doll's wedding

and other stories
by Chaso (Chaganti Somayajulu); translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman

It's a lesson in how to make your stories everything but what they seem. Wandering, straightforward stories about a simple thing and everything else, too. It's lovely and heart-wrenching.

With an introduction that talks about his style as lacking sentiment and being "threadbare," I found it to be quite a striking and emotional book. As usual, I should have read the blurb later and just judged for myself first, I guess.

It's a strange sort of experience, to read a translation from a language you're familiar with. I found myself constantly translating everything back into Telugu in my head. (The last time this happened was when I was reading the translation of Gulabi Talkies by Vaidehi, but that was written in Kannada which I can hardly understand. I kept translating it into Telugu and Tamil in my head, whenever I felt like a sentence sounded better in either language.) Anyway, I really want to read it in Telugu now. Let's see. 

invisible cities

i want to commit to memory:
every little detail about every single city in italo calvino's invisible cities.

List of Flouted Resolutions Thus Far, May 2012

1. Hi. So I've been reading mostly fantasy. Even more than last year. So sue me.

2. Ka, Roberto Calasso; Transmission, Hari Kunzru; Warbreaker, Brandon Sanderson; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick; Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis - These are books I have cheated on, started reading, (bought, in most cases), but have not finished. I have liked all of them (loved Ka especially), but midway started reading something else and haven't bothered to pick these up again. They're lying on the table next to my bed and are staring at me all the time.

3. Obviously, I read Patrick Rothfuss, the Unfinished But Awesome Series About Kvothe the Awesome. Twice over. But it's worth it. So.

4. Must. Read. Regular. Fiction. Therefore, I am going to finish Zorba the Greek (which is really quite nice. I don't know why I stopped reading it) and then start reading something else on this list of unfinished books. (Being broke also helps - I can read what I have instead of buying new books, you see.)

see what just arrived in the mail!

and they're so pretty! and hardbound! and the illustrations are so pretty! thank you p'akka!!