Sherbert Illuminated

  Fellow readers, I apologize for my absence last week. On Saturday the 24, I had just picked up Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers , the largest book I’ve read to date. I spent the rest of the week finishing it, so I hope I can make up for lost time with this bi-weekly recap: Trying to Find Chinatown by David Henry Hwang The lesser-known plays of the Asian American playwright behind M. Butterfly . None of these works are as mature as the one that made Hwang famous, but each contains the flashes of cynicism and empathy that illuminate his best work. “MA: If I dont get rich here, I might as well die here. Let my brothers laugh in peace...I’ve got to change myself. Toughen up. Take no shit. Count my change. Learn to gamble. Learn to win. Learn to stare. Learn to deny. Earn to look at men with opaque eyes…’Cause I’ve got the fear. You’ve given it to me” (87) Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump Claude McKay Love, an ordinary Black teenager from South Shore, struggles to fi...

I am proud, fellow readers, of my accomplishments this week. I read eight books! This is admittedly the result of having tons of free time, but I feel proud of my progress nonetheless. I also got back my copy of Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night . Although I read that book a week ago, I will include it alongside this week’s reviews: Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night by Sindiwe Magona Stories from the perspectives of Black South African girls and women before the end of Apartheid. The most successful piece are the innovative monologues which peel back the pretense of the hypocritical medem-maid dynamic, but the collection as a whole is disappointingly conventional. “Now, I have to be careful I don’t find myself in another soup. Women like talking about each other and then forget they said what, and before you know it you will be answering questions about what you said to whom about whom. I have no time for that. But I would be lying if I said their stories are uninteresting...

Fellow readers, I messed up this week. I read six books—the best rate this year—but in order to conserve space in my suitcase I shipped one of them home before transcribing my favorite quotes. I’ll include my review of it in next week’s summary. In the meantime, I’m still pretty proud of the five books I managed to read: The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro Upon arriving in an anonymous Central European city, a famous pianist finds himself embroiled in a mess of critical disputes, bourgeois functions and failing marriages. I am unsure whether this book seeks to destroy the soul on purpose or if I am merely too young to understand it, but either way it is utterly unlovable. “Is it any wonder at all that in this little town of yours, you have all these problems, this crisis as some of you choose to term it? That so many of you are so miserable and frustrated? Does it puzzle anyone…look at the way you treat each other” (271)   Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz The arrival of a Tolstoy-t...

Fellow readers, I am proud to announce my participation in a new challenge: longform reading. At the urging of my very nice Discord friends, I have elected to page through Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick over the course of the next two months, discussing plot and character along the way. So far I am enjoying both work s—I expect the latter to become one of my favorites—but they are not the only things I have been reading. This week I managed to complete five books: Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma A boy comes of age on a hostile farm rumored to be the resting place of an ancient dragon. What could have been a tender, devastating fairy tale is incinerated by the dullest prose I’ve ever read. “Sleep and death are not the same” (151) A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov In a collection of short stories inspired by the author’s experience at a rural hospital on the eve of the Russian Revolution, a newly-qualified doctor comes into his own. Bulgakov’s b...

Fellow Readers, I fear I may disappoint you: this week, I only read two books. The first was a buddy read with a new friend, and I had the opportunity to annotate as I was reading. I thoroughly recommend marking up the books you own, to pick out favorite lines and interesting themes. The other was a play from one of my favorite modern playwrights. I enjoyed them both: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Against the urging of his friends and mentors, author avatar Stephen Dedalus grows from a confused child into a freethinking artificer. While many passages in this archetypical Bildungsroman are scarily accurate to my own experience, any personal affection I have for Joyce or his prose is overwhelmed by respectful awe.  “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can using for my defense the only a...

Good afternoon, fellow readers! This week I read books from many different genres and eras, from a Baroque treatise to a modern screwball comedy. One common thread in these works was the human tendency to obscure, knowingly or unknowingly, the truth. I hope my reviews aren’t too much of a misrepresentation: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco As the apocalypse looms, two monks investigate the lethal secrets of a wealthy abbey. One of those books which is more smart than enjoyable, but mystery fans will love the labyrinthine plot and fellow nerds will admire the semiotic shenanigans. “It is a hard thing for this old monk, on the threshold of death, not to know whether the letter he has written contains some hidden meaning, or more than one, or many, or none at all” (610)   Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins The poetry (and selected prose) of the Victorian poet-priest famous for his use of sprung rhythm. Where every other Victorian poet composes their lines, Hopkins discovers them. “...