Reading updates

I have completely turned over the books I've been reading. I suppose I will have more to say on Anniversaries, a book I spent over a year reading, but not right now. The new lineup:

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 2

...and God help me, I will finish Buddenbrooks before I run out of renewals at the library. Thomas Mann, king of novels I like in theory but kind of dislike in practice (cf. The Magic Mountain, but especially Doktor Faustus, a novel which very much should have been my jam but left me with little afterlife except a yearlong exploration of Beethoven piano sonatas).

...we are mostly back on our famous European novels bullshit; the Proust is an attempt to up my reading pace and actually finish the series; the Weiss is entirely about the difficulty of climbing up a sheer wall of text with perhaps four or five paragraph breaks over 300+ pages.

Poetry seems to have fizzled out for the moment, though I do think there's something to be said for returning to some things previously experienced at too high a tempo--I come back to, say, Emily Dickinson and Sujata Bhatt for a reason, might as well see what's new there five years on. Drama too--I have a long list from Bluesky of contemporary American plays worth diving into, but finding any of them in print is difficult, much less anything written by those authors. But I will eventually find a solution there, as I often do.

The pendulum is due to swing back to Japan, I think: more has come out in translation and it'll be worth it to revisit what I have read in order to identify gaps. But for now it's still Hot Austrian Summer (I held off on Elfriede Jelinek's Women as Lovers because it Had A Gimmick, but alas, it was good. Unfortunately all of her other translated novels seem to be...unpalatable.).

A question, to be taken seriously: is this all just inner emigration?