2014 Apr-June zdino book log

Books read recently by J. Zimmerman

Disclaimer. Links. Booker Prizes. Chocolate.
Books read. Best books read in 2014.

Best book read in 2013:
Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists: a Novel (2012); short-listed for the 2012 Booker Prize.

Set in Malaya during and after WWII. Nakamura Aritomo is a Japanese master gardener adept at all aspects of Japanese gardening but especially the skills of shakkei ("borrowed scenery").
The narrator is Teoh Yun Ling, a Chinese-Malayan woman. With her sister, she was harshly imprisoned by the Japanese during WWII but survived the camp while everyone else there died.
Beautifully written.
Blog entry.

Best writers of poetry and prose
Harry Potter; also Harry Potter en Español.
Why read a book?.
New books on Spirituality by Pagels, Ehrman, et al.
My chocolate of choice:

Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:
Skip pages Not read Not finish Not defend your tastes

Translators of poetry must accept failure as the primary condition of their work. They must settle, at best, for second best: Their translations must succeed or fail as new poems in their own language which at the same time serve as approximations or shadows of the original poems. Nobody, I think, has ever believed that there was an equation between a translation and the original.

Wendell Berry,
Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

(6.30.2014)

2014: finally finished listening to Michael Cunningham's: The Snow Queen, his new and over-hyped novel: a struggle to get through it. A lot of the conversations thrive on nerdy facts to make sure we know the author can use Google. One doesn't know at the end what will happen to the main relationships but no matter.

(6.29.2014)

Finished rereading Henry James' The Figure in the Carpet, a "you're been had" tale of delusions, ending:

I may say that today as victims of unappeased desire there isn't a pin to choose between us. The poor man's state is almost my consolation, there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge.

(6.28.2014)

1987: Bright Moon, Perching Bird, translation of poetry by Li Po (James Cryer's translations) and Tu Fu (J. P. Seaton's translations).
See also the translation by Cryer and (from a separate book) one by Seaton at James Maughn's These Peripheries.
Calligraphic text is included: wild, erratic, and ambiguous for Li Po; legible, artistic yet clear for Tu Fu.
Li Po (701-762), "a spirit incarnate" and passionate hedonist, and Tu Fu (712-770), "the greatest human poet" and a responsible Confucian scholar, were Chinese poets writing in forms including:
- lü-shih: "regulated verse" with lines all of 5 or 7 characters, with 8 lines, grouped into 4 pairs of couplets with rhyme on even-numbered lines, with grammatical parallelism on the 2nd and 3rd couplets, and consistent tonal (pitch) sequences. Tu Fu used this often.
- ku t'i shih: "old-style verse" was like lü-shih but without the restrictions of parallelism or tonal (pitch) sequences. Naturally this was preferred by the more rambunctious and rebellious Du Fu.
- chüeh-chü: "cut-off verse", which is a quatrain. With 5-character lines, there were only 20 characters (and syllables) in the poem. Li Po mastered this form, as did Wang Wei.

(6.27.2014)

Finished revisiting Antonio Machado: Selected Poems in Alan S. Trueblood's translation of Antonio Machado's poems.

Trueblood's view of translation (from his Preface) includes

One cannot hold today that a poet's voice in translation should sound as if he had been writing in English all along. While the translator's voice will ease accommodation into a new literary medium that has its own impositions to make, he becomes a usurper once his voice overpowers or supplants the voice originally heard in the text. Some aura of foreignness, individually culturally marked, should survive re-creation; it surely will if not dissipated in the process. [p. ix]

Trueblood cites Juan de Mairena definitions of poetry:

"the dialog of man with time"
and
"the dialog of man, of a man with his time" [p. 27]

to leave room for the time in which the poet lives, as Machado did.

The 64 poems in the book are often multi-part, as for example Poem 34 (poem CXXXVI in Spanish-language collection Standard Numbering), which includes (sadly with Trueblood's changes of punctuation):

VI Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar. [p. 142]

VI Wayfarer, the only way is your footsteps, there is no other. Wayfarer, there is no way, you make the way as you go. As you go you make the way and stopping to look behind, you see the path that your feet will never travel again. Wayfarer, there is no way— only foam trails in the sea. [p. 143]

and Poem 41 (poem CLXI in Spanish-language collection Standard Numbering), which includes:

XVII En mi soledad he visto cosas muy claras, que no son verdad. [p. 180]

XVII In my solitude I've seen very clearly things that aren't so. [p. 181]

LI Demos tiempo al tiempo: para que el vaso rebose hay que llenarlo pimero. [p. 188]

LI Don't try to rush things: for the cup to run over, it must first be filled. [p. 189]

LXXI Da doble luz a tu verso, para leido de frente y al sesgo. [p. 194]

LXXI Give double lighting to your verse for reading straight on and sideways. [p. 181] [i.e., allow it to be read in different ways.]

(6.25.2014)

Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (issue 16, 2014) which includes a tanka by J. Zimmerman.
Excellent specialty journal.

(6.24.2014)

1996: The Wellspring, poetry by Sharon Olds.
A passionate collection in four parts on the four main areas that her poems arise: Her parents; Her adolescence; Her son and daughter; and Her husband. One has to wonder how comfortable her family can be with their appearance in her physically and emotionally explicit poems. But Olds mines her relationship with her dear ones for powerful poems.
The 2012 Stag's Leap subsequently described the breakup of the marriage.

(6.23.2014)

Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) by Anne Carson.
Another disappointment: some ok poems, some .
Don't bother to read this. Read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse.

(6.22.2014)

Dipping into two books on the ghost town of Bodie:

James Watson and Doug Brodie's Big Bad Bodie : High Sierra Ghost Town (2000, 2002), with an anecdotal spirit.
Warren Loose's Bodie Bonanza: The True Story of a Flamboyant Past (1997), with lots of historic photographs and a greater depth of research, both of which I prefer.

(6.21.2014)

Jean Rhys' Quartet: A Novel (1924, 1957).

A sad story of two couples and their various types of irresponsible behavior.

Rhys' writing kept me attentive to a novel that I might otherwise only have skimmed. Some examples:

It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach. [p. 22]
. . . everything — even sin — was an affair of principle and uplift if you were an American, and of proving conclusively that you belonged to the upper class, but were nevertheless an anarchist, if you were English. [p. 62]
Her heart felt as if it were being pinched between somebody's fingers. [p. 99]
It was comical, of course, and degrading. They were like two members of a harem who didn't get on. [p. 101]
Marya . . . sat on the divan feeling like a captive attached to somebody's chariot wheels. [p. 115]

(6.20.2014)

Finished dipping into neurologist Alice W. Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (2004).
Part scientific text, part creative writing, it includes an exploration of hypergraphia ("the overwhelming urge to write" or "driven, compulsive writing") and writer's block. Flaherty writes about her own manic hypergraphia, when "the sight of a computer keyboard or a blank page gave me the same rush that drug addicts get from seeing their freebasing paraphernalia". She emphasizes the importance of the temporal lobes and the limbic system in hypergraphia.
In a conversation about this book, Flaherty has said: "there is fairly solid evidence that drive [, and emotional involvement in your work, is even more important than talent in creating something new . . . paradoxically, such extrinsic motivation as money hurts creativity. This may be because money is distracting or because the person stops working the instant money comes in".

(6.19.2014)

Read issue 45.2 (Summer 2014) of Modern Haiku.
Includes two haiku by moi.
See also comments on previous issues of: Modern Haiku:

(6.17.2014)

2001: Ann Patchett's bel canto, read somewhat flatly by Anna Fields. A tale of an inept mass kidnapping where both the kidnapped and the kidnapping allow themselves to fall into the Stockholm Syndrome.
It is said to be based on the 1997 Lima Hostage Crisis (lasting 126 days) at the Japanese ambassadorial residence in Lima. Given the ineptness of the hostage takers, however, in real-life there would be a faster resolution, even though that would cut a lot of Patchett's operatic romance.

(6.15.2014)

red lights: June 2014 issue. Includes two tanka by J. Zimmerman.

(6.13.2014)

Japanese! and English of "The Third Night", a short story Natsume Souseki (published in Japan in his Ten Nights of Dreams (1908)), in Giles Murray parallel-text Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text (2003). Though it's Murray's running-dictionary that makes such a reading possible to a beginner!
See also:
1. Natsume Souseki's "The First Night".
2. Natsume Souseki's "The Third Night".

(6.10.2014)

1996 (recorded 2011): Woman with Birthmark: an Inspector Van Veeteren mystery by Håkan Nesser. Gripping. Even if one wonders if it was a procedural error not to check phone records.
Nesser's read to date:
- 1996: Woman with Birthmark: an Inspector Van Veeteren mystery.
- ?: Borkmann's Point: an Inspector Van Veeteren mystery.

(6.6.2014)

2003: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel that helps you appreciate the parents of a person with Asperger's Syndrome as much as the person telling the tale.

(6.5.2014)

1973: Tom Watts' Pacific Coast Tree Finder, such a nice, handy flow chart of a little book for finding what native tree you are looking at, based primarily on leaves and habitat.

(6.4.2014)

1998: Verna R. Johnston's Sierra Nevada: The Naturalist's Companion.
From the Sierra Nevada western foothills to arid eastern Sierra slope, Johnston mixes scientific data and anecdotes. An informative and charming book about the plant and animal life.

(6.2.2014)

Dipping into books for the mountains:

1970, 1977: Jeffrey P. Schaffer and Thomas Winnett's High Sierra Hiking Guide #4: Tuolumne Meadows.
1975: Mary Hill's Geology of the Sierra Nevada.
1993, 1996: Robert Gillmore's Great Walks: Yosemite National Park.

{ May : go-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2014 }

(5.31.2014)

2010: Sian Beilock's Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting it Right When you Have to.
While the book is a little too chatty and the facts sometimes seem to be submerged beneath anecdotes, there are some helpful sidebars and checklists and other quotables, including:
- [p. 5] "Malcolm Gladwell ... talks about choking and panicking. The former occurs, Gladwell suggests, occurs when people lose their instinct and think too much about what they are doing. Panicking occurs when people rely on instincts they should avoid. I am here to tell you that from a scientific point of view these are both instances of choking. ... not simply poor performance ... Choking is suboptimal performance."
- [p. 25] "Working memory-differences across people account for between 50 percent to 70 percent of individual differences in abstract reasoning or fluid intelligence."
- [p. 28] "Under low-stress conditions, using more brainpower gets you further. That is why higher-working-memory individuals perform the best in practice situations. Under pressure, however, a majority of our high-powered students panicked and actually switched to the short-cuts that the lower-powered student normally used. Low-powered students ... stuck with them [their usual shortcuts] and their performance didn't drop under stress."
- [p. 32] "Take a step back instead of running full steam ahead when what you're doing requires a heavy dose of working-memory."
- [p. 34] "Even practicing under mild levels of stress can prevent you from choking when high levels of stress come around."
- [p. 73] "By analyzing the errors that people make when learning a second language, psychologists have discovered that adults make some errors that kids don't, precisely because adults have too much working memory at their disposal."
- [p. 232] Tips to combat performance flops under pressure in sports and performance, which includes:
  Distract yourself by singing a song or thinking of your pinky toe.
  Don't slow down to give yourself too much time to cogitate. Also [p. 77]: "Adults are better at acquiring a new language — that is adults look more like kids with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes — when they are distracted and not concentrating too hard on what they are learning." Also [p. 192]: "Paralysis by analysis occurs when you attend too much to activities that normally operate outside conscious awareness."
  Practice under the stress. Also [p. 147]: "Practicing under the types of pressures you will face on the big testing day is one of the best ways to combat choking." Also [p. 213]: "Riding in an elevator over and over makes heights less frightening. Similarly, training in stressful situations minimizes the possibility of the choke as you gradually become accustomed to the pressure."
  Don't dwell on errors but see them simply as a chance to learn how to perform better.
  Focus on the outcome not the mechanics.
  Find a key word (e.g. "smooth") to focus you on the end result instead of the minutia of the steps to accomplish.
- [p. 257] Prevent the Choke [in a job interview] which begins:
  Be a memory guide. In the interview, give a schema at the outset that will help the interviewer encode your positive attributes. Start off by telling your interviewer why you are the best person for the job.
  Subtle mimicry [facial expression and gestures] can help create positive affect and liking.
  Think about what you want to say, not what you don't want to say, because when you try not to do or think something, it may be more likely to occur.

(5.30.2014)

Finished dipping in to Barbara G. Walker's The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (1998).
Really helpful for learning Spanish.

(5.29.2014)

1984: Carl Senna's Cliff Notes on García Márquez' 100 Years of Solitude.

(5.28.2014)

2002: Annie Proulx' That Old Ace in the Hole, in an excellent 2003 narration by Tom Stechshulte. Blurb includes: "Bob Dollar is hired by Global Pork Rind to scout out land for new hog farms in the Texas panhandle ... Bob is a resounding failure. But he begins to learn about the ties binding other people to their land."

(5.27.2014)

2012: James Maughn's These Peripheries.
A set of responses to poems by others.

(5.26.2014)

Finished dipping in to Ronni L Gorgon and David M. Stillman's The Red Pocket Book of Spanish Verb (2004).
Really helpful for learning Spanish.

(5.25.2014)

1990: Malcolm Goodwin's Angels: An Endangered Species.
Richly illustrated (Doré, da Vinci, Blake, the Sumerians, et al). The text is less convincing than the art.

(5.24.2014)

1998: Robert Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide.
Interesting in parts, but a much more worthwhile book on the analysis of sounds in poetry is Derek Attridge's Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995).

(5.24.2014)

1993: Edwin Cranston's A Waka Anthology: Volume Two, Part B: Grasses of Remembrance.
This portion has all 795 poems from The Tale of Genji, with his annotations.
This is the final portion of his immense anthology of Japanese court poetry through the Early Classical period (sources from the 890s to the 1080s). In these two centuries, court (and therefore documented) poetry returned to native Japanese (previously Chinese was fashionable). See also his other portions for a total of over 2,600 poems, including many from the first four imperially procured collections: Kokinshu, Gosenshu, Shuishu, and Goshuishu. Also selections from Shinsen Man'yoshu, the late-ninth-century collection of verse in (parallel) Chinese and Japanese.

(5.23.2014)

2006: The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize edited by Joan Murray (with support of Bill Henderson and Pushcart Editors).
Six poems included for each of the 30 years.

(5.22.2014)

2003: Giles Murray's Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text, with four short stories by Natsume Souseki (published in Japan in his 1908 Ten Nights of Dreams:

The First Night.
The Third Night.
The Fifth Night.
The Seventh Night.

and three short stories by Akutagawa Ryuunosuke:

In a Grove (1922). [The film Rashoumon was based on this 7-witness story.]
The Nose (1916).
Rashoumon (1916).

After reading the English-language intro and translations, went through the Japanese of "The First Night".

Delighted with the first Japanese reader. The parallel reading is made feasible even for a newbie by Murray's:

running dictionary at the bottom of the page [which] provides a translation of the words in the order that they appear in the text. The dictionary covers every kanji-based word in the book, as well as the more difficult hiragana words.
[p. 9]

(5.21.2014)

1994: Victor Chan's Tibet Handbook: A Pilgrimage Guide, from Moon Publications: one last skimming before its release to others.

(5.20.2014)

1998: Robert Pinsky's collection of poems by others in The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow.

This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?
[p. xiii]

(5.19.2014)

1996: Julia Cameron's The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart.
An enthusiast of manifesting the not-yet-grasped, Cameron continues on the path (with a fair amount of duplication and a little more boilerplate) as her earlier and better: The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.

(5.18.2014)

1994: Malcolm Godwin's The Lucid Dreamer: A Waking Guide for the Traveler Between Worlds.

Richly illustrated, especially with surrealist art by Magritte, Rousseau, and others.

Some of the material will be queried by the skeptic but he includes possible exercises including (after relaxation while directing the eyes "at a point between the eyebrows":

The subject now may be experiencing the sensation of having two bodies, a static outer body and a more fluid inner body which may appear to be trapped within it. The trick [!] is to visualize, with all one's intent, the subtle body escaping through the trapdoor of the brain. The incorporeal self gathers at the pineal gland, as if preparing to leap our through the door. This gland is located in the centre of the brain and has long been associated with the third eye.
[p.98]

Another exercise is based on a Tibetan practice:

This method is a meditation used by the Dzogchen sect as part of the 'Practice of the Natural Light.' This abbreviated version ... could give the practitioner a taste of both lucid dreaming and the luminosity which is called the Clear Light which arises at the moment of falling asleep.
Concentrate upon a white Tibetan syllable A at the center of your body. This corresponds to the sound AHHHH. ... This dream technique is most beautiful for those interested in the bardo states, for it encapsulates the whole after-death experience.
There are six bardos or gaps [or islands] and all these can be explored through lucid dreaming.
The first is that of the ordinary waking state of consciousness. The second is that of the dream time as we sleep. The third bardo is that of meditation, which covers the entire spectrum to realization. The fourth is that of the dying process as the five elements of our body dissolve into one another.
The fifth is the bardo of reality, which actually is the arising of hallucinations and apparitions. ...
The sixth and final bardo is that of the rebirth of the individual into what the Tibetan Buddhist sees as the wheel of Samsara or the roundabout of the illusory world, of birth and death and rebirth.
[p.156]

(5.16.2014)

Additional book release: the Ancient Greeks: 2001 edition of Anne H. Groton's From Alpha to Omega, An Introduction to Classical Greek.

(5.14.2014)

1998: Tae Moriyama's: Kanji connections: hints on how to differentiate 400 easily confused characters, translated by Bob and Reiko Gavey. Useful for after a beginner has learned a few dozen kanji, and good to revisit perhaps annually as one's Japanese vocabulary increased.

(5.12.2014)

1984: finished re-reading Burton Raffel's: How to Read a Poem.

Even if I find Raffel in error in some of his analyses, his varied choice of poems to quote and discuss is worth while. Some of his themes on how poetry works include:

Metaphor.
Music.
Contrast and balance.
Obscurity.
Precision.

Some of his themes on what poetry uses include:

Rhyme.
Alliteration.
Repetition and refrain.
Allusion.
Imitation and parody.
Onomatopoeia (misspelled in his TOC).

Some of his themes on what poetry's shapes and structures include:

Couplets and quatrains.
Ballads and hymns.
Sonnets (Italian, Shakespearean, and Spenserian).
Dialogues and monologues.
Free forms.
Concrete poetry.

He concludes with metrics:

Musicality and metrics are not the same thing, the former having to do with the larger issues of rhythm, word groupings, word choice, and so on, and the latter having to do only with conventional patterning of lines. English being what is known as an accentual language, rather than (like French or ... [Japanese]) a syllabic language, the metric of English is and has always been accentual in nature.
[p.233]

Unstressed syllables do not matter at all in Old English prosody [which counts stresses]; they matter a great deal in the poetry of the Chaucerian compromise [the incorporation into English of French vocabulary language, and later, because the prosody has become partly stress and partly syllabic.
[p.235]

(5.10.2014)

2002: finally finished my intermittent dipping into Eriko Sato's: Japanese for Dummies, by listening to the CD of samples before passing it on. It's an O.K. start at conversation but other books on learning Japanese are better if you will be wanting to read anything such as street signs.

(5.8.2014)

2011: finished Senko Maynard's: Learning Japanese for Real: A Guide to Grammar, Use, and Genres of the Nihongo World.
Well written, practical, informative.

(5.7.2014)

Ryan Inzana's: Ichiro, a beautiful illustrated book, showing a Japanese-American boy learning about his Japanese heritage.

(5.6.2014)

Frogpond (37:1, 2014), excellent haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by J. Zimmerman.

(5.2.2014)

1998: Brian Wilson Aldiss' memoir: The Twinkling of an Eye, or, My Life as an Englishman; not as witty as I had hoped.

(5.1.2014)

2008: Edwin A. Cranston's essay collection: The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame: Worlds of Memory, Discovery and Loss in Japanese Poetry:

"In the Dark of the Year: Love Poems from the Japanese translated with prose settings". A somewhat fanciful interleaving of Cranston's prose with his translation of poems particularly from the past.
"Young Akiko: The Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942)". This is the most interesting of the three essays, interleaving the tanka transitions at the turn of the 19-to-20th centuries, reporting on Akiko's life, and translating selected poems, including her:
Star of the winter Night you were, my love; No, not one alone, I do not say you were but one — You were all the stars there are. [p. 47]

"The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish: Fishing for Mythy in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko", on his translations in collaboration with the living poet Mizuno of her prose poems of the forms sanbushi (prose poems) and gendaishi (modern poetry in free-verse lines). While attracted to the surreal aspects of Mizuno's poetry, thankfully Cranston does not over-interpret:

In writing about poetry, I think it folly to over-interpret, to "explain" everything. My work as I see it is to present, let poems live and breathe, let them create their magic, only pointing here and there a pattern, recurrences of image and scene that may imply the deep structure of an author's thought. [p. 58]

Cranston's inclusion of the kanji and kana are very helpful for students of Japanese.

{ April : shi-gatsu (see also books on learning Japanese) 2014 }

(4.30.2014)

End of month book release: the Ancient Greeks:

Ancient Greek Texts

1990: Maurine Balm and Gilbert Lawall's Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek, Book I. A pragmatic interleaving of grammar, history, culture, and short translatable sections of Ancient Greek.
1989: C. Carey's commentary: Lysias: Selected Speeches (1, 3, 7, 14, 31, 32).
1989: Gilbert Rose's annotated text of: Plato's Apology.
1970: Charles Darwin Adam's commentary: Lysias: Selected Speeches (12, 16, 19, 22, 24, 25, 32, 34).
1951: A. Sidgwick's: Greek Prose Composition.
1929: Plato: Vol 9 in the Loeb Classical Library: Plato IX: Timaeus; Critias; Cleitophon; Menexenus; Epistles. A parallel-text translation by G.R. Bury, initially published 1929. Timaeus, on the construction of the Universe, is one of Plato's core texts.
1909: Harvard Classic's Plato, Epicteus, Marcus Aurelius.

(4.25.2014)

1970: Dario Fo's play: Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

(4.20.2014)

Buy 'Under the Skin' (2000) by Michael Faber

Michael Faber's Under the Skin (2000).

The book is an order of magnitude better than the 2014 movie in all respects, especially in terms of arousing sympathy with an alien. (The movie makes unfortunate and sweeping changes to the plot.)

The story begins with a woman searching for a male hitch hiker with:

big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were of no use to her.
[p. 1]

The book slowly reveals what the "use" will be. It does so elegantly, through different perspectives obtained by the woman's interactions with others both from this world and her home planet.

One of the best books read in 2014.

(4.18.2014)

1969: Finished dipping into Helen Vendler's On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems.

(4.17.2014)

2014: The new issue of HPNC's journal Mariposa 30.

(4.16.2014)

Finished re-reading the 1986 Yellow Glove, poems.
Books by Nye include:
- 2008: Honeybee: poems and short prose.
- 2002: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.
- 1995: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

(4.10.2014)

2011: Jasper Fforde's The Song of the Quark Beast, Second in his Chronicles of Kazam series.

Fun but lightweight. A quote: "That was fun in a panicky, exciting, soil-your-underwear kind of way".

Thursday Next books:

(2001) The Eyre Affair.
(2002) Lost in a Good Book: a Thursday Next novel.
(2003) The Well of Lost Plots: a Thursday Next novel.
(2004) Something Rotten.
(2007) Thursday Next in First Among Sequels.
(2011) One of Our Thursdays is Missing.
(2012) The Woman who Died a Lot.

Nursery Crime books:

(2005) The Big Over Easy.
(2006) The Fourth Bear: a Nursery Crime.

Kazam books:

2011: The Song of the Quark Beast.

(4.9.2014)

2007: Chuck Palahniuk's Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey.
Urban demolition derby friends create a biography of a rabies spreading pal. Hilarious and yucky.

(4.8.2014)

Ribbons (10, 1) Winter 2014 issue. Includes a couple of Tanka by J. Zimmerman, and a responsive tanka by her and Patrick Gallagher.
Includes Angela Leuck's review of mainstream poet Harryette Mullen's Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2013), with 31-syllable poems chopped into three lines: "Glancing through Mullen's book, it's difficult at first to recognize her three-line poems as tanka ... sprawling verse ... Almost all of her poems would be improved by editing out all of the unnecessary words and paring down phrases."
Also a more positive review of tanka poet Margaret Chula's Just This: Tanka (2013).

(4.5.2014)

Frogpond (37:1, 2014), excellent haiku journal.
Includes a haiku by J. Zimmerman

(4.4.2014)

2014: Gusts No. 19, a tanka journal edited by Kozue Uzawa. This issue includes three tanka by me.

(4.3.2014)

2012: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012 edited by Dan Ariely (series editor Tim Folger).

Many interesting essays but especially Rivka Galchen's "Dream Machine" (starting on p.258 and exploring the ideas of David Deutsch), Brian Christian's "Mind vs. Machine" (starting on p.289 and exploring a contest to be the Most Human Human), and Joshua Davis' "The Crypto-Currency" (starting on p.276 and exploring the idea of Nakamoto's bit-coin and possible successors, though to me the potential for fraud and also the use of bit-coin mining computers as the engine for bit-coin exchange itself seem like death-stars at some point, e.g. when the mining period ends).

The most-not-only-interesting-but-also-practical is David Dobbs' "Beautiful Brains":

Our brains, it turned out, take much longer to develop than we had thought. This revelation suggests both a simplistic, unflattering explanation for teens' maddening behavior — and a more complex, affirmative explanation as well.
... Our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our twelfth and our twenty-fifth years. The brain doesn't actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most of the head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.
... the brains axons — the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons — become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin ..., eventually boosting the axons' transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses — the little chemical junctions across which axons and dendrites pass notes — grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning ... causes the brain's cortex — the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking — to become thinner but more efficient. Taken together, these changes make the entire brain a much faster and more sophisticated organ.
... these physical changes move in a slow wave from the brain's rear to its front, from areas close to the brain stem that look after older and more behaviorally basic functions, such as vision, movement, and fundamental processing, to the evolutionary newer and more complicated thinking areas up front. ... Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. ... the frontal areas develop greater speeds and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variable and agendas than before.
[pp. 157-158]

Also:

speed comes at the price of flexibility. While a myelin coating greatly accelerates an axon's bandwidth, it also inhibits the growth of new branches from the axon ... [making] the period when a brain area lays down myelin a ... crucial period of learning — the wiring is getting upgraded, but once that's done it's harder to change.
...The brain's language centers acquire their insulation most heavily in the first thirteen years, when a child is learning language. The completed insulation consolidates those gains — but makes further gains, such as second languages, far harder to come by.
[p. 166]

(4.2.2014)

2013: F / poems by Franz Wright.

The middle of three sections is particularly remarkable, a long poem called "Entries of the Cell":

There are two infinities. Can't you see them?

Don't ask me how it works — one of star-sown space, and one of the words for it.

I only know it was like living twice.

[p. 29]

The third and final section has shorter poems, some excellent including: "Learning How to Read":

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word so what. I looked them up. I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother looked like she was about to break, and not into blossom, each time I spoke.

My favorite was The Iliad. True, I had trouble pronouncing the names; but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom? ...

... Life has taught me to understand books.

[p. 51-52]

The concluding "Three Basho Haibun" [pp.76-78] seem over-optimistically named, there being so much more ego in Wright's poems than in Bashō's.

(4.1.2014)

1930's-40's (begun 1934, concluding section 1947!): Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Coutry, in Edward Seidensticker's 1956 translation from the Japanese.
Love and loss in early-20th century Japan, and the surprising feistiness of a country geisha.