The Book Thread! What are you reading?

[erilaz]

As I continued to read the book, I spotted a bit in the Second Edition update to the chapter on Orgonomy that made me happy. Gardner reports on Wilhelm Reich's "most spectacular recent invention" — a rain-making device that Irwin Ross described in the New York Post, Sept. 5, 1954, thusly:

a bank of long hollow pipes tilting at the sky and sections of hollow cable, all of which are mounted on a metal box; it resembles a stylized version of an anti-aircraft gun, and works with surprising ease. The clouds are not sprayed with any substance; the hollow pipes merely draw orgone out of them—thus weakening their cohesive power and eventually causing them to break up.

Kate Bush fanatics like me will of course be acquainted with Reich's "cloudbusters":

[erilaz]

Nihongo Notes 1: Speaking and Living in Japan (1977) by Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani — I picked this up at a used book store in Berkeley last weekend. It's a collection of 70 columns that first appeared in The Japan Times in 1976 and 1977, which chronicle the misadventures of a fictitious Mr. Ernest Lerner (ha ha), as he struggles to learn the finer points of the Japanese language. The columns are quite informative, covering matters of pronunciation, grammar, and especially idiomatic expressions. Some address things that I already knew, of course, but I still managed to learn a fair amount.

Mr. Lerner's blunders are often humorous. When I read this:

I put my foot in my mouth again today. When I introduced Miss Winters to my Japanese friends I meant to say Edo-bungaku-o kenkyuu-shite-imasu (She's studying the literature of the Edo period). But my "d" sounded like an "r," so...

I was laughing out loud before I even reached the explanation:

Spoiler: show

...what I actually said was "She's studying pornographic literature."

[Zunu]

I agree it's a pretty fun little book,not bad at all or perhaps I should say warukunainjanaideshouka. Small and flexible enough to fit in a jacket pocket and the kind of book where you can just pick it up in the middle and find something brief and interesting to read. The woman of the team also wrote "Introduction to Intermediate Japanese - An Integrated Course" which you can also find used for quite cheap due to the fact that it is around 35 years old and contains dialog about answering machines and other subject matter that comes off as dated (but is still perfectly useful Japanese).

Spoiler: show

I wonder if that would work in reverse? "No I wasn't flirting inappropriately...I just wanted to ask you about 17th century Japan; how could you possibly take offense!!!!"

[erilaz]

Currently reading When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines and She.

The basic plot is typical Haggard: English adventurer goes to a distant country and discovers the remains of a lost civilization. What I found especially different about this one was how it addressed and critiqued current events. In one chapter, the ancient king of the Children of Wisdom, who had been asleep for 250,000 years (!), takes our English narrator as a guide on a tour of the modern world via astral projection or something similar. But since this story was first published as a newspaper serial in 1918, the modern world that Haggard shows us includes German war atrocities and a scene that for me hit close to home:

We came to a hilly country which I recognised as Armenia, for once I travelled there, and stopped on a seashore. Here were the Turks in thousands. They were engaged in driving before them mobs of men, women and children in countless numbers. On and on they drove them till they reached the shore. There they massacred them with bayonets, with bullets, or by drowning. I remember a dreadful scene of a poor woman standing up to her waist in the water. Three children were clinging to her—but I cannot go on, really I cannot go on. In the end a Turk waded out and bayoneted her while she strove to protect the last living child with her poor body whence it sprang.