Started and finished since last time:

Trick Pear, by Suzanne Cleary
Blue Angel, by Francine Prose
The Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham
Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami Haruki (translated by
Duane's Depressed, by Larry McMurtry
Discretions, by Mary de Rachelwiltz
Seven Japanese Tales, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Howard Hibbett)
Goldengrove, by Francine Prose
Naomi, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Anthony Chambers)
Blue Genes, by Christopher Lukas
Flaubert and Madame Bovary, by Francis Steegmuller
Some Prefer Nettles, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker)

Also read parts of

Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way, by Robin Gerber
Page by Page, by Heather Sellers
Van Gogh's Blues, by Eric Maisel
Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose
Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes

Francine Prose and her work occupied me for a good deal of this time. I think it began when I dipped back into her Reading Like a Writer, rereading the delightful chapter "Learning from Chekhov," and endlessly (and I do mean endlessly, perusing her list of "Books to Be Read Immediately" at the back, which led our household to a number of new acquisitions, and me to read one great book already, Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary, which can justifiably be called a page-turner, even though the subject--how Flaubert came to write that masterpiece--doesn't sound like like it would be conducive to such a label. Steegmuller somehow weaves together excerpts from the author's letters and diaries in such a way that you just want to keep reading, in part because it's just so darned entertaining and in part because you do want to learn how he went from spending years feverishly writing a book that his two closest friends, after listening to him read the entire thing aloud for hours on end, told him was no good.
Rather than just read books Prose recommended, I decided that I ought to read a book she had actually written, which lead me to Blue Angel. It's a funny and sad story about a male college teacher of creative writing. Then, I happened to be in the Strand and found out that she'd be reading from her new novel, Goldengrove, there. She read part of the first chapter and I inhaled that sad (the title is an illusion to Hopkins' tragically beautiful poem), exquisitely written book over the following 24 hours or so. Prose took questions from the small crowd at the Strand very willingly and gave open, honest, and funny answers, especially to the sweet young aspiring writers. My librarian friend Susan and I enjoyed chatting with her as she signed books for us afterward; I asked if she was familiar with Joyce Carol Oates' story about Marilyn Monroe shopping in the Strand, since Prose had said that the store was like a second home to her. She hadn't. I need to look up the title of that piece since I do go around mentioning it to people.
I had read somewhere that Larry McMurtry's Duane's Depressed was a really good book, and since he's been in the book reviews lately because of his new nonfiction work--I think it's called Books, about his huge used bookstore and antiquarian book sales operation in Texas--I decided that he must be a more serious writer than I'd thought, so I'd give him a try, and I was well rewarded. The book is the third in the trilogy that begins with The Last Picture Show, which I now have bought and plan to read. Duane's Depressed is funny, and melancholy, and brings in Thoreau and especially Proust in a creative way (when am I going to read all of Proust?!?).
Three things I read were variations on the theme of surviving the suicide of a close relative, and all moved and inspired me. Joan Wickersham organizes The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (I still haven't checked to see if this is fiction or nonfiction--it feels like the latter but was in the former section at Borders) as the title indicates. Each chapter describes an aspect of the author's (or first person narrator's) experience of her father's suicide, such as "Day after," "Anger about," and "Finding Humor in." It seemed to me like a creative and logical way to deal with this difficult subject.
Alison Bechdel's The Fun Home is another take on paternal suicide--in graphic novel form. It's only the second in that genre that I've ever read (I'm counting both of Spiegelman's Maus books as one--interesting that his parents commit suicide in the course of those as well). Bechdel's drawings, many of the eccentric, antiques-filled house she grew up in, are stunning. The fact that she is a fellow Oberlin alum gave the work extra interest for me, of course. I'm not sure how to describe it or praise it, except to say that it's one of those books that you immediately want all of your closest friends to read, because it is so well done. But I haven't tried to sell it to anyone yet. My younger sister, who, like Bechdel, is a lesbian, may be my first customer--this is partly a coming-out story.
Blue Genes annoyed me in some ways--it just needed to be edited and wasn't, but I'm still glad that Christopher Lukas gave us that book, which is his attempt to understand the suicide of his brother, the award-winning nonfiction author J. Anthony Lukas, and also to figure out how he managed to survive the traumatic childhood (mother slit her wrists and throat when they were little boys, but no one talked about it) they shared without succumbing to the depression that killed not only his brother but also his mother and a shocking number of their other relatives, several after his brother's death.
The Tanizaki books I'm reading for grad school in preparation for my PhD comprehensive exams, so I am not going to talk about them here, but I'm enjoying them tremendously and reading each twice before each class. Discretions is by Ezra Pound's daughter, whose work is the subject of an article I am going to write, so I won't say much about it, either, except that I am now looking into some biographies of her father and the Cantos also.
Speaking of poetry, Trick Pear is a collection by a talented neighbor of mine. It was an amazing experience to read it while sitting on my front porch, with her house in view--one of the poems even mentions our street by name. But that's not why I love the work. They are well-wrought poems accessible in a Billy Collins way--some funny, and many more poignant, and even sad.
Often when I hear that a novel has elements of the fantastic I run the other way, and that is what I did for years in the case of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, despite having heard it praised by several friends not in the Japanese lit field. But I had been depriving myself of a great book. Read it now! The characters are just plain lovable, and the elements of the fantastic that occur somehow aren't off-putting, even to the most reality-bound among us.

Two things inspired me to resume this blog--after more than three and a half years (is that a blogosphere record?). One is that I successfully kept a daily blog for the duration of a great experience I had this summer, the Summer Institute for Chinese Librarianship in the Electronic Environment. Feeling obligated to post an entry each morning--even though the obligation was self-imposed--was great discipline for someone who needs and aspires to do more writing of all kinds. Second, earlier this year I discovered that Nick Hornby has written and published something nearly identical to what I wanted this blog to be. His originates as a monthly column in The Believer magazine. The colums are periodically compiled into books. The first one was The Polysyllabic Spree, and the second Housekeeping Versus the Dirt. After I bought the first one and learned that the columns start life online, I kicked myself, thinking I could have gotten the content free on the web. But I didn't deserve the bruise on my shin because only the beginning of each is posted free. Do take a look at http://www.believermag.com/issues/200805/?read=column_hornby to get a tantalizing taste. For each month, Hornby lists the books he bought and those he read. As is true for the rest of us, the overlap between the two lists ranges from zero to less than one hundred percent.

I'm starting out a little differently from Hornby: it's not the end of the month, and I'm not going to list the books I have bought. This month, the latter would be so long that I'd be embarrassed, plus I'd have to decide whether to list the one that I discovered yesterday was a duplicate acquisition. (That unsavory fact emerged when in the course of catching up with a year's worth of filing I discovered a bag of books purchased at the secondhand Japanese bookstore BookOff that had never been unpacked and somehow got into the to-file pile.) I made a number of exciting finds at Seattle's wonderful used and independent new book stores, and also at the amazing annual Friends of the Library sale at the Desmond Fish Library in Cold Spring.

So I’m going to list books I have started and/or finished each month and write a bit about them.

The Banquet Bug, by Yan Geling. This is a satire about life in China that I learned about from a great article in the Guardian listing one person’s picks of the ten best novels set in Beijing. I like it—it’s funny and sad at the same time—but decided to mail it home from Seattle because I got involved in other books, and it took a while for the box containing it to arrive, so I haven’t finished it.

The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth, by Natalie Goldberg. I devoured this. She is a great writer, and the book has a kind of plot involving an event in her life that grabs you and makes you want to keep reading. Also funny and sad. The exciting thing about this one is that I read it on my Palm Treo as an e-book using the MobiPocket program. I had been thinking about buying a Kindle or other e-book reader, but decided to try souping up my Palm for the purpose first. And it does the job, wonderfully. I made the background a nice golden color and the type a brown, because I once read that brown ink on yellow legal paper was easy on the eyes. When I am eating alone and reading, I use the autoscroll feature and so I don’t have to touch the device with greasy fingers to page down. Awesome!

Long Quiet Highway, by Natalie Goldberg. I devoured this also. It comes before The Great Failure, but I didn’t know that (even though I had long owned the book) until I read the former. Also wonderfully written. I want to meet her and take her workshop one day!

The End of Suffering: the Buddha in the World, by Pankaj Mishra. This is a great blend of travelogue, history of Buddhism, and autobiography. I never knew that Pali wasn’t the kind of Sanskrit the Buddha spoke, or that we have no real proof that he was literate. I really liked Mishra’s novel, The Romantics, and I’m pretty sure the period described in this book predates it, because he is holed up in a freezing cold cottage in India near Tibet trying to see if he can become a writer. I’m taking my time reading this because some of the history makes it slow going. I know I’ll finish it, though.

The Commoner, by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. When he came out with Bicycle Days way back when, I admired him for writing the first book from the point of view of a foreigner in Japan that I thought was good. But this new one is an amazing feat. He writes in the first person, from the point of view of the Crown Princess who became Japan’s first empress to come from among the common people rather than the aristocracy. The stately, beautiful, take-your-breath-away writing fits the topic perfectly. Nevertheless, I’m having some trouble getting through it. The story has a certain inevitability to it—maybe because I know the history? Or do I sometimes avoid picking it up because it is just plain depressing and makes me worry about the fate of the current Crown Princess, Masako?

The Skull Mantra, by Eliot Pattison. I started this mystery recommended highly by a trusted reader friend in hopes that it would engage me and relieve me from the downsides of The Commoner. It is engaging and I will finish it, but it is also depressing—because it centers on a group of Tibetan monks who have been arrested and put in a Chinese hard labor camp. I don’t know how this happened, but all of the fiction I have picked up this month has to do with people being oppressed in Asia. Sigh.

Page by Page, by Heather Sellers. An excellent writing book full of down-to-earth advice and motivating pep talk, as well as useful exercises. I’m working my way through it, but that didn’t stop me from buying the sequel (J) Chapter by Chapter, yesterday.

I guess one of my goals for the new month should be to find a fiction book that isn’t depressing. Suggestions gratefully accepted.