It

From a grad school friend who had two copies, Summer 2015.

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Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer (essay)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (1984)

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Kundera’s prose is just plain beautiful: lyrical, thought-provoking, and melodic, divided into short, powerful scenes that make for lots of page-turning, so an extra kudos to translator Michael Henry Heim for capturing the power of the original Czech.  The plot involves a man who cheats constantly on his wife, but the plot comes second to Kundera’s other subjects: love, the 1968 Prague Spring/Communist invasion by Russia, more love, sex, communication, more sex, fate, dogs, fidelity, being an ex-pat, loyalty to one’s ideals, and old age.  A great read, though a quick warning: the philosophical reflections do get dense.

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4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from a friend I visited in Columbus, Ohio who was downsizing his book collection and recommended it highly, Summer 2015.

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Milan Kundera on Wikipedia

How Important is Milan Kundera Today? (2015 article in The Guardian)

We Are Market Basket, by Daniel Korschun & Grant Welker (2015)

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Full Disclosure: I worked for Market Basket ten or so years before the 2014 protests made national news, but I would have enjoyed this book either way.  In case you missed it: a rivalry among the Demoulas family split the grocery chain between the workers and the board, with the power-hungry directors firing CEO Arthur T., who believed in supporting workers and treating customers fairly.  This book explains not only the history behind the protest, but the business practices that both fostered it and allow Market Basket to flourish in a world dominated by Milton Friedman’s shareholder-favoring philosophies.  Nice.

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4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Christmas Gift, 2015.

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More on the Market Basket Protests (Wikipedia)

When the Market Basket Workers Fight Back, Everyone Wins (my 2014 thoughts on the protests)