Reading

It sometimes seems like I'll take books out and return them without ever having read more than a few pages of them; I feel incredibly guilty about this, but I should learn that if I can't get through more than a few pages, I probably should just try a different book.

I returned El Arpa y la Sombra yesterday, and took out instead Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento, (The Shadow of the Wind in English).

Everything I'd read about it previously brought it to my attention as the sort of book that I would like very, very much; a book about books, about the power of stories. And when I picked it up, it had that sleek, transparent sort of prose that I absolutely need when reading books in languages I don't know that well. Murakami Haruki can do it too, and I believe he's the main reason I persisted in the belief that Japanese is really not all that difficult after all.

Jay Rubin's written, previously, in Making Sense of Japanese that the pleasure you get from figuring out what a paragraph means is absolutely unrelated to the pleasure you get from literary quality, and that it's easy to mix them up; that's true. But I don't particularly care, as I love the books that I love without the slighest regard to literary quality.