Category Archives: Literature

“The Joy of Words” by Lu Ji [w/ Audio]

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Writing is joy --
   so saints and scholars all pursue it.

A writer makes new life in the void,
   knocks on silence to make a sound,
   binds space and time on a sheet of silk
   and pours out a river from an inch-sized heart.

As words give birth to words
   and thoughts arouse deeper thoughts,
   they smell like flowers giving off scent,
   spread like green leaves in spring;
   a long wind comes, whirls into a tornado of ideas,
   and clouds rise from the writing-brush forest.

Translation by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping in The Art of Writing (1996) Boston: Shambhala.

BOOKS: “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Luo Guanzhong

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Three Kingdoms (4-Volume Boxed Set)Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Website – Penguin

The edition that I read was the Penguin abridged version that fits this sprawling epic into a single volume of a little over 600 pages. This is one of the four Great Classics of Chinese literature (along with Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber.) It offers a fictionalized telling of a period of Chinese history featuring a three-way civil war, especially centered upon the Han attempt to maintain its Imperial line against challengers, a fight that would ultimately end in the reunification under the Jin.

I’ve loved reading the Chinese classics. While this book and Water Margin feature massive ensembles of characters and could become clunky and cumbersome to read, they don’t because stories are told in intense battle-sized chunks and with a profound capacity to build character hooks that maintain clarity despite so many characters.

I would break this book up into three parts. The first (and by far the bulk of the story) focuses on a trio of great warriors that form a kind of blood-brother pact: Xuande, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei. Under Xuande’s leadership, these men fight to keep the Han imperial line intact. (It’s fair to say it could also be seen as focusing on the opposition to these men, notably Cao Cao.) The next bit continues the action as the masterful strategist, Kong Ming, tries to keep the wheels rolling on Xuande’s army after the dramatic deaths of the aforementioned trio, and finally there is a section in which it is as though all the great warriors are gone, resulting in an inevitable reunification as there are no longer those who can fight insurmountable odds. As I describe it, it might seem anticlimactic, but it is far so, but I would count it a tragedy.

To me, this book read more like historical fiction than did Water Margin, the latter (also excellent) is almost like fantasy: its characters are so much larger than life as to be veritably superhuman. That said, this novel does feature some magic, but the characters feel much more life-sized — if not without a measure of grandiosity.

I’d highly recommend this book for readers of historical fiction. It’s highly engaging and readable, despite being long and of epic of proportions.

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“Ebb” by Edna St. Vincent Millay [w/ Audio]

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I know what my heart is like
   Since your love died:
 It is like a hollow ledge
 Holding a little pool
   Left there by the tide,
   A little tepid pool,
 Drying inward from the edge.

BOOKS: “The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

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The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (AmazonClassics Edition)The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Paul Laurence Dunbar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Available online at Project Gutenberg

As the title suggests, this is all the published poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. With a career pre-dating the Harlem Renaissance, during which lyric poetry ruled the roost, Dunbar may not be as well-known today as several of the African American poets who came later, but it’s not for being any less masterful.

The collection includes a wide variety of lyric forms from simple quatrains to intermediate length poems of several pages. The content and tones also vary, and there is often a sense of whimsy in the poems that goes beyond just being lyrical in form. Dunbar wrote both in dialect and in standard English. He was a big fan of James Whitcomb Riley’s dialectal work, as a poem in Riley’s honor attests. The dialect poems are easy enough to follow and are a pleasure to read. Dunbar was by no means limited to dialectal writing; he also wrote in Standard English cleverly, and the juxtaposition of his very “proper” poems and the dialectal ones shows a great range.

I’d highly recommend this collection for poetry readers, particularly those who enjoy lyric and dialectal poems.

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“Without desire everything is sufficient” by Ryōkan Taigu

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Without desire everything is sufficient.
 With seeking myriad things are impoverished.
 Plain vegetables can soothe hunger.
 A patched robe is enough to cover this bent old body.
 Alone I hike with a deer.
 Cheerfully I sing with village children.
 The stream under the cliff cleanses my ears.
 The pine on the mountain top fits my heart.

Translation by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Daniel Leighton in Essential Zen (1994) HarperSanFrancisco.

BOOKS: “The Obscene Madame D” by Hilda Hilst

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The Obscene Madame DThe Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Pushkin Classics

Release Date: May 27, 2025

This strange novella features a lot of stream-of-consciousness exchanges between the lead and her common-law spouse / lover. Hille, the protagonist, is a woman who’s decided to withdraw from her normal life and live a celibate, hermetic existence in a recess under the stairs of the home she shares with Ehud (her lover / long-time partner.)

It is a thought-provoking and philosophical work and will be most of interest to readers who like such books. On the other hand, it isn’t likely to have much appeal for readers of commercial fiction. It’s not story-driven and isn’t even deeply character-driven. [Except in the sense of showing thought processes that encourage the reader to drill down into the character’s psyche.] This book has been placed in the genre of (and titled as) erotica (or even pornography,) but I would say that it is much less accurately defined as such than other works of that category, including Hilst’s “Letters from a Seducer.” This isn’t to say the book doesn’t use graphic language or mention past sexual activity, but it’s not erotic at the core. It’s not shy about sex or “vulgar language” by any means, but it is a book about a woman who has given up sex along with other activities of ordinary life.

Ultimately, I’d recommend this book for readers of psychological and philosophical literary fiction. It is not intensely readable as a story and is not intensely erotic as erotica, but it does keep a curious person wondering about the motives and future of Hille.

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“A Passage to India” by Walt Whitman [w/ Audio]

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Passage O soul to India!
 Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive
   fables.

Not you alone, proud truths of the
   world,
 Nor you alone, ye facts of modern
   science,
 But myths and fables of eld, Asia's, Africa's
   fables,
 The far-darting beams of the spirit, the
   unloos'd dreams,
 The deep diving bibles and legends,
 The daring plots of the poets, the elder
   religions;
 O you temples fairer than lilies, pour'd over
   by the rising sun!
 O you fables, spurning the known, eluding
   the hold of the known, mounting to 
   heaven!
You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled,
   red as roses, burnish'd with gold!
 Towers of fables immortal, fashion'd from
   mortal dreams!
 You too I welcome, and fully, the same as
    the rest!
 You too with joy I sing.

Passage to India!
 Lo, soul! seest thou not God's purpose from
   the first?
 The earth to be spann'd, connected by
   network,
 The races, neighbors, to marry and be given
   in marriage,
 The oceans to be cross'd, the distant
   brought near,
 The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,
 You captains, voyagers, explorers,
   yours,
 You engineers, you architects, machinists,
   yours,
 You, not for trade or transportation only,
 But in God's name, and for thy sake, O
   soul.

“A One-String Harp” by Lu Ji [w/ Audio]

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When an author composes too short a poem,
  it trails off with a lonely feeling
  like looking down at solitude with no friends
  or peering into the vast sky, disconnected.
 One string on a harp is crisp and sweet
  but sings without resonance and harmony.

Translation by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping in: The Art of Writing (1996) Boston: Shambhala Publications.

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” by John Keats [w/ Audio]

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My spirit is too weak -- mortality
   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
   And each imagined pinnacle and steep
 Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
 Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
   Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
 Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
 Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
 So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
 Wasting of old time--with a billowy main --
   A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.

“To fight aloud is very brave –” (138) by Emily Dickinson [w/ Audio]

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To fight aloud, is very brave --
   But gallanter, I know
 Who charge within the bosom
   The Calvary of Wo --

Who win, and nations do not see --
   Who fall -- and none observe --
 Whose dying eyes, no Country
   Regards with patriot love --

We trust, in plumed procession
   For such, the Angels go --
 Rank after Rank, with even feet --
   And Uniforms of snow.