Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Read Jane Eyre for the very first time, in Elizabeth Klett's excellent audiobook version. Lives up to the hype. But St. John Rivers is clearly given short shrift in the popular imagination, compared to Eddie "Pretty Boy" Rochester. Rochester wouldn't be what he is without Rivers; this is a book that reminds one why structuralism had a high point. Two colonialist voyages, one secular and one sacred, one west and one east; two ways of imprisoning a wife--in the attic vs. in heaven; and two mirror-image personalities, the irascible vs. the cold. Hindustani? Jane Eyre? Really?

Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

Recommended by Andrew Sullivan here. Midcentury use of form at its best; curiously, both metre and rhyme announce themselves more explicitly as the poem continues. "Frowsty"="fusty" (OED) from Old French frouste, ruinous, decayed. Usages like that, plus the form, make one want to read metapoetically.

Hua Tong, "Yan'an Seeds"

Cultural revolution fiction: what can one say about an individual piece? Like the individual humans of the time, the individual fictions are lost in the vast sea of the collective. But, taking this one as a proxy for the whole, it is curious how socialist fiction rides roughshod over the Aristotelian conception of literature as a medium between history and philosophy. The constant erasure of personality, individuality, unpredictability, and hence historicity by ideology makes literature less of a medium than a sort of sad, vacant stage on which one hero drags the corpse of the other by the heels.

Wang Zhenhe, "An Oxcart for a Dowry"

A fairly brutal exposition of the economic basis of marriage--or, more precisely, its dissolution. And interestingly, unlike most stories of this genre, there seems to be a lot of sympathy for the economic realism. No romance here. One is happy for Wanfa that he ends up able to eat, at the cost of giving up on a loveless marriage. Most animus seems directed against the social norms manifested in the (rather clumsy and abbreviated) frame narrative, which are unwilling to recognize unorthodox necessities.

Thoreau, Walden, "Reading"

• Curious to note that reading is gendered:

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer the heroic writers of antiquity.

and again,

The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue...

A very old and standard gendering in itself, matter v. intellection. What surprises is the mapping of this onto moderns v. ancients (or perhaps the fact that no one has previously made such an association?)

• Is this just ignorance? Mistake?

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue...Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even.

Hard to fathom that HDT wouldn't have known of Chapman or Pope at least. And yet this doesn't seem metaphorical.

• How is it that HDT manages to be both radiantly inspiring and insufferably snooty? Nice trick.
  

Murakami, "Sleep"

Note that the book which the narrator reads first is Anna Karenina. Her own nightly dalliances are only with books, but the choice of reading highlights the quasi-adulterous nature of her "affair", which needs to be hidden from husband and child. (and is even accompanied by chocolates! can we get this woman on Oprah?)

Borges, "The Library of Babel"

The first paragraph, on close reading, gives a surprisingly nonsensical physical description. Only one of the open sides of the hexagon is described as opening out into another. Does the other side really do likewise, as one would naturally assume? If so, are these sides opposite each other, resulting in a single infinite row of hexagons? (There can be no hexagons to either side.) Then again, how does a single mirror in the vestibule (not in the restroom-compartment?) produce the illusion of infinity? And, for that matter, why would so many restrooms be necessary? (Perhaps the Freudian link between books and anal erotism...)