Reading Updates

1. Let me begin by checking how I’m going with my New Year reading plan. It’s already two months into 2009 and I’ve read three of the ten titles I targeted at the start of the year, namely Dickens’s Great Expectations, Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad. I won’t be doing one of my brief idiosyncratic reviews on Great Expectations. I really like Great Expectations, it’s a great novel, but I feel that what I have to say would just repeat what everybody already know. Anyhow, there’s an excellent review of the novel from the World Literature Forum. Meanwhile, I still have to look forward to reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hasek’s Good Soldier Svjek, Malraux’s Man’s Fate, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.

2. The New York Review Books recently unveiled their Spring and Summer catalogue. I’m excited over the release of Platonov’s Foundation Pit. There’s also Guy De Maupassant’s Alien Hearts, which is his last novel before dying of syphilis at the age of 43. It is, as leaked by Book Addicts last December, in the Summer catalogue. Another title of interest include Niki: The Story of a Dog by Tibor Dery, a Hungarian dissident writer during the communist era. Then Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhhizhanovsky, a Russian writer from the Soviet era whose works are only being discovered from state archives now. His style is compared with Borges and Kafka. But of course, there are still those older titles from the rest of the catalogue, particularly Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, as stated in my New Year reading plan.

3. I’m still (re)reading Žižek’s Violence slowly along with two other mind-boggling philosophical texts, which I’m sure not to grapple. In the meantime, a good review of Violence can be read over at Unnatural Habitat. These texts are providing me a much needed jolt from the stupor that pretty much comes with my middle class origins. I’ve been slowly turning into some sort of wishy-washy liberal democrat these past two years. Well, there was always that liberal side in me. But, then again, it simply got worst! Imagine a year and a half ago, when an exiled progressive Filipino leader was briefly detained by foreign authorities for charges of terrorism, etc. my honest to goodness reaction was, okay, fine, they should have him tried. If he’s innocent, then they’ll have to set him free anyway. What my position was missing is the realization that the law is essentially determined by the needs of the class that those foreign authorities ultimately serve.

4. My Global Voices roundups for February: (1) about creating a top-rating noontime show, (2) reflections on OFWs, (3) on corruption, the World Bank, and the Philippines, (4) on the proposal to add one more year to college, (5) the baro at saya, (6) 12 recommendations for Bacolod, and (7) the Dumaguete flood.

5. One of my lengthier book reviews, the one about Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, was featured in the literary webzine, Escape Into Life. Check out the bio. I reveal my plans of growing a Russian beard, among others. ■