Five your consideration:

I shouldn't really be trying to do justice to these books, some of which are among the best ever written, in this state of exhaustion. I thought that I would find the energy to write about them in the manner they deserve, but I have not, so this will have to do.

Athol Fugard: Valley Song

This is the second time I have read this book, this time with a view to teaching it to my world literature class. On second reading it is, if possible even more charming. Valley Song is an example of how to do drama right. There is a not so fine line between Shaw, Ibsen and , especially Strindberg--the very definition of realistic drama--and Becket, Ionesco and their ilk. I suppose it is a continuum of sorts, and Fugard falls slightly to the right of Pirandello on the scale. Not so real as to be boring, but not to absurd as to be . . . absurd? Rather, he passes seemingly effortlessly between the two worlds, into and out of the characters' minds. The real beauty is that it seems so natural that the reader/viewer doesn't even think to ask, "What parts of this are real, and which imaginary" until trying to write something about it.

Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji

This monster has long been on my list, and only Philip Ward was persuasive enough to get me to follow through. I almost feel regret for reading it under such compulsion, for I didn't really begin to appreciate the beauty of it until three-quarters of the way through. I was reading it as such an English Major, such a westerner, always looking for the meaning, that I didn't stop to appreciate that it really is written quite beautifully. The prose is so flowery that it may as well have been written in verse, and I have no doubt that the Lady Murasaki would have been up tot that task as well. Sadly, I was in too modern a frame of mind, both literarily, and mentally--wanting to get through it and defeat it.

In spite of its general lack of theme, however, I did manage to take away a sympathy with the title character, and even his adoptive son, who dominates the last third of the book. Neither of them ever really found permanent love; nobody in the book did except, perhaps, the suspiciously named Murasaki, Genji's favorite. There is always, especially for men, another side of the fence, another field to be mown, so to speak. Maybe gay marriage is not such a good idea . . .

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

I was originally intending to write this revivew as what Leslie Klinger calls in his introduction to the anthology, "a gentle fiction". Throughout, he takes the amusing tack of treating the works as honest-to-god biographies, commenting in extensive notes about Holmes' and Watson's lives as though they were real people. This was not entirely annoying, for the extent of Sherlockian scholarship would make comprehensive annotations impossible. "Why not then," says I, "write the review in the same style." I may yet write an apocryphal work, wherein Holmes uses his powers to deduce that he and Watson are, in fact, fictional, and critiques how he is written. But not today.

Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Far more enjoyable and succinct than Kavalier and Klay [sic] due largely to the way Chabon's masterful way with an epigrammatic metaphor naturally fits the detective noir genre. Some of my favorites:

"A badge of grass, a green brooch pinned at the collarbone of a mountain to a vast cloak of black trees" (247).

"The Body, the horror and the splendor of it, naked as a giant bloodshot eyeball without a socket . . . Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a wet slab of limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair . . . the belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breast full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs great, hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah" (341).

This latter one reminds me of a certain opera singer I know. I thought I saw Jessie yeterday, but it was only a white Volkswagon.

Often a certain ghost contributor to this blog and I read side by side--different books, of course, his unbearably non-fictional--and read cute little passages to each other. I had to stop myself, though. Every page of the Union has at least one aphorism that deserves to be read aloud. I think it perfectly just that he won the Hugo this year, an event that I was, may I mention, witness to.

There was another book I finished recently, but I can't remember which one . . . BTD: 29?

Added later: the book is Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. I have some relevant things to say about it, but I can't find my copy.