Recommended Reading

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, By David Shields (Knopf, 2010).

For a full review of the book, please click on this link:

http://andrewleefielding2.blogspot.com/p/books.html

Georges Simonon, and Maigret

I’m at the post office most days, because I get my mail there (at a P.O. Box). Next door is the local branch of The Salvation Army. A few years ago I discovered they have a nice used-book selection, and since then have bought a lot of books there.

Here are two of them; both are part of the Maigret series, by Georges Simenon. I hadn’t read any of Simenon’s books before these, and enjoyed both very much.

http://www.amazon.com/Maigret-Headless-Corpse-Georges-Simenon/dp/0156551446/

http://www.amazon.com/Maigret-Madwoman-Georges-Simenon/dp/0156028506/

Recommended Reading

“Hojoki—Visions of a Torn World,” by the poet Kamo-no-Chomei.

The book was written in the year 1212. The translation in this edition (Stone Bridge Press,1996) is by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins.

“Poet, reporter, social philosopher, monk, Kamo-no-Chomei is one of the great noble and solitary figures in all of Japanese literature, his incomparable Hojoki as relevant today as it was eight hundred years ago…”--comments, from the back-cover, by Sam Hamill.

http://www.amazon.com/Hojoki-Visions-Collection-Japanese-Literature/dp/1880656221/

Aharon Appelfeld

A new book by the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, Blooms of Darkness, was published last month:

http://www.amazon.com/Blooms-Darkness-Novel-Aharon-Appelfeld/dp/0805242805/ref=pd_sim_b_2

I have not yet read it, but expect to do so soon.

Appelfeld is an extraordinary writer. While his current work is situated during the Holocaust, his novels often take place as the Holocaust is approaching, or take place in its aftermath.

Says Philip Roth: “Aharon Appelfeld is fiction’s foremost chronicler of the Holocaust. The stories he tells, as here in Blooms of Darkness, are small, intimate, and quietly narrated and yet are transfused into searing works of art by Appelfeld’s profound understanding of loss, pain, cruelty, and grief.”

Here is a link to one of Appelfeld’s best known works, Badenheim 1939.

http://www.amazon.com/Badenheim-1939-Aharon-Appelfeld/dp/1567923917/ref=pd_sim_b_3

Robert B. Parker

The very talented novelist Robert B. Parker was best-known, certainly, for creating the character of Spenser, the Boston private detective. Mr. Parker died in January, at age 77.

After he passed away, I re-read his first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, published in 1973; I’d originally read it thirty years ago. It was just as enjoyable, revisited.

I think my favorite books by Mr. Parker are his earlier Spenser titles—in addition to The Godwulf Manuscript, books such as The Judas Goat, Mortal Stakes, and Looking for Rachel Wallace come to mind.

Mr. Parker was a skillful—and wonderfully entertaining—writer.

A poisonous, hateful man

Headline: "Iranian president: 9/11 was 'big lie'"

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/03/07/ahmadinejad.afghanistan/index.html

Chomsky, America, Israel

I was browsing through Facebook recently (if you're not careful, you can waste a lot of time doing so), and looked at the page of someone I knew decades ago. In her list of favorite Facebook pages, she included a page about Noam Chomsky.

A number of people (largely on the left, though I am sure he has a significant number of right-wing fans as well) think of Noam Chomsky as brilliant; they regard him as a hero.

I am not in that camp. I think of Noam Chomsky’s ideas as being morally blind, dangerously misguided, frenetic, imbued with distortion.

His animus toward the United States, and its foreign policies, is tiresome, relentless—and routinely offensive. (In a November, 2001 interview, for example, he referred to the United States as "a leading terrorist state.") His obsessive hostility toward the state of Israel—rooted in a cartoon-like apprehension of the Middle East conflict (his views of the United States are similarly cartoon-like)—I have long found repellent.

Also repellent: an event currently underway, worldwide, known as “Israeli Apartheid Week.”

Here are two essays about the latter subject. The first is from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. The second is from Canadian columnist Leonard Stern.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/01/AR2010030102761.html?wpisrc=nl_pmheadline

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/dark+side+Israeli+Apartheid+Week/2612768/story.html