The Knowledge of the Holy A.W. Tozer I read this like three or four years ago, thinking "Knowledge of the Holy? I wanna know about God! I'll read this thing and then I'll know all about God!" I read it quickly and eagerly and was mostly disappointed. This time I read it slower and got more out of it. I don't really know how to talk about books like this, and it's hard for me to take anything completely seriously that's this, uh, reverent, but I liked this book quite a bit. | The Year of My Life Issa trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa One of the only things I know about poems is that I usually like short poems better than long poems. So I've been trying to read a lot of haiku. The problem is that "nature poetry" usually seems stupid to me, and like forty percent of all haiku is about cherry blossoms. Issa is the second most famous haiku master after Basho, and I liked Basho quite a bit better even though Issa is more interested in mosquito larva than in cherry blossoms. Here's some of my favorites of Issa's though:
A mosquito larva
The mosquito larva
Out of the willow
Leaping a torrent
"Wolf dung!" |
Growth of the Soil Knut Hamsun All the Scandanavian writers I've read (which I think means just Per Petterson and Tove Jansson) have this calm, deliberate style that I like a lot. Knut writes like that too. Sturdy, straightforward chapters with occasionally alarming scenes and entences. Some parts of this book are better than others because it's more fun to read about people working and thinking in the wilderness than it is to read about the court cases and real estate agents that come crawling into the wilderness after them, but that's the point - you want to stay with Isak and Inger, and you want the wild to stay wild and lonely. The good parts are exactly what I want to be reading. I'm gonna tape the last paragraph to my wall. I'm gonna read a lot more of Knut's books. | |
other stuff I read: Freedom - Jonathan Franzen After Ikkyu - Jim Harrison Teaching English as an International Language - Sandra Lee McKay Dune - Frank Herbert Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam trans. Edward Fitzgerald The Practice of the Presence of God - Brother Lawrence Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu |