Reading Borges

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greats. One of those writers that you really must read.

I've been carrying "Fictions" around in my bag for two weeks now. I've managed to read two stories from it.

I just can't read it. Perhaps if I'd come to Borges while I was younger and studying literature then I would have had the mental agility to read it, but not now when I primarily read for pleasure. I do like to feel challenged occasionally in my reading and certainly to learn something new, but this is too much. It is impenetrable.

The note from the translator says it all:
"I have presumed the reader to possess more or less the range of general or world history or culture that JLB makes constant reference to, or to have access to such reference books and other sources as would supply any need there".

It may be worth trying to find my way through, so that I too love Borges, but I'm just not in the right mindset at the moment.

I think Borges in going back to the library unread.

Favourite Passage: "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G K Chesterton

A description of the lead character, Gabriel Syme's family:

"He came from a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing esle. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Book of the Month: February 2009

Rather late but I've been deliberating.

After much thought, February's Book of the Month is "Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe" by Doreen Baingana.

The book consists of eight connected short stories about Christine and her two sisters, coming of age in Uganda. A full review can be found here, but in brief, I read it in the space of a few hours and felt the deepest empathy for the characters.

Connections: "Giraffe" and "Natural History of Unicorns"

"Giraffe" by J M Ledgard is a fictionalised account of a real life incident involving giraffes in a Czechoslovakian zoo in the 1970s.

“The Natural History of Unicorns” is a non-fiction book looking at the origins and persistence of the unicorn myth.

What connects these two books?

Before I read “Giraffe” I had never heard of the Okapi, the closest relative of the giraffe, but without the long legs or neck. And then, I encountered it again in “The Natural History of Unicorns” as one of the possible candidates for being the source of the unicorn.

999 Challenge Update: End of February

My aim at the beginning of the month was to have read three books in each category by the end of the month. This plan went awry. Numbers-wise I'm still on target, but I have been enticed by books in the Around the World category at the expense of others.


1001 Books to Read Before You Die
1. Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
2. Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
3. Slow Man by J M Coetzee


Fiction Authors that are New to Me
1. Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
2. The Underground Man by Mick Jackson


Crime and Detectives around the world (each one from a different country)
1. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg (Denmark and Greenland)
2. Real World by Natsuo Kirino (Japan)
3. Ice Moon by Jan Costin Wagner (Finland)


Theme: Dystopia
1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. The Declaration by Gemma Malley
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury


Retro: Beats, Hippies, 1960s and Counter-Culture (fiction and non-fiction)
1. Retro Retro edited by Amy Prior
2. 1968: The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky


Around the World (fiction set outside of the UK and USA - each one from a different country)
1. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (Australia)
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini (Afghanistan)
3. Distant Star by Roberto Bolano
4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
5. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
6. Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe by Doreen Baingana


Non-Fiction
1. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
2. Los Angeles without a Map by Richard Rayner


Complete Works of - T C Boyle
1. East is East by T C Boyle
2. The Inner Circle by T C Boyle
3. A Friend of the Earth by T C Boyle


Themed Titles - Animals (a different animal in each title)
1. The Boy Who Kicked Pigs by Tom Baker
2. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
3. Giraffe by J M Ledgard