Like The Anatomy of Melancholy, A Journal of the Plague Year is another one I wish l’d picked up at the height of the pandemic.
I’ve just discovered Backlisted the book podcast and this is the first book I’ve bought directly attributable to one of their episodes 💙📚
The Translator Without Talent, a book from Ryan Holmberg who’s an art historian, translator and comics scholar. I love niche books like this. It collects a series of instagram posts from 2017-2019 during a stint the author spent in Japan as a visiting professor at Tokyo University. The entries detail manga news, thoughts on translation, manga history research findings plus meetings with various manga artists and more!
Sadly I was not following @mangaberg on IG back when these posts were made and the only downside to reading this now is finding out about a lot of great books that are out of print and no longer available (Bloody Stumps Samurai being the prime example).
If you have any interest in alt-manga you should definitely be checking out Holmberg’s translation work as well as the in depth essays that accompany them from publishers like D&Q, Breakdown Press, New York Review Comics and others. Also check out his IG account.
Want to read: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr 📚
Eager to check out this novel after hearing it being discussed so enthusiastically on the lit podcast Across the Pond.
Finished reading: Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman 📚
In Prose Architectures there’s a semblance of writing and that morphs into and out of shapes that could be landscapes or city skylines. Most of them have the feeling of continuous line drawings so there’s a sense of them being borderless without a beginning or end.
Quotes from the introduction:
“I drew out of the matter that was most central to my thinking and living, and that was the city.”
“Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language.”
“I didn’t want to actually draw plans but rather wanted to use the idea of plans, the suggestion of architecture, to point elsewhere: toward a different mode of being where thinking takes the shape of buildings.”
Major book mail day! I ordered a Renee Gladman bundle directly from Wave Books. With the bundle you get a pretty substantial 40% off! It comes with Calamities, Plans for Sentences and Prose Architectures.
Even though I already have a copy of Calamities the discount still made the bundle worthwhile, especially since I wasn’t able to order one of the other books locally.
Also arriving, unexpectedly, is a photo book called Ueno Park by Yuta Fuchikami. This was 100% an impulse purchase after an effusive recommendation from a writer/photographer I follow online.
Currently reading: How Life Works by Philip Ball 📚
“…the answer in biology is always “yes.” Could it be this or could it be that? Yes. The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming-from conception to the grave."
A second volume of stories by pioneering alt-manga artist Yamada Murasaki. Just released by Drawn & Quarterly.
