Summer Reading Recommendations, 2018

Summer is coming (even to Westeros, eventually), so it's time for some non-light but highly enlightening summer reading. This year I'm suggesting a handful of books from other languages in translation. (But if you read the other languages, then by all means read 'em in the original.) Click on the titles to buy the books at Bezosworld.

• Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
• Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
• Roberto Bolano, By Night in Chile
• W. G. Sebald, After Nature
• Gert Ledig, The Stalin Front

Okay, second things first. I know The Tale of Genji is enormous and because I'm challenging you to read Royall Tyler's unabridged translation, it will take up most of the summer. But relax. Take a deep breath. Count to ten. The other five books are much shorter; all of them are under 200 pages. So it's a challenge, yes, but not an impossible load. Back to the beginning. And it is indeed a beginning, for the four non-Orestean tragedies of Aeschylus lie close to the origins of Western literature. Reading them is like witnessing a literary primal scene. After our extended excursion to Lady Murasaki's Heian Japan, we cross the continent to Iran and read Hedayat's Blind Owl, a horrifying fever-dream of a novella that's widely considered one of the greatest works of 20th-century Persian literature. Next we speed to Pinochet's Chile for Bolano's nearly perfect novella in the form of the interior monologue of a dying Opus Dei priest. Then it's back to Europe and our own time to end with a pair of German-language jewels, Sebald's verse triptych After Nature and Ledig's panoramic WWII combat novel Die Stalinorgel, 'the Stalin organ' (the German Army nickname for the Red Army's mobile Katyusha rocket launchers), published by NYRB as The Stalin Front.