Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers

Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The Spring of my Life by Kobayashi Issa

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolano

NW by Zadie Smith

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

On Tennis: Five Essays by David Foster Wallace

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert Heinlein

Mad Ducks and Bears by George Plimpton

The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem

Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh

Death of a Peer by Ngaio Marsh

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh

Third Girl by Agatha Christie

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

My Antonia by Willa Cather

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey

Emma by Jane Austen

Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Rose Madder by Stephen King

Adventures in Algeria by Alexandre Dumas

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Roughing It by Mark Twain

Bliss & Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft

The Little Treasury of One Hundred People, One Poem Each compiled by Fujiwara no Teika

The Sea by John Banville

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

Mr. Monster by Dan Wells

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

Aleph by Paulo Coelho

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales by Stephen King

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Dear Life by Alice Munro

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Census by Jesse Ball

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The post Books I Read in 2018 appeared first on Matthew Talamini.

The cherry blossoms
Are truly cherry blossoms
Only while we wait

Passing high above
our village, migrating birds cry,
“Nobody needs you!”

These are incredible!

I searched JSTOR, Google, Wikipedia, Amazon… These two poems, in this translation (by Sam Hamill, exquisite) of Issa, seem to be the only place Hakuhi exists in the anglophone world.

I don’t know if I’m mad about that, or if it makes the poems more poetic.

Maybe when I’m 80, some chance encounter will bring a third Hakuhi haiku to my attention, and after a lifetime of anticipation the poem will be so sublime I’ll turn into a mist and float away.

Either way, if you know how to research these things better than I do, I’d appreciate some tips. Who was Hakuhi?

The post Who Was Hakuhi? appeared first on Matthew Talamini.