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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 28th, 2021 07:46 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, a picaresque tour through the heroine’s five temporary jobs over one year, is a pleasure from start to finish. It occurred to me as I was reading that I haven’t read too many books that are actually about the experience of work (as opposed to interpersonal drama that happens to occur at work), and how refreshing it was to read something so different from my usual fare.
With Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram, I’ve read all of Sally Belfrage’s books. In fact I read this one only because I was so close to scoring Belfrage complete bibliography, which is perhaps a questionable motive for reading a book, but in this case it really worked out.
After Belfrage’s two closest friends both decided to devote their lives to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Belfrage went out to India to visit their ashram. Belfrage’s great strength as a writer and reporter (although it is also, not infrequently, a weakness) is her impressionability. She’s a skeptic, in this book more than in any of her others, but a skeptic who easily takes on the coloring of her surroundings (orange, in this case, is the prescribed color for Bhagwan’s followers). She is moved by Bhagwan’s great force of personality; when she attends his talks she feels utterly swept up by the flow of his words, as if he is talking directly to her.
She is not, in the end, converted, so she can’t describe the conversion experience - but then, if she had been converted, she probably wouldn’t have written the book at all, so there would have been no description of anything in any case. But she does move from bafflement (why are her friends uprooting their lives to move to India? One of them abandoned her children!) to a place of understanding - even though fundamentally she still disagrees with their choice.
What I’m Reading Now
Just before I started reading Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, I stumbled on a comment complaining that the book is a peak example of female-narrator-written-by-man. Would I be feeling that quite so hard if I hadn’t been primed by that comment? It’s hard to say, but I definitely am feeling it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I enjoyed There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job so much that I thought it might be worthwhile to check out other work by this translator (Polly Barton), which led me to Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Quoth the description: “Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales - shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells - and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.” Doesn’t that sound fun?
Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, a picaresque tour through the heroine’s five temporary jobs over one year, is a pleasure from start to finish. It occurred to me as I was reading that I haven’t read too many books that are actually about the experience of work (as opposed to interpersonal drama that happens to occur at work), and how refreshing it was to read something so different from my usual fare.
With Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram, I’ve read all of Sally Belfrage’s books. In fact I read this one only because I was so close to scoring Belfrage complete bibliography, which is perhaps a questionable motive for reading a book, but in this case it really worked out.
After Belfrage’s two closest friends both decided to devote their lives to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Belfrage went out to India to visit their ashram. Belfrage’s great strength as a writer and reporter (although it is also, not infrequently, a weakness) is her impressionability. She’s a skeptic, in this book more than in any of her others, but a skeptic who easily takes on the coloring of her surroundings (orange, in this case, is the prescribed color for Bhagwan’s followers). She is moved by Bhagwan’s great force of personality; when she attends his talks she feels utterly swept up by the flow of his words, as if he is talking directly to her.
She is not, in the end, converted, so she can’t describe the conversion experience - but then, if she had been converted, she probably wouldn’t have written the book at all, so there would have been no description of anything in any case. But she does move from bafflement (why are her friends uprooting their lives to move to India? One of them abandoned her children!) to a place of understanding - even though fundamentally she still disagrees with their choice.
What I’m Reading Now
Just before I started reading Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, I stumbled on a comment complaining that the book is a peak example of female-narrator-written-by-man. Would I be feeling that quite so hard if I hadn’t been primed by that comment? It’s hard to say, but I definitely am feeling it.
What I Plan to Read Next
I enjoyed There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job so much that I thought it might be worthwhile to check out other work by this translator (Polly Barton), which led me to Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Quoth the description: “Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales - shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells - and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.” Doesn’t that sound fun?
