This is one in a series of (for the most part) monthly posts that round up the (mostly non-city-related) books and essays that also figure into my reading life.
Books
Michael Shapiro, The Shadow in the Sun: A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow: I first read this strangely forgotten portrait of Olympics-era Korea before I’d even been here, and re-read it knowing all the places and events cited. Korea seems to have been much worse in the 80s, so naturally I wish I’d experienced it.
Essays
“I’m not sure why Taiwan has so much English—maybe due to optimism regarding tourism and business. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in widespread error-ridden, idiosyncratic, and unintentionally poetic English in public typography.”
“We offshored the jobs that didn’t require a degree, and then declared a crisis in the institutions that were never designed to give everyone a degree in the first place.”
“La France n’est pas viscéralement anti-libérale, mais que contrairement à de nombreux pays européens elle n’a pas encore réussi à réunir les conditions de mise en œuvre d’un moment libéral dans son histoire récente.”
“Nobody makes it through life without swaddling themselves in a thick coating of lies. You lie about yourself so often and so automatically that you almost start to believe it. The only difference is that when Jason Arday lied he went big.”
“This could have been a novel solely about the private world of a middle-aged couple; instead, Lanchester is more interested in how privacy can be distorted and deranged, obliterated or weaponized, at the click of a button.”
“We broadcast our pain obsessively, clinging defensively to the device that exacerbates it, circulating the language of pop psychology through that same device.”
“Although Cusk is a reliably effective technician, Life of M is less a work of art in the honorific sense than it is an artwork in the ethnographic sense. Its primary value, like so many novels these days, is symptomatic rather than aesthetic.”
“なぜ僕たちは1988年アンマンの音楽を'City Pop'というカテゴリーから理解することができても、1980年代東京の音楽を'Amman Pop'というカテゴリーから理解することはないのだろうか。”
“If you were to put her decades of writing about movies between two covers, you’d have something quite a bit larger than Knausgård’s six volumes, and something that could with greater justice be called My Struggle.”
“Fiction isn’t journalism; newsworthiness can’t save a piece of bad fiction, while a good novel might be written decades, or even centuries, after the events that it describes.”
“Borges propone que el nacimiento de la novela reside no en lo que se llamaría, al modo tradicional, un acto de creación pura, sino en una labor que durante siglos ha sido considerada como subsidiaria: la traducción.”
“The Kimification of American politics is one of the least recognised contributions North Korea has made to the world.”
“We are cursed by our refusal to mutter out loud the simple reality, understood by most children, that different individual human beings can be more or less smart.”