The top 7 books to read in March 2023

Posted on March 2, 2023 by WordsAndPeace

Here are
The top 7 books
I plan to read in March 2023

As you know, I’m less and less requesting new books, andd focusing instead on my various TBRs.
So I’m thrilled to announce that this month, I’ll be starting a project I had in mind for a while:
– besides reading at least one book from my physical shelf,
– I also picked a random title from my long Goodreads TBR (1,153 titles as I’m writing this), and I picked this way:
In 2022, I started filling a jar with titles: each time I would see mention, on another blog, of a book that had been on my TBR for a while, I added that title to my jar. So I currently have a lot of papers in my jar, and I finally started digging to read at least one of these books.
– Also, I have decided to pick a random title (with random generator number) from the books I added to my TBR last month.

Each month, I want to keep reading a book in Italian or Spanish – in alternation.
The Japanese Literature Challenge is officially over, but I will keep reading Japanese titles throughout the year.
And on top of that, there are always surprise titles, that my French students want to read with me.
So here is a sample of what I am planning on reading this month:

📚 CURRENTLY READING 📚

📚 Why Read The Classics?
by Italo Calvino
Nonfiction / Book on Books
Perché leggere i classici
was published in 1991
306 pages

Reading in Italian.
Besides the brilliant first essay on Why Read the Classics?, the other 35 essays each focusses on a different classic.
So far, I have been reading the part focused on Antiquity: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, and Plinius the Elder.

📚 Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence,
by Peter C. Bouteneff
Nonfiction / Biography / Music / Eastern Orthodoxy
Published in 2015
231 pages

I am now more in the meaty part. And discovering how some of his works are so structured on the text, I had no idea! Fascinating!

“Listeners often speak of a certain mystery in the way that Arvo Pärt evokes spirituality through his music, but no one has taken a sustained, close look at how he achieves this. Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence examines the powerful interplay between Pärt’s music and the composer’s own deep roots in the Orthodox Christian faith—a relationship that has born much creative fruit and won the hearts of countless listeners across the globe.”

📚 L’Arabe du futur :
Une jeunesse au Moyen-Orient, 1978–1984
(L’Arabe du futur, #1)
by Riad Sattouf
French nonfiction – Graphic novel
Memoir – History
Published in 2014
158 pages
Available in English as
The Arab of the Future:
A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984

Reading with French student F.

My French student F. enjoys exploring different genre, so she chose this nonfiction graphic “novel”.
It’s a nice way of reviewing a major page in world history!
I like how the artist plays the different background colors.
There are 6 volumes in the series, covering the author’s life from 1978 to 2011.
Just in the first quarter of the book, but we start seeing interesting cultural differences.

“The Arab of the Future, the #1 French best-seller, tells the unforgettable story of Riad Sattouf’s childhood, spent in the shadows of 3 dictators—Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez al-Assad, and his father.
In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Assad’s Syria–but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation.
Riad, delicate and wide-eyed, follows in the trail of his mismatched parents; his mother, a bookish French student, is as modest as his father is flamboyant. Venturing first to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State and then joining the family tribe in Homs, Syria, they hold fast to the vision of the paradise that always lies just around the corner. And hold they do, though food is scarce, children kill dogs for sport, and with locks banned, the Sattoufs come home one day to discover another family occupying their apartment. The ultimate outsider, Riad, with his flowing blond hair, is called the ultimate insult… Jewish. And in no time at all, his father has come up with yet another grand plan, moving from building a new people to building his own great palace.
Brimming with life and dark humor, The Arab of the Future reveals the truth and texture of one eccentric family in an absurd Middle East, and also introduces a master cartoonist in a work destined to stand alongside Maus and Persepolis.”

I am acually also reading two other books on Orthodox spirituality.
I will talk about them when I am done.

📚 READING NEXT 📚

📚 The Fifth Rule of Ten
(Tenzing Norbu Mysteres #5)
by Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay
2016
384 pages

This is the result of my jar pick!
I have really enjoyed the first 4 books in this series, and realized I had never read the last volume. So glad I picked this one!
The detective is an ex-Buddhist monk, so it’s not your usual thriller pace, and there are intyeresting reflection on life.

“Be mindful, both making and keeping commitments, that they be springboards to liberation, instead of suffering.
That’s the Fifth Rule of Ten
Private investigator and ex-Buddhist monk Tenzing Norbu is wrestling with commitments on all fronts. He and his fiancée, Julie, can’t seem to commit to an actual wedding date. Ten’s dropped the ball on a pledge to find his assistant Kim’s missing brother, Bobby. Even his dreams hint at broken vows. And now his best friends, Lama Yeshe and Lama Lobsang, are about to land in Los Angeles with a Tibetan entourage for an unexpected 10-day fund-raising tour, sponsored by the local Buddhist Temple Ten abandoned 12 years earlier. Obligations are piling on, and for the first time in his life Tenzing Norbu is finding it hard to breathe.
Then an anonymous cell phone voice taunts Ten as he waits for his best friends at LAX, a mysterious missive lands in Tenzing’s mailbox, and the bloody evidence of foul play on a Griffith Park trail points directly to him. Tenzing knows that something dark is afoot, and the ensuing series of ominous events and disconcerting clues pull Ten into a dark mirror-world of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He joins forces with Yeshe, Lobsang, his ex-partner, Bill, and his hack-tivist buddy, Mike, to track down the Patient Zero of this epidemic of criminal chaos. In The Fifth Rule of Ten, our hero is forced into a life-and-death battle with a powerful shadow presence whose roots reach way back in time. Tenzing must commit to fully embracing his own past, or lose everything he now holds dear.”

📚 Éclipses japonaises,
by Éric Faye
Literary fiction
2016
240 pages

This is the random book from the titles I added to my TBR last month.

And I added it to my TBR because the title attracted my attention (just say the word “Japanese” and I wake up!).

Plus I read Nagasaki by the same author a few years ago, and gave it “5 Eiffel Towers”!

Éclipses japonaises hasn’t been pubished yet in French, so here is a translation of the official synopsis:
In 1966, an American G. I. mysteriously disappeared during a patrol in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. He is considered “missing”.
At the end of the 1970s, on the coasts of the Sea of Japan, men and women, of all ages and from all walks of life, vanished. Among them, a schoolgirl who came home alone from school, an archaeologist who was about to post her thesis, and a future nurse who wanted to buy an ice cream.
“Hidden by the gods”, as they say in Japanese.These victims left no trace, not a clue, thus puzzling the investigators. One by one, the cases got closed, the families left to incomprehension, and the disappeared poeple forgotten.
In 1987, Korean Air Flight 858 exploded in midair. One of the terrorists, who got off the plane during a stopover, was arrested. She spoke in perfect Japanese. However, the police eventually identified a spy who came straight from North Korea.
Twenty-five years later, the Japanese “hidden by the gods” reappeared like ghosts, in the lands of Kim Jong-un.
Then, it is the turn of the G. I. to reappear in a North Korean propaganda TV movie, where the CIA saw him playing the role of a hated American.
Are all these cases related?

🎧 CURRENT AND NEXT AUDIOBOOKS 🎧

🎧 I Am a Cat,
by Natsume Soseki
Japanese literary fiction
吾輩は猫である
was first published in 1905
Translated by Graeme Wilson and Aiko Ito
470 pages
It counts for The Japanese Literature Challenge
and The Classics Club

I have a couple more hours of this one.

🎧 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,
by Laurence Sterne
Literary fiction / Humor
1767
735 pages
21H58
It counts for The Classics Club

Some years ago, I listened to My Great Books, an excellent lecture given by Salman Rushdie at Emory University, where he shares about the great books in his life.
If you love classics, I highly encourage you to watch this video.
The first classic he mentioned was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in 1767, yes, you read this right, by the Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).
What Rushdie said about it was so inspiring that I added it to my TBR.
I bumped into it several times recently (it is mentioned in Rouvrir le roman, and in I Am A Cat – my current audiobook), so the time has fially come for me to dive in!
My library has a good audiobook version of it available through Hoopla, so I’m planning on partially listening to it. But I will also probably read some passages, or at least check a print book, to read important relevant notes.

“Endlessly digressive, boundlessly imaginative and unmatched in its absurd and timeless wit.
Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first ‘postmodern’ novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations.”

Have you read it? Your thoughts? Any recommended edition for the notes?

HAVE YOU READ OR ARE YOU PLANNING TO READ
ANY OF THESE?
DO YOU HAVE A SECIAL WAY OF TACKLING YOUR TBRs?
WHAT ARE YOUR READING PLANS FOR MARCH?

https://linktr.ee/wordsandpeace

The top 7 books to read in February 2023

Posted on February 2, 2023 by WordsAndPeace

Here are
The top 7 books
I plan to read in February 2023

January-February (not March this year) is the Japanese Literature challenge, in which I am (slowly) participating. I hope to read at least two books this month for this.
My French students keep me busy with reading French books with them.
I hope to be able to read a nonfiction in Italian by my favorite Italian author.
I read/listened to 12 books in January, so I should be able to read more than the titles below, but they are the priority titles for me this month.

📚 CURRENTLY READING 📚

📚 Okamoto Kidō: Master of the Uncanny,
by Kidō Okamoto
Japanese short stories (before 1939)
Translated by Nancy H. Ross
168 pages
It counts for The Japanese Literature Challenge
and The Classics Club

I’m about 25%, and really enjoying these quirky stories!

“Born just after Japan transitioned from the Shogunate to Meiji, Kidō grew up in a samurai-oriented world being transformed by the West in many ways. As a reporter he covered domestic development and overseas wars, while also marrying a traditional geisha, eventually becoming a playwright and author. In addition to a number of well-received plays, he also penned more than fifty horror stories over a roughly ten-year period starting in the mid-1920s. Just prior to this period, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 destroyed almost everything in Tokyo that remained from the Edo era, and Japanese horror itself was transitioning from the traditional uncanny stories to more modern horror structures.

While many of Kidō’s stories are retellings of tales from China and other nations, he also drew on a diverse range of traditions, including the heritage of Edo-era storytellers such as Ueda Akinari and Asai Ryōi, to produce a dazzling array of work covering the entire spectrum from time-honored ghost tropes to modern horror. The majority of his stories were collected in four volumes: Seiadō kidan (1926), Kindai iyō hen (1926), Iyō hen (1933), and Kaijū (1936).

Kidō remains popular for his elegant, low-key style, subtly introducing the “other” into the background, and raising the specter of the uncanny indirectly and often indistinctly. His fiction spans an enormous range of material, much of it dealing with the uncanny, and as a pioneer in the field his work formed the foundation for the new generation of Japanese authors emerging in post-Restoration literature.

This selection (12 stories) presents a dozen of his best stories: pieces which remain in print almost a century later, and continue to enchant readers—and writers—today. Finally, English-reading audiences can enjoy his strange visions as well.”

📚 Rouvrir le roman,
by Sophie Divry
French nonfiction/ Book about books
Published in 2017
208 pages
Reading with French student F.

Interesting reflections on how and why authors write.

“This book aims to discuss preconceived ideas that weigh on the conscience of contemporary French writers. The main purpose is to show that the novel is not dead, and that literature is worth it.
Sophie Divry offers solutions to reset the novel into a place of research and adventure. She shares her ideas for a literature that is more demanding, more lively and more tenacious, more necessary for authors and readers alike.”

📚 120, rue de la gare,
(Nestor Burma #1)
by Léo Malet
French mystery
Published in 1946
215 pages
Available in English as
Bloody Streets of Paris
It counts for The Classics Club
Reading with French student E.

Wow, this is my first book by Léo Malet, and it is great fun! There are hilarious details, and I like how the detective Nestor Burma goes around to figure out what happened.

“Set in France during World War II, this is Léo Malet’s first novel starring detective Nestor Burma.
Burma’s assistant Bob Colomer, having just arrived in France after being held prisoner in a German camp, is murdered at the Lyon station as soon as he reunites with his boss. Colomer’s last words, whispered to Burma as he lay dying, are the address 120 Station Street, the same address Burma had heard from an agonizing patient in a military hospital.
And thus begins an investigation that will force Burma to revisit episodes from his past he thought he had buried long ago, and that will take him from Vichy France to Nazi-occupied Paris.
First published in 1942, this passionate noire novel is a description of everyday French life during World War II, where rationing, division of territory, and Nazi-imposed restrictions serve as the backdrop to this tale of intrigue.
It sealed the birth of the French noir novel, a cocktail of suspense, humour, poetry and social reflection.”

I am acually also reading two books on Orthodox spirituality.

📚 READING NEXT 📚

📚 I Am a Cat,
by Natsume Soseki
Japanese literary fiction
吾輩は猫である
was first published in 1905
Translated by Graeme Wilson and Aiko Ito
470 pages
IIt counts for The Japanese Literature Challenge
and The Classics Club

I have read many books by Soseki, The Gate for instance, but not this one, which might be his most famous!

“Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume’s comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.
A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki’s best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki’s I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.”

📚 Why Read The Classics?
by Italo Calvino
Nonfiction / Book on Books
Perché leggere i classici
was published in 1991
306 pages

I’ll be reading it in Italian – part of my plan to read more books in Italian and Spanish this year.
I started a little some time ago, and found this wonderful sentence:

“The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’”

So now that my Italian is better, I’m really looking forward to dive deeper into this.

“From the internationally acclaimed author of some of this century’s most breathtakingly original novels comes this posthumous collection of thirty-six literary essays that will make any fortunate reader view the old classics in a dazzling new light.
Learn why Lara, not Zhivago, is the center of Pasternak’s masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, and why Cyrano de Bergerac is the forerunner of modern-day science-fiction writers. Learn how many odysseys The Odyssey contains, and why Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories are a pinnacle of twentieth-century literature. From Ovid to Pavese, Xenophon to Dickens, Galileo to Gadda, Calvino covers the classics he has loved most with essays that are fresh, accessible and wise. Why Read the Classics? firmly establishes Calvino among the rare likes of Nabokov, Borges, and Lawrence–writers whose criticism is as vibrant and unique as their groundbreaking fiction.”

🎧 CURRENT AND NEXT AUDIOBOOKS 🎧

🎧 Blanc,
by Sylvain Tesson
Nonfiction/ Travel
10/13/2022
240 pages
4H50

This one is closer to La Panthère des neiges (Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet) than the one I just listened by him.
It’s actually his reflections and notes taken over four winters, as he and his friend went through high mountains
It is not yet available in English, so here is my translation of the synopsis:

“With my friend the high mountain guide Daniel du Lac, I left Menton on the Mediterranean coast to cross the Alps on skis, to Trieste, passing through Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.
From 2018 to 2021, at the end of winter, we were rising in the snow. The sky was virgin, the world without contours, only the effort counted down the days. I thought I was venturing into beauty, I was diluting myself in a substance. In the White [Blanc] everything is canceled – hopes and regrets. Why do I so enjoy wandering in purity?

🎧 The Wind in the Willows,
by Kenneth Grahame
Childrens classic
Published in 1908
288 pages
7 hours

I MAY have read this a LONG time ago, but don’t remember a thing about it.

“Spend a season on the river bank and take a walk on the wild side…
Spring is in the air and Mole has found a wonderful new world. There’s boating with Ratty, a feast with Badger and high jinx on the open road with that reckless ruffian, Mr Toad of Toad Hall. The four become the firmest of friends, but after Toad’s latest escapade, can they join together and beat the wretched weasels?”

HAVE YOU READ
OR ARE YOU PLANNING TO READ
ANY OF THESE?
WHAT ARE YOUR READING PLANS FOR JANUARY?

https://linktr.ee/wordsandpeace

The top 9 books to read in January 2023

Posted on January 3, 2023 by WordsAndPeace

Here are
The top 9 books
I plan to read in January 2023

January-February (not March this year) is the Japanese Literature challenge, in which I’ll be participating (more about that on January 11).
Besides that, I’m not really planning on any other challenge in 2023, trying to focus on my own personal challenges (reading more books in Spanish, Italian, and possible easy picture books in Japanese), on classics, and on my unruly TBRs, while keeping space for random reads.
Plus my French students keep me busy with reading French books as well!

Click on the covers to know more

📚 CURRENTLY READING 📚

📚 Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret,
by Georges Simenon
Mystery – short stories collection
Published in 1944
624 pages
Reading with French student E.
It counts for The Classics Club

This is the first collection of short stories in the Maigret series (written between 1936-1938).

We have a few stories left.
I really enjoya lot these short stories.
He is a master who can come up with interesting characters and great original plots in so few pages. In them, Maigret tends to be even more grumpy than usual, so there’s definitely some hidden humor here as well.

📚 Week-end à Zuydcoote,
by Robert Merle
French historical fiction
Published in 1949
244 pages
Reading with French student F.
It counts for The Classics Club

It is set during WWI, in June 1940 at Dunkirk.
It was actually trasnalted into English as Weekend in Dunkirk.

I had not read any book by Robert Merle for a very long time, so it’s nice to go back to his writing.
This book is raw, and yet a lot of humor at the same time. It tells the life of a group of French soldiers trapped in the pocket of Dunkirk, for two days, after the Franco-British defeat.

📚 L’Os de Lebowski,
by Vincent Maillard
French mystery
Published in 2021
202 pages
Reading with French student S.

S. wanted to read a contemporary French mystery, and in my list, she chose this one.
This is my first book by Maillard. I like the humoristic style, and I’m at the point where the plot starts getting intriguing!

The book hasn’t been translated into English.
It’s narrated in the first person by Jim Carlos, a gardener working at Prés Poleux, owned by a rich family.
Jim has a very lazy dog (Lebowski), who spends its time sleeping, but one day it manages to dig, and finds a human bone (hence the title: Lebowski’s bone).
So, whose bone is it? What happened to that person?
Why is the bone on this property?

📚 Death of a Red Heroine
(Inspector Chen Cao #1),
by Qiu Xialong
Chinese Mystery
First published in 2000 (in English)
482 pages
Reading for my public library
Winter Reading Challenge
(book chosen for me by the satff)

I like the plot, and all the political background, with the Communist regime and the work ethics of the place.

“A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career—perhaps even his life—to see justice done.”

📚 READING NEXT 📚

I’ll be joining the Japanese reading challenge, and hopefully will read 3 books for it this month:

📚 Hell Screen,
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Japanese short story
Published in 1918
Not sure yet of the translator
58 pages
It counts for The Classics Club

I have read several short stories
by this author,
but not this one yet.
I can’t remember why I put it on my TBR,
but I want to keep the surprise right now,
so am not looking at the synopsis.
I’ll tell you more about it later.

📚 Okamoto Kidō: Master of the Uncanny,
by Kidō Okamoto
Japanese short stories (before 1939)
Translated by Nancy H. Ross
168 pages
It counts for The Classics Club

📚 I am a Cat,
by Soseki Natsume
Japanese lit
Published in 1905
Not sure yet of the translator
470 pages
It counts for The Classics Club

I have reads several books by this author, but mnot yet this one, one of his most famous!

“Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume’s comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.
A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki’s best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki’s I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.”

🎧 CURRENT AND NEXT AUDIOBOOKS 🎧

🎧 The Red Thumb Mark (Dr. Thorndyke Mysteries #1),
by R. Austin Freeman
Mysteries
Published in 1907
224 pages
9H32
It counts for The Classics Club

I have heard a lot about this author recently, so I was eager to discover Dr Thorndyke.
Richard Austin Freeman (1862-1943) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medicolegal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke. He invented the inverted detective story and used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels.

“In this first book of the series, Dr. Jervis encounters his old friend Dr. Thorndyke; soon after they are drawn into a mystery in which a man is accused of murder and his own bloody thumbprint – evidence that cannot be denied – places him absolutely at the scene of the crime. But for Thorndyke, things may not be quite as straightforward as they seem. Can one forge a thumb print? As Thorndyke investigates, it becomes apparent that he is too much of a threat, and must be removed…”

So far in the book, I don’t find as much medicolegal forensics as I expected, and the focus is more on Thorndyke’s friend Jervis. But still, I like it and am planning to listen at least to volume 2 to see if indeed there’s more medicolegal stuff.

🎧 L’Empire de la mort (N.E.O. #3), by Michel Bussi
French YA scifi
Published on JUne 16, 2022
640 pages
16H24

I really enjoy this author. He is actually just as good in YA scifi as he is in thrillers.
I really loved a lot the first 2 books in this series, so am really eager to keep going.
It is set in post-apocalytic time in and around Paris and Versailles.

I will probably listen to other books, try to read a book in Italian, and go on with an Orthodox book I have been reading with the catechumens in our church.

HAVE YOU READ
OR ARE YOU PLANNING TO READ
ANY OF THESE?
WHAT ARE YOUR READING PLANS FOR DECEMBER?

https://linktr.ee/wordsandpeace