Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s given topic: Books on My Fall 2024 To-Read List
I know this is late (by a week) but I am still doing it. As for this fall season, it can go three ways. First, I might be reading works of Japanese and Asian literature. Second, I might be reading Booker Prize-shortlisted novels however, five books are still in transit. Third, I might be reading books in my active reading challenges. On another note, my autumn reading journey can combine all of the above. Anyway, here are some of the books that I might be reading this autumn season.
Title: The Empusium
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2022)
No. of Pages: 302
Synopsis:
September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and to debate the great issues of the day: Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone – or something – seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature inventiveness, humor, and bravura.
Title: Thirst for Love
Author: Yukio Mishima
Translator (from Japanese): Alfred H. Marks
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 200
Synopsis:
After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law’s house, where she numbly submits to the old man’s advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences.
Title: The Key
Author: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Translator (from Japanese): Howard Hibbett
Publisher: Perigree
Publishing Date: January 1981
No. of Pages: 183
Synopsis:
The Key is a novel told in the form of parallel diaries kept by a husband and wife which describe the last four months of their marriage. The husband (a professor in his fifties) frenziedly drives himself to even more intense sexual pleasures with the wife with whom he has lived for almost thirty years. He resorts to various stimulants: brandy and a handsome young man for her. In the day they record the previous night’s experiences. Each suspects that the other is secretly reading their respective diaries, and wonders at the same time if the other does not actually intend that his daily confession be read. It is a masterful example of a theme which dominates all of Tanizaki’s writing: the relationship of sexual desire to the will to live.
Title: The Rainbow
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Translator (from Japanese): Haydn Trowell
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: 2023 (1950)
No. of Pages: 215
Synopsis:
With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters – born to the same father but different mothers – struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. Momoko, their father’s first child – haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together – seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers.
A thoughtful, probing nove about enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a powerful =, poignant, work from Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Title: Woman of the Ashes
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2018 (2019)
No. of Pages: 254
Synopsis:
Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last emperor of the State of Gaza. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village. Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese Crown, while the others have chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes.
Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.
Title: The Invention of Morel
Author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
Translator (from Spanish): Ruth L.C. Simms
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 103
Synopsis:
Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw. This fantastic exploration of virtual realities also bears comparison with the sharpest work of Philip K. Dick. It is both a story of suspense and a bizarre romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.
Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to find such admirers as Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Octavio Paz. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad, this classic of modern Latin American literature also changed the history of film.
Title: The Black Book
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Translator (from Turkish): Maureen Freely
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: July 2006
No. of Pages: 461
Synopsis:
Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celal, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celal, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celal’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the most.
Title: The House of Power
Author: Sami Bindari
Translators (from Arabic): Sami Bindari and Mona St. Leger
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Publishing Date: 1980
No. of Pages: 216
Synopsis:
The House of Power is the first novel of this great Egyptian writer to appear in English. A potent story of love and hate, of violence and ancient faith, it evokes the oppressive quality of village life in Egypt a generation ago.
The novel opens with the symbolic death of village idealist, Saleh’s father. Now Saleh must deal with the petty cruelties of local bureaucrats. As the months pass, Saleh grows tougher and there is an interval of calm. But beneath the calm run strains of long-buried resentments that will tear apart the village society and catapult Saleh into desperate flight across the desert.
Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books
Publishing Date: 2004
No. of Pages: 216
Synopsis:
The Scarlet Letter, America’s first psychological novel, exploded society’s view of Puritanism upon its initial publication in 1850, and today – perhaps more than ever – it holds the power to change the way we think about human relationships, punishment, and the status quo.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is a dark tale of love, crime, and revenge set in colonial New England. It revolves around a single, forbidden act of passion that forever alters the lives of three members of a small Puritan community: Hester Prynne, an ardent, fierce, and ultimately ostracized woman who bears the symbol of her sin – the letter A stitched into the breast of her gown – in humble silence; the Reverent Arthur Dimmesdale, a respected public figure who is inwardly tormented by long-hidden guilt; and the malevolent Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband – a man who seethes in an Ahab-like lust for vengeance.
The landscape of this classic novel is uniquely American, but the themes it explores are both timeless and universal – the nature of sin, guilt, and penitence, the clash between our private and public selves, and the spiritual and psychological cost of living outside society. Constructed with the elegance of a Greek tragedy, The Scarlet Letter brilliantly illuminates the truth that lies deep within the human heart.
Title: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe
Translator (from Japanese): John Nathan
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2002 (1986)
No. of Pages: 250
Synopsis:
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a virtuoso novel from one of today’s finest authors. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. This child Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things – behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother – and K, given to retreat from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his life-long love of William Blake’s poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and his place in it, he must also reevaluate his relationship with his own father and the duty of artists and writers in society. A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between a father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 