UNESCO and Mags

Since my last blog, I have read two issues of The Economist, four issues of Eclectic Reading, and three novels. Naoe's Pillar of Fire is a historical novel with a political message about the militarism of Japan. I enjoyed it. Ishikawa Jun's Bodhisattva is another experimental Japanese novel. It was easier to follow that Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 or Woman of the Dunes, but it was not nearly as interesting or imaginative. Possibly Japanese readers enjoy the Buddhist aspect more than myself. I also read Abdullah Hussein's Weary Generation, about how a Muslim came to be a displaced person and refugee. The author translated his own work from the Urdu, and while I am sure that the translation is more faithful than if someone else had done it, I wondered about the modern colloquialism in a period novel. I found that modernism distracting, in the end. The novel didn't particularly hold my attention.