Book Search

I’ve been run­ning low on things to read late­ly. Most of the sci­ence fic­tion and espe­cial­ly the fan­ta­sy stuff looks like com­plete­ly shal­low and uno­rig­i­nal tripe. And while there are plen­ty of oth­er things to read besides sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, I don’t real­ly know where to start.

Coet­zee has been rec­om­mend­ed to me, but for some rea­son I’m loathe to try him out. I don’t real­ly know what I am look­ing for. I just got back from the library where I wan­dered aim­less­ly star­ing at things until I end­ed up grab­bing a cou­ple of books. I’m not real­ly inter­est­ed in any­thing that tells a sto­ry of the mod­ern world. It needs some sort of sec­ondary cre­ation evi­dent to it, some sort of twist, or at least some­thing for­eign enough to seem so. I’ve been read­ing a book of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism on Tolkien late­ly and often I find it point­ing out strengths in his works that I find miss­ing in most oth­er fan­ta­sy. Which is why I’m look­ing for oth­er stuff.

I enjoyed Louis Aragon’s The Adven­tures of Telemachus a few months ago, so I grabbed anoth­er book of his; called Paris Peas­ant. I also checked out a book by the Chi­nese author Yu Hua titled Chron­i­cle of a Blood Mer­chant, which appar­ent­ly takes place under Chair­man Mao. Hope­ful­ly one or the oth­er will pro­vide me with a good tale, which is all I ever real­ly want from a book.