book bans

As a coincidence, Le Monde [weekend edition of 18 March] had an article about the rapidly growing number of book bans in US [school] libraries and Tor.com highlighted a tribune by a US school librarian detailing a concerted move by conservative forces to ban books going against their (bigoted) views… And giving advice for resisting the move (like, don’t donate banned books to the libraries).

the best books of the NYT readers

Two years after Le Monde reported on the list of the 101 favourite novels of [some of] its readers, which I found most fascinating as a sociological entry on said readers, rather than a meaningful ordering of literary monuments (!),  even though it led me to read Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as well as Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s Gagner la Guerre [To the victors go the spoils], The New York Times did something similar to celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary. If on a lesser scale, as it only produces

1. 1. 1. 1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
         2. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
         3. 1984 by George Orwell
         4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
         5. Beloved by Toni Morrison

as the top five books of the last 125th years, Lee’s, Tolkien’s, and Garcia Márquez’s appearing in both lists, if with a different ranking. (The nomination rules were not exactly the same, though, with only novels for Le Monde and only “recent” books and only one per author for the New York Times.) Here is a longer list of the 25 top contenders, from which NYT readers voted [an opportunity I missed!]:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Ulysses by James Joyce

some of which I had never heard of. And not including a single Faulkner’s… Except for One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published as Cien años de soledad, all novels there were originally written in English. Sadly, the number one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is also one of the most censored by school boards in the USA! (And so are books by Toni Morrison.)

a journal of the plague year² [reopenings]

Returned to some face-to-face teaching at Université Paris Dauphine for the new semester. With the students having to be frequently reminded of keeping face masks on (yes, the nose is part of the face and need be covered!). I do not understand why the COVID pass did not apply to universities as well. I also continued an on-line undergrad lecture in mathematical statistics, as I found that the amount of information provided to students this way was superior to black-board teaching. (I actually gave some of these lectures in a uni amphitheatre, to leave the students free to chose, but less than 20% showed up.)

Read the very last volume of the Witcher. With a sense of relief that it was over, even though the plot and the writing were altogether pleasant… And Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, with a permanent feeling of amazement at this novel been praised or awarded anything. Once more, I had missed that it was a YA [but not too young!] novel. Still, so many things go wrong, from the overly obtuse main character to the transparent plot, the highly questionable romantic affair between the 100⁺ year old wizard and the 17 year old teenager he more than less ravished from friends and family, to the poor construct of the magic system, and to the (spoiler alert!) rosy ending. As I read the book over two sleepless nights, not much time was lost. And it had some page-turning qualities. But I’d rather have slept better!

Watched Kate, thinking it was a Japanese film, but quickly found to my sorrow it was not. Not Japanese in the least, except for taking place in Tokyo and involving cartoonesque yakuza. To quote the NYT, “as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter”. Simply terrible, even lacking the pretense of story distanciation found in Kill Bill… And then came by chance on Time and Tide, a 2000 Hong Kong film, a much better distanced action picture, with enough ellipses and plenty second-degree dialogues, some mixing Cantonese and Portuguese, plus highly original central male and female characters. I am wondering if the same could be filmed today, given the chokehold of the PCC on the Hong Kongese society and the growing censorship of films there.

Had a great month with our garden tomatoes, as we ate most of them. With a dry spell that stopped the spread of mildew and the aggression of slugs. And had a steady flow of strawberries, a second harvest that is not yet over. And more recently (late) figs, although I bring most of them to the department. The fig harvest seems to be less plentiful than last year…  The last and final product of the garden will be a collection of huge butternuts that spontaneously grew out of last year seeds.

content which deviates from the norm [from Pest county]

banned books week