There's a wonderful German audiobook of five of the stories by Martina Gedeck: www.audible.de/pd/Geschicht...

I read Stories of God, by Rainer Maria Rilke (1900, but in 1904 extensively revised and augmented; 1932 translation by M. D. Herter Norton, i.e., Mrs. WW Norton). They start off as droll folktales, but a universe is created in which the stories become something bigger and deeper.

I read Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, by Bohumil Hrabal. Stories of 1950s Prague, mostly set in and around the steelworks where Hrabal, as a member of the intelligentsia, was assigned to work. First published in 1965, here translated by Paul Wilson for New Directions, 2015.

I love where he’s complaining that them sending political undesirables to work the steelworks had ruined the working class character of the place, bringing in eggheads. Which is somehow funnier knowing it’s formerly a Wittgenstein’s. Inevitable the place would get fouled up that way

On his birthday, remembering Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). A regular in my reading ever since I read Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude two decades ago.

Watching the Midtjylland- Nottingham Forest match and the camera landed on Bak and Cho standing side by side and now I want something Cantonese for lunch.

I read A Parish Chronicle, by Haldór Laxness (1970; 2026 translation by Philip Roughton for Archipelago Books). I thought this delightful. Maybe having once spent a delightful day in the parish had something to do with it?

I read A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami (1982; 1989 translation by Alfred Birnbaum). A shaggy dog story about a wild goose chase, as unputdownable now as the last time I read it (nearly twenty years ago).

His friend Alban Berg wrote songs based on five Altenberg "postcard texts": 5 Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskartentexten von Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 here's a 1960 version with soprano Bethany Beardslee (who turned 100! last Christmas), Robert Craft conducting: youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I read Ashantee, by Peter Altenberg (1897; translated by Katharina von Hammerstein, 2007), and Telegrams of the Soul, selections from across his career (translated by Peter Wortsman, 2005).

I read Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982). Useful reminder of how and why the regime ended the way it did, but it's too bad he didn't stick around to exercise that Kapuścińskian irony on the mullahs. (1985 translation by William R. Brand & Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.)

Best birthday wishes to John McPhee (b.1931), who has been part of my reading life since high school. (my collection isn't complete - there are yet a few titles to get.)

Stacks for two who share a birthday but are otherwise each truly 'sui generis': Kōbō Abe (b.1924) & Georges Perec (b.1936).

A great one. And I was hoping he'd finally get his Nobel next year.

At some point Giorgio Bassani (botd in 1916) decided all his novels and stories were just one big novel, the Novel of Ferrara.

For his birthday, my Kapuściński stack...

I read 'My Morning Walk' [Spacer poranny], by Ryszard Kapuściński, whose birthday it is (1932). Don't miss his beautiful photographs. This was published two days after his death in 2007. Polish text, with English, German, & Spanish translations: archive.org/details/spac...

I read Arthur Waley's translations of The Book of Songs (1937) and The Analects of Confucius (1938). Reading them concurrently over the last few weeks was rather wonderful.

Birthday regards to George Sandys (1578-1644), traveler, colonist, poet, and early English translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the bulk of which he worked on in the 1620s while serving as Treasurer of the Jamestown Colony. His Ovid is out of print but available here:

I read The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, by Isaiah Berlin (1953). A good sidedoor entry into Berlin's thought. Also, makes me want to dive into War and Peace again.

I read Works & Days, the Theogony, and the Shield of Herakles, by Hesiod (tr Lattimore, 1959). The author of the last work could be pseudo-Hesiod, sub-Hesiod, off-day Hesiod, or another Boeotian also named Hesiod. W & D makes me want to strip to a loincloth and hoe the beanrows.

George Brown Tindall (1921-2006), born on this day. I've been making my way through his America: A Narrative History (1984) and enjoying it very much. (My great-grandfather, Rev. Charlie Friend, whose mother was a Tindall, was a fourth cousin of GBT.)

BOTD, Millicent Fenwick (1910-1992). A favorite Republican (and distant kinswoman), a congresswoman from NJ's 5th District, UN diplomat, pipe-smoking grandmother, and model for Doonesbury's Lacey Davenport, who championed gun control, campaign spending limits, and the ERA.

Happy birthday to birthday boy César Aira. He has certainly cheered his fair share of my rainy afternoons. My Airas, in their original publication order, all but The Seamstress and the Wind and The Famous Magician, which are playing hide-and-seek at the moment.

On the occasion of his birthday today (1907), a few Auden books that have stolen into my library over the years. A few lost in the maelstrom downstairs: The Prolific and the Devourer Secondary Worlds (The Eliot Lectures) Lectures on Shakespeare WH Auden's Book of Light Verse Wasley's Age of Auden

I read Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (Modern Library, 2004). Translations by Burton Raffel, with an intro by Guy Davenport.

I read Pulse, by Cynan Jones (2025). Stories in the man-against-the-elements vein, beautifully done but only for those able to bear elevated cortisol levels.

Lyrics from the Old English (Smithsonian Folkways, 1964). Burton Raffel & Robert Creed taking turns in English Old & New: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I had a look at Libraries, by photographer Candida Höfer (2005). Some spectacular libraries here, a number of which I've added to my Places to Visit, If or When I Get the Chance.

I read The Signature of All Things: On Method, by Giorgio Agamben (Zone Books, 2009; translated by Luca D'Isanto & Kevin Attell). Agamben goes a few rounds with with some abstractions and I'm the one who gets punch-drunk. I'll need to have another go at this, someday.

I read The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes (1926), his first poetry collection and the opening work in this latest addition to Everyman's Library.

I read A Murder of Quality, by John le Carré (1962). George Smiley solves a cozy mystery.

I read You Will Hear Thunder (1985), a selection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, translated by D. M. Thomas, here reissued as a Penguin Classic with the bare title 'Selected Poems' (2006).

I read The Trojan Women and Other Plays (viz., Hecuba & Andromache), by Euripides, in James Morwood's translation for Oxford World's Classics.

I read Memoirs of My Life, by Edward Gibbon (posth., 1795). I enjoyed this very much. (The Folio Society volume is just the Penguin Classics edition in fancy dress.)

I read In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden, by Byung-Chul Han (2018; 2025 translation by Daniel Steuer, from the German). 100% read in the garden (yeah, we're having that kind of January).

I read Poems from Greek Antiquity (Everyman's Library, 2020). Edited by the antiquarian Paul Quarrie, whose commentary on historical transmission, editions, reception, translations, etc, amount to nearly a third of this volume. In the Pocket Poets series but not of it.

I read The Upright Piano Player, by David Abbott (2010). A corporate exec finds his (forced) retirement more eventful than expected, not all in good ways. It's 'The Late Harvest of Henry Cage' in the German edition and that gives a good sense of the book.

I read The North Sea, by Heinrich Heine (1826/27). Translated by Vernon Watkins for New Directions, 1951. Und längst ist erloschen / Das unauslöschliche Göttergelächter. And long is extinguished / The inextinguishable laughter of gods.

cover art: Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Boys in a Pasture (1874). Oil on canvas, 15.8" x 22.8". Museum of Fine Arts Boston #53.2552

I read Bevis: The Story of a Boy, by Richard Jefferies (1882). Real natural history meets boyish imagination in the adventures of Bevis and his friend Mark. h/t to Thomas (@thatiliazdguy.bsky.social) for the introduction!

cover art: Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), 'Approaching Storm, Beach Near Newport" (c.1861-62). Oil on canvas, 28" x 58". Museum of Fine Arts Boston #45.889.

I read Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, by Annie Dillard (1974). I'd read more like this.

I read Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2008). Her terrific 'Correspondences: A Family History in Letters' (1974) takes up about half of this volume. It's her birthday today (b. 3 January 1933).

Happy New Year! In spite of all the football I've managed to do a little reading, including Whose Body?, by Dorothy Sayers (1923), in which Lord Peter Wimsey makes his début.

I read Dubliners, by James Joyce (1914). This is a 2014 de Selby Press centenary edition with droll illustrations by Stephen Crowe (@invisibledot). As far as I know, this "Irish publishing house based in Paris" (comprising two colleagues from Shakespeare & Co.) only ever published this one title.

I read What is a Classic?, by T.S. Eliot (Faber, 1945), the inaugural lecture of the Virgil Society (of which Eliot was a founder and first president). Spoiler alert: There is one and only one classic in European literature, the Æneid, and that is not a bad thing.

I read The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck (1932). A skein of stories about the inhabitants of Las Pasturas del Cielo [real-life Corral de Tierra, situated in the hills between Monterey and Salinas]. Among my Steinbeck favorites.

I read Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell (1933). I'm grateful that Orwell had these experiences (and made a fine book of them) and that I haven't.

I read Christianity & the Writer's Task, by Georges Bernanos (Wiseblood Books, 2022). I'm neither Catholic nor writer but thought the author of Mouchette & Diary of a Country Priest might have something interesting to say.