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.