It's still Wednesday here (barely) so ...

I read La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 2001), by Benedetta Origo, among others.

I read The Meaning of a Liberal Education, by Everett Dean Martin (1926), based on lectures given at the Cooper Union. His approach is largely a Via Negativa, warning us off what is not a Liberal Education, with broad hints as to what it might be.

I read The Water Statues, by Fleur Jaeggy (1980; 2021 translation by Gini Alhadeff). Like a dream, uncertain, enigmatic, seductive.

I read Love Sonnets & Elegies, by Louise Labé (in Richard Sieburth's 2014 translation for NYRB/Poets). I thought they might have some 16th century historical interest, but I ended up enjoying them very much.

I read The World of John Cleaveland, by Christopher M. Jedrey (1979). A great study of rural New England between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, with the 'Separatist' minister at its heart. It really is a world - family, church, community, law, politics, and economics, brought to vivid life.

I read The Comedy of Errors, by Wm. Shakespeare (Pelican Shakespeare, 2018). So it doesn't achieve the Shakespearian Sublime, it's still fun. I read Bloom's bit on it in Invention of the Human, and now I may pull down Plautus's Menaechmi, one of WS's sources.

I read Collected Poems and Other Verse, by Stéphane Mallarmé (Oxford World's Classics, 2006; translations by the Blackmores, E.H. & A.M.).

I read The International Style, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson (1932), after finding a box in the garage of my old architecture books.

I read In the Old 'Sun,' a 1908 story/novella by Hermann Hesse, which I believe is not collected anywhere (in English) but in vol 19 of 'German Classics,' a 20-volume set from 1913-14. I'd describe it as a short, German, 'Poorhouse Fair.' (The Sun was a tavern turned poorhouse.)

Happy Hundredth to Whitney Balliett (1926-2007), long-time jazz critic at The New Yorker. I've just started into American Singers. The opening profile, on composer Alec Wilder (the one non-singer in the collection), was quite good and led to some happy hours on youtube & spotify.

In honor of his birthday (1878) my Robert Walser books held a reunion. I'm going to sit down with a cup of coffee and read 'A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenburg,' by Guy Davenport.

I read In the Orchard: Poems with Birds, by Anne Stevenson (Enitharmon Press, 2016). Some of the poet's poems had birds in them: they're collected here. Finely enlivened with etchings by Alan Turnbull.

I read The Yellow Dog, by Georges Simenon (1931; 1987 translation by Linda Asher). Shady doings in the little port town of Concarneau. Revenge? And that poor yellow dog! cover photo (detail): Henry Gruyaert, Street scene - Paris, France (1985)

I read Beneath the Wheel, by Hermann Hesse (1906; 1968 translation by Michael Roloff). Interesting that both this and The Confusions of Young Törless appeared the same year, two 'Schulroman.'

I read Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen (1937). When I was very much younger I read this upon Holden Caulfield's recommendation -- an accidental library loan that he thought would "stink," but turned out to be "a very good book." A very good book, indeed, Holden.

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.