Edition 69 was a six-volume series of works published in Czechoslovakia from 1931-1933 showcasing avant garde erotic writing and illustration. Spearheaded by Jindřich Štyrský, the volumes were kept from the usual distribution channels for restrictions by censorship laws, and instead the volumes were distributed to collectors and friends off of a limited print run. Of the six original volumes, two are printed in this small, hardcover book. Of the unprinted, volume two was the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, which is available at any bookstore and too extensive. The others (erotic poetry by František Halas, a selection from Ragionamento by Pietro Aretino, and a selection by Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret) were excused for various reasons.

What remains are volumes one and six: Vítěslav Nezval’s “Sexual Nocturne” and Jindřich Štyrský’s “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream”, both with illustrations by Štyrský. These are supplemented by a collection of dreams from Štyrský’s dream journal, an essay on sexual art by Bohuslav Brouk of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, and a translator’s note with historical background. Both works are of interest for largely historical reasons, having been written by the founders of Czech surrealism in the 1930’s.

The Nezval work details a young man’s sexual awakening in a silenced, conservative society and comments on censorship, the naughtiness thus inherent in sexual talk and action, and how naughtiness is perceived in differing contexts. The story loses something in being read in our modern society, though. There is not too much shocking in Nezval’s tale, but from the perspective of 1930’s Czechoslovakia, the story must have been extremely racy and therefore revolutionary.

The Štyrský strikes a more surrealistic tone, eschewing concrete plot for a more poetic examination of sex, incest, and infidelity. It’s a short piece of writing, but it’s followed by a huge selection of dreamlike, collage illustrations, some more effective than others. Again, this part of the book suffers from being taken from its original context, but it stands better on its own as a piece of art.

By far the most interesting parts for me were the Brouk essay and the translator’s note. The note is the standard few pages of historical background that helps you appreciate the work that preceded, but the Brouk is an discussion of pornography consumption in a conservative society as an act of rebellion that colors the consumption in turn. It’s more complex than that, but I’d probably mess it up. Anyway, it really brought the collection together because it was written by the man who founded this movement, and this more than the translator’s note really demonstrated the impetus behind the art of Edition 69.

I understand this wasn’t my more thrilling review, but this isn’t a book to evaluate in the same way as some novel or short story collection, so I figured I was better off telling you what it was rather than how it was. So now you know. If you’re interested in what 1930’s surrealist Czech erotica might be like, give it a try. If not… well there’s really no point. But I’m going to recommend you be interested. It’s something different at the very least.

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

It’s not so much a book as an author. I have zero interest in Kurt Vonnegut for some reason. I read a couple of his things in high school, and I liked them, but I just can’t bring myself to do it again. NO idea why. Same goes for all the great Russian authors, only I haven’t read them before.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

First of all, the activity would have to be quiet, but social. I’ll say a brunch… one of those brunches that goes on for five hours. As for guests, I’m going to go with Hermione Granger (Book 7 Hermione, after she gets cool), Lyra from His Dark Materials (only a bit older so she can have mimosas), and the White Queen from Through the Looking Glass. That last might make things a little exasperating now and then, but I think Hermione would enjoy figuring her out.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

Les Miserables? I dunno. Doesn’t seem like my thing, but I’ve never read it, so who knows? Other people have said Moby Dick, and I’m REALLY inclined to agree with that.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

Try EVERY book we were assigned in junior high and high school. I’m not one to read what I’m told. The only exceptions to this were Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Jane Eyre, both of which I wanted to read anyway.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t?

Really haven’t. It’s happened with movies, but books are too much of a commitment for this to happen.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)

This sort of depends. Starter books, huh? I guess it would have to be something shortish, though. Ok, so if the VIP needs to be convinced that books are entertaining and good for leisure, I’d recommend Clive Barker’s Abarat. Pretty pictures and all. If they needed convincing of the power of literature to speak to the human experience and all that, I’d go with The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin. For a combination of the two, definitely The Golden Compass. I’d probably settle on the last one, but only if I trusted the VIP to appreciate it.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

I was going to say Japanese automatically too, but…. actually, there’s no but. Japanese. Anything else I can learn on my own, but Japanese is really hard and has a huge body of work.

A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

Coraline. Neil Gaiman. I read it once or twice a year anyway, so that’s no problem whatsoever.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?

The most important thing I can say I’ve discovered is how books can affect people in such profoundly different ways. It’s common knowledge that everybody reacts to things differently, but actually seeing it expressed and also seeing how one person’s interpretations vary across a whole number of books with which I’m familiar helps me to find new ways to appreciate what I read. It’s pretty neat.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.

Honestly, I’m not all into fancy editions or anything like that. I like paperbacks…. gently used or new. Mostly all I want in my dream library is volume. I want it HUGE, automatically filled with everything I could ever be in the mood for. And it had better be really well-organized. Well, that’s my responsibility, really. It’s half the fun. So yeah… it’ll be huge… multi-roomed. THEMED rooms! Fantasy room. Sci-fi room. Classics room. All furnished to match, but not in a tacky way. And I have this great butler, too, that keeps things looking nice. And a cookbook room with a gigantic gourmet kitchen were the attractive celebrity chefs will live! Ok I’m done.

The other day I got a belated Christmas gift from my friend, Chris, and it was more than I could have dreamed. It was an envelope with eight crappy books from the 60’s through the 80’s that he called Bunduki Wannabes. They’re the kind of horrible sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure stories that give other works in the genres a bad name. I love them.

I’ve replaced a category in the 888 Challenge to accommodate these because he told me to.

There’s something really satisfying about reading schlocky, outrageous fiction with plot elements that can make you both cringe and laugh out loud. As terrible as Bunduki was, it was a ton of fun. Here’s what we’ve got coming up:

• Quest of the Dawn Man / J. H. Rosny — The fact that this caveman adventure was translated from the French implies that it might be pretty ok, actually. Still… the guy on the cover’s riding a lion.
• Titans of the Universe / James Harvey — Like Bunduki, this is about a perfect man who can do no wrong. Bunduki in Space!
• Slave Ship / Frederik Pohl — Tagline: “Manpower was in short supply, so the UN Navy began drafting… animals!
• The Master of Evil / David C. Smith — Upon further inspection and despite the stupid cover, this might be kinda ok.
• The Harp and the Blade / John Myers Myers — Dunno about the quality of this one, but the cover’s pretty gay. Ever met a barbarian warlord type who shaved his pits?
• Out of their Minds / Clifford D. Simak — Everything mankind has ever imagined shoved together in one novel for no particular reason.
• Trax / R. L. S. Hawke — Another “perfect specimen of man” story, this one in ancient Rome!
• Sioux Spaceman / Andre Norton — What can I say about Sioux Spaceman? What do I NEED to say about Sioux Spaceman? Nothing.

Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask turned out to be a lot more than I imagined and a little less than I had hoped. I initially approached this book through the lens of Japanese fiction. Knowing this was a book about Japan during WWII and having read the author’s The Sound of Waves, I had a certain set of expectations.

What surprised me is that I also found myself evaluating the book as a piece of gay fiction, which I hadn’t originally intended. I knew the book was about a homosexual man, and based on the title, I assumed he was keeping this hidden, but for some reason, prior to starting the novel, to categorize it in the corpus of gay writing seemed inaccurate and insulting. Inaccurate because it’s older and by a heterosexual(?) man. Insulting because — and this should come as no surprise — I hate gay fiction.

Within the first 20 pages, I had completely changed my mind. During the first 100 pages of the novel, I felt like Mishima was living in my brain, pulling forth memories I didn’t know I had of my own coming-of-age and sexual awakening. In other gay works, there is a lot of emphasis on sex, relationships, alienation, and violence, but it’s often superficial and always contrary to my personal experience. The first third of this novel, however, is about the protagonist as a child, and Mishima captures so accurately many of the confusing and also nonplussing thoughts that a to-be-gay child might have, and certainly that I had. A lot of what went on in the character’s head felt perfectly normal to him, though they were thoughts that would later set him apart from his peers. The fascination with masculinity, the mistaking of sexual attraction for aesthetic appeal, the natural disconnect between fantasies in the mind and what they mean in life. It was so similar to what I experienced, it was scary. These aren’t things that I’ve talked about with anybody, so as sappy as it sounds, reading this book made me feel like I wasn’t alone.

If you read this, though, bear in mind that the guy’s obsession with death and stuff was NOT part of my experience. It’s icky.

After the first third or half of the book, though, the protagonist’s experience varies drastically from mine, so I was able to bring my mind back to a more subjective place from which to evaluate the novel. It’s here that his story becomes intimately tied with his life in Japan during and after the war, and what the rest of the book focuses on other than his thoughts are his relationships with women and how lying about sexuality to the world inevitably led to tension and a great deal of self-deception. It remains a good book with that quiet, introspective style I’ve come to associate with Japanese literature, but it does get a little dry at times and somewhat repetitive. Every now and then I wanted to say “Ok! We get it! You’re conflicted! It sucks to live a lie. Now can we please move on?!” But ultimately, the book is still insightful and engaging.

One thing the book encouraged me to do was take another look at some gay fiction. I replaced a category in that mammoth 888 Challenge to include 8 books that I feel will span a spectrum of themes (and quality, I’m sure.) I replaced the category called “Professionally Relevant” because I figured you guys wouldn’t want to read about that boring stuff anyway.

I have this goal–more of a hope really–that 2008 will be a better reading year than 2007. “Better,” in this case, is not a measurement of quantity of books, reading focus, or really anything having to do with me. It’s more an issue of the quality of books I read. There was a lot of disappointment in 2008, so much so that when everybody was saying how hard it was to narrow down a Top 10 of 2007, I couldn’t find 10 books that deserved to be on such a list. The Murakami, the Card, the… well I don’t remember now. The point is, we (royal) have to do better.

So far, so good. The Woman in the Dunes, which I finished almost a week ago, is a fantastic novel.

Niki Jumpei is an amateur entomologist. A bug collector. Yeah, it’s an odd sort of hobby, but it probably keeps him from murdering young girls or setting cats on fire, so just go with it. He’s also fascinated by sand, on which he has done much research, in part with hopes of finding a heretofore undiscovered species of sand-dwelling insect. Again my sociopathy-sense is tingling, but I have to admit it was these obsessions of the character that provided Abe the opportunity to, within the first 20 pages, convince me this would be a favorite book of mine with his lyrical, heady, and insightful style. On sand:

Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth. […] While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

The part omitted with the ellipses make this excerpt come together even better, but it was kinda long.

Anyway, Niki takes a couple days off work to visit some dunes and look for bugs. He needs to stay the night in the village there, so–and bear with me here–I guess they lowered him into a sort of pit in the dunes where a woman lived alone in her house. The physical layout of this house and the surrounding dunes was never clear in my mind, though this was the setting for 90% of the novel. This was actually a minor drawback, as I had to take it on faith that things happened the way they did. Though I suppose it’s fiction, so taking it on faith is the only way…

The point is, this was all a trick. The sand enters this house constantly, and it is the woman’s full-time job to shovel the sand into buckets that will be lifted out and discarded. She must do this because if the sand builds up in her house–her pit–too much, it will upset some sort of balance and the entire village below will be destroyed by sand. Again, I have no idea why this was or what this village looked like. The physics of the thing are totally beyond my grasp, so just go with it. Anyway, now Niki’s trapped in there with her to help her out because the townspeople took the rope ladder away. Ha ha.

I’ve rambled already. Basically, the book’s about a guy trapped in a sand pit with a woman. The entire book. A sand pit. Excited yet? It’s a hard sell, I’ll admit, but Abe manages to transform this strange plot into a deeply moving, intensely psychological, and non-stop page-turning study on this man and both his relationship with the woman and how he deals with his entrapment. It touches on identity, acceptance, adaptation, sexual politics, and most of all Niki’s struggle with himself.

And by “sexual politics,” yes, I mean sex in a sand pit. As if he wasn’t chafed already.

The point is, this book is exceptional. Had I read it a week sooner, I may have been able to eke out a Top 10 list with this at the top. As it is, Mr. Abe will have to wait until December for this illustrious honor.

I promise to quit reading books I don’t like without feeling bad.

I have a serious problem putting books down once I’ve started them, even if I’m not enjoying them at all. A part of my brain considers it an affront to the author, as if they’d know in the first place. It is probably related to a childhood psychosis I had wherein I would feel bad throwing candy wrappers away because the poor people at the candy wrapper factory worked hard all day to make them. I’m sure some of you know what I mean. Anyway, it’s stupid, and I’ve over it.

So, in the spirit of this resolution, I’m giving up on a book. I am about 100 pages into Natsume Soseki’s I Am a Cat, and I’m sorry, but I’m just not feeling it. It started out charming and witty, but it’s fallen into a really dull, flat tundra of conversation that I can’t abide. The book was written in the first decade of the 20th century, and that’s all too obvious. I’d stick it out if it weren’t 470 dense pages, but it is, so I’m not.

What’s doubly sad is that I started reading it for the Four-Legged Friends Challenge, so now I have to find something else to replace it. I’m thinking Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White because of the recommendations I got on the Stuart Little detraction. Also because it’s short, and I’m running out of time.

So there you go. Failure. Proud failure, with no guilty feelings towards the long-dead author. Maybe I’ll come back to it one day.

I selected the books (9 children/young adult, 1 adult… weird proportion, I know, but I was going to short things to enhance the illusion of accomplishment) and numbered them and put the numbers in a hat. Actually, it wasn’t a hat, it was a decorative gift box.

Sadly, halfway into my first book, I remembered that I had a ton of shit to do Saturday (today) and that I had plans as well that I had forgotten about. So my 24-hour reading fest turned into about an 8-hour one. It was still pretty fun. (Also, I went shopping today and bought fabulous clothes, and we all know that’s just as important as expanding our minds with reading.) Anyway, here’s the timeline:

7:00p – Began Ella Enchanted
7:20p – Broke for dinner
7:37p – Resumed Ella Enchanted
11:07p – Finished Ella Enchanted
11:08p – Began The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
11:48p – Finished The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
11:51p – Began Bridge to Terabithia
2:14a – Finished Bridge to Terabithia
2:15a – Retired to bed with Peter and the Starcatchers
2:45a – Slept

And some thoughts:

Ella Enchanted — Honestly, I was prepared to hate this book, and I didn’t. That kinda says a lot. It’s a little bit contrived, a little bit cutesy, and a LOTTA bit girly, but if you can get into that, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a fairy tale, and it’s the Cinderella story, so you know how it’s going to end, but Ella turns out to be a compelling character who keeps you interested. And I don’t know about anyone else who read this, but the Prince in my mind was an absolute dreamsicle. He’s the perfect man. He’s also, like, 17, so yes, I do feel dirty, thanks. I haven’t seen the purportedly nightmarish Anne Hathaway movie yet, but I’m gonna Netflix it.

The Hoboken Chicken Emergency — This was cute. It is extremely short and not a terribly involved story, but it has a charm and cleverness that makes it worth picking up if you’ve got a spare half-hour. I was afraid it would depend on the novelty of a giant chicken to carry it along (since chickens, like monkeys and penguins, are kinda automatically funny), but Pinkwater’s humor is fresh, often in subtle ways.

Bridge to Terabithia — Man, what can I say about Bridge to Terabithia? This is probably one of the finest young readers books ever written. I read it in the 6th grade, which is a long time ago, and found myself relating to Jess and his little sister. Before I saw this movie in the summertime, I remembered that relationship and one devastating still image of a landscape with a creek that would always pop into my mind when this book was mentioned. I was reading it last night, and I can honestly say I’ve never believed a book deserved a Newbery as much as this one.

Something happened to me last night while I was reading this. I’m not going to spoil the ending for anyone unfamiliar with the story, but I had this complete emotional breakdown towards the end of the book. I can’t explain it, really, and I’m even kind of uncomfortable talking about it, but I cried and cried like I hadn’t in ages. It went on for a full half an hour before I could pull myself together and finish reading. Afterwards, I was exhausted, but I forced myself to pick up another book before I went to bed just to get my mind off of things. Ok, enough of that.

Incidentally, Peter and the Starcatchers is surprisingly good so far. I’m only 50 pages in, but it’s better-written than I expected. I think I’ll like it…. and I’ll let you know.

I’ve been busy and traveling to LA and entertaining my family in town and mostly only having time to read on airplanes and subways. Some of these books aren’t worth a closer look, and some of them are. If they are and I get inspired, good. If not, so it goes:

• Brave New World / Aldous Huxley — I read this book by accident because I thought it was on my list for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. Turns out, it didn’t win any awards, and that’s fine by me! I was really not a fan of this. I found it tedious, superficial, and horribly dated. Apologies to BNW enthusiasts, but I’m surprised I read to the end. Yuck. This is the review that held me back. I never wanted to write it, so I kept putting it off because I was afraid I’d bitch too much and offend people, and also I was never in the mood. Then three weeks went by and I hadn’t blogged at all. My solution was this digest.
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH / Robert C. O’Brien — My copy of NIMH is made of dust and spores and is held together by pure willpower. Somebody loved this book before I bought it. I love it now. It was clever and readable and smart, and I fell in love with every vermin protagonist. After Stuart Little, this restored my faith in rodent fiction. I shall now welcome Brian Jacques back into my life as well.
• Kokoro / Natsume Soseki — Kokoro is beautiful, really. There’s a lot in this book, and much of it is difficult to truly understand having grown up in Western society. The story is told primarily through conversations between the narrator and his Sensei, except the final section with is an extended (REALLY extended) letter from Sensei to the protagonist whose name escapes me right now. I’ll probably talk more about this one later.
• The Subtle Knife / Philip Pullman — Airplane reread. I love this trilogy, and the second book is fantastic. You either know that already or will read it now and find out because I say you have to. Go.
• Fire and Hemlock / Diana Wynne Jones — This book was enthralling through the first two thirds, which I read in one sitting, but the ending kinda wavers. It suffers from what I like to call the Wynne Jones Whatinthehell, wherein the story seems to be going along fine until you hit a passage so shrouded in metaphorical magic with no precedent that you’re like “What in the hell is going on?” At its best, this is a wonderfully-crafted story where you find yourself really growing up with Polly, the protagonist. She’s awesome, and this novel does in one book what Harry Potter did in seven, which is to really capture how a child’s experiences can define the adult he or she becomes. The ending was kind of crap, but I still look very fondly back on my experience with the novel. Definitely my favorite Wynne Jones work, a sentiment which is echoed by many. Or perhaps I’m echoing them. Shut up, whatever.
• American Gods / Neil Gaiman — I just finished this today. It won 100,000 awards. I guess it was pretty good. Gaiman’s characterizations are always brilliant, and this was no exception. It’s a solid novel, fully realized and written with his usual grace and wit, but something about it just made it kinda flat to me. I suppose I didn’t find it especially believable. It seemed like everything was happening for the sake of happening. It’s extremely clever in a lot of ways, but I feel like it got caught up in that and occasionally forgot to be about people. It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t hate it and I’m in love with the character of Sam, so I’m still calling this one a win.

In other news, everyone I have ever met has left town for the sake of Jesus… and I forget where I was going with that, but I must away again, so pretend I didn’t say anything.

Chronically behind in everything, I present to you my official tiny reading list for Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge. Three books. January 30, 2008. I can totally handle. I’m going out of town in a week, so lots of airport time awats… ok.

1. The Woman in the Dunes / Kobo Abe
2. Kokoro / Natsume Sōseki
3. Confessions of a Mask / Yukio Mishima

Really, I’m only behind in posting this little announcement. I’m actually 2/3 of the way through Kokoro already, and it’s positively lovely. I’m reading it because my friend ChrisP told me to do so before I read I Am a Cat (a.k.a. Wagahai Whatever), which I have to hit soon for Kitty Challenge. Ummm… also, the same Chris instructed me to read Woman in the Dunes before Kangaroo Notebook, so that’s why that’s there. Basically, Chris tells me what to read and then I read what Chris tells me to read. … which reminds me, his Christmas gift has been sitting on my kitchen table for a month and now needs to be sent…

That’s right, I got you something.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is the one charming little grammar book everyone should read. Yes, I like grammar, ok? I don’t use punctuation properly, especially on the Internet, but I am generally well-aware of the atrocities I commit such as this very sentence. Other people are simply uninformed on the proper uses of some of linguists’ favorite little symbols–you know, the ones that you use to make emoticons.

Lynne Truss is a self-proclaimed stickler for punctuation, but the book is not a style manual, nor does the author insist upon CONSTANT VIGILANCE in written communication. (Harry Potter reference.) She instead communicates a genuine reverence for the power good punctuation can have on language along with sections on the history of certain symbols and numerous amusing examples of embarrassing grammar mistakes commonly made.

Truss’ (or is it Truss’s?) style–should I have used an m-dash there?–is accessible and fun, making this a quick and enjoyable read. I had an 8th-grade English teacher much like Truss, and this book hearkened back to my grammar education with Mrs. Panagakis (R.I.P.), another kooky stickler. I was reminded of my terror at the number of rules for that little comma and especially my affection for the misunderstood semicolon, but most of all, I was reminded that language is a precious and elegant art form that, while evolving in a 21st-century society, still has so much to gain from the Rules that E-Mail Forgot. I close with a quote:

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.