Week-end UNESCO Representative Literature

I've decided to read two books a day as a rule, so that I can keep abreast of all those loans I've received.

Since my last post I've read two issues of Eclectic Reading. I'm behind in my magazine reading, there are two Economists, one New Yorker and one New Scientist on my bedside table.

I read Haggard and Noland's Famine in North Korea. this is a meticulously researched and argued examination of the terrible famine of the 1990's, where about 4% of the population died. It was not an exciting read, and the technical discussion got a bit hard to follow, but it was very interesting. There is so little known about North Korea that they have to be careful what suppositions they propose to use. I also read Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words. I was a little disappointed. Hitchings identifies ten or twelve mechanisms by which words are imported into English, some mechanisms being more common in times of war or plague than others, and then gives endless lists of examples. It's a little lightweight, I guess, for my taste.

I also read Knut Faldbakken's Sweetwater. This is a novel about a nameless war and a nameless occupied village, and its march towards liberation. Fabian Dobles' Years like Brief Days is a long reminiscence about the narrator's former days in a valley as a young man, a way of life that no longer exists. I read about half of Marga Minco's The Other Side, a collection of short stories. I liked best the stories about Jewish people after the war, in particular a short story about a gentile who robbed Jews by saying she would safeguard their most precious belongings. A Holocaust survivor calls on this woman and finds their Hanukkah candlestick used a a sconce. Egon Hostovsky The Arsonist is an interesting portrait of a village, with the search for an arsonist (who is never found) as the plot device to take us through the process. Annika Idstrom's My Brother Sebastian is a searing first-person novel of a youth and his mistreatment at the hands of a foster home under the pretext, no doubt, of protection. Finally, Autran Dourado's Pattern for a Tapestry made little impression on me.