The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a new book about the Brontë sisters, by Lucasta Miller. This is apparently not so much a biography as an examination of the legends that have grown up around the sisters.

I don’t know why I get so excited when we get worthy new translations of the classics, because it’s not like I have time to read them. But the Guardian excerpted Heaney’s new translation of Antigone this weekend. I don’t think it is available in the U.S. just yet.

The Guardian reviews a new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The review gives a general overview of the difficulties of translating this poem, where the original is not exactly in a foreign language, just in an earlier version of English. The review also compares this version to some earlier versions, including Tolkien’s.

Every Night is Ladies’ Night. Carolyn See’s review of this new book makes me think it’s likely to be one I would like:

But this book is extraordinary. It’s just great, and it brings shame on those who might want to treat it as in any way regional, or ethnic or quaint.

Yes, it’s set in a suburb of East L.A., El Monte, to be exact. Yes, its characters are Mexican Americans, stuck working at McDonald’s or at an auto repair shop — which stays around for generations and functions as a character of its own — or in rubber factories or jam factories or paper-tube factories. The men race cars or tour across Mexico as mariachi musicians. Or they drive trucks across America or travel thousands of miles to hook up once again with old girlfriends. These characters, again, aren’t quaint, or cute. They aren’t presented here to teach us an uplifting lesson about harmony between the races, or that manual labor is sacred, or that “the old customs are the best,” or any of that.

The men and women are here in these pages to remind us what it is to be 100 percent alive — not going through the motions — but to be alive.

But See also points out some petty issues regarding the presentation of the book, and honestly these are the sorts of things that cause me to put books back on the shelf:

“Every Night Is Ladies’ Night” comes with a couple of built-in disadvantages: a title that seems cornball in the extreme and an unattractive cover that subverts the dignity of the text. The publicity campaign on the bound galley announces “Author Appearances in Los Angeles.”

I don’t think I would ever, without a recommendation, pick up a book called Every Night Is Ladies’ Night, and I sure wouldn’t pick up a book with that cover. Petty, for sure.

(Do you really want to see petty? I bought Mimi Smartypants’s book from Amazon UK, and I haven’t been able to get past the first ten pages because it’s printed in a sans-serif font. )

…has a new detective novel out. I will probably not rush out to buy that one.

A “deeply intellectual” review of her latest book. This is how I sound when I try to talk about Rushdie.

The Christian Science Monitor reviews a new biography. Over the last few years it seems like Maugham has been on the verge of suddenly coming back into style or something — I keep running across people who claim to be fans. Of Human Bondage has been on my reading list for ages, but then so have a lot of other things.

Metamorphoses. The Guardian reviews a new translation of my favorite mythology collection. I have read the Humphries translation and I have the Mandelbaum translation on this year’s reading list, and I’m not sure I am enough of a fanatic to read three different translations. The review seems to indicate that the Mandelbaum translation is at least as good as the new one, just hard to find in the U.K. And really, this doesn’t sound all that great to me:

[Y]ou may think the poetry of the translation isn’t that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn’s fault: he isn’t a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a “vile degenerate age”. But while Raeburn isn’t afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery (“white as a sheet”, and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud.

I think I will skip it, since the same review calls Mandelbaum’s prosody s so good it’s actually distracting.” I don’t mind that kind of distraction.

Or at least placing him in context. The Guardian has published an edited version of an introduction to a new edition of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man. The introduction is by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene.

Also of interest: a review of a new collection of essays on evolutionary biology and violence.

A new feature in Salon will round up indie publishing news and reviews. This week they offer, among other things, a brief review of a new non-fiction collection from Flann O’Brien (possibly my favorite Irish author since I haven’t read Ulysses yet). The collection is called At War and it is a collection of O’Brien’s pseudonymous columns for Irish Times.

The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra. I am noting this as a possible future selection for the book club, once it is out in paperback. The author is actually a former Algerian army officer named Mohamed Moulessehoul, but he publishes under his wife’s name. This review in the Christian Science Monitor describes the novel as a love story set in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule and praises the novel’s examination of “the psychological poison of militant Islam.” It sounds like uncomfortable reading, which is why I’m going to note it for the book club rather than just for my own personal reading. I like to spread the discomfort around, you know.

I have been sort of looking forward to reading J. M. Coetzee’s latest book, Elizabeth Costello, because I am one of the thirty or so people on earth who have read and actually enjoyed Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. But this Jonathan Yardley review makes me think that I shouldn’t bother, because the problems he outlines confirm the suspicions I got just from reading the early U.K. reviews:

Described on its dust jacket not as a novel but as “Fiction,” it is an exercise in the higher self-indulgence: a succession of almost unimaginably tiresome ruminations, cast in the form of formal academic addresses, about big-ticket issues in which Coetzee himself is interested, ranging from storytelling to cruelty to animals (this one gets two full chapters all to itself) to the mystery of artistic genius to evil pure and simple.

The Stauffenberg connection is described near the end of the review:

One especially strange chapter is “The Problem of Evil,” in which the author considers an actual novel by an actual author — The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenbegr, by Paul West — which is “about Hitler and Hitler’s would-be assassins in the Wehrmacht” and includes vivid, graphic descriptions of the execution of the plotters. Though Costello expresses admiration for the skill with which it is written, she attacks it as “an obscene book” because West “has shown what ought not to be shown.” She discovers that West himself is in the audience but launches into the attack anyway:

“That is my thesis today: that certain things are not good to read or to write. To put the point another way: I take seriously the claim that the artist risks a great deal by venturing into forbidden places: risks, specifically himself; risks, perhaps, all. I take this claim seriously because I take seriously the forbiddenness of forbidden places. The cellar in which the July 1944 plotters were hanged is one such forbidden place. I do not believe we should go into that cellar, any one of us. I do not believe Mr. West should go there; and, if he chooses to go nevertheless, I believe we should not follow.”

I was hoping that this attack was ironic, or that the Elizabeth Costello character was supposed to be kind of ridiculous, but if the argument is presented as a straightforward attack on immoral art, well, let’s just say I’ve gotten enough of that from On Moral Fiction. (About which I will say more later today.)

Pedro Páramo. In keeping with my last post, I am taking note of this book as one I want to track down and read in the near future. I really need to read more Mexican authors. I’ve read Mexican-American authors, and other Latin American authors, but so far in terms of Mexican literature I’ve only read Our Lady of the Circus by David Toscana. I have Toscana’s Tula Station and Carlos Fuente’s The Years with Laura Diaz on my reading list already, but man, I can’t be the only American who gets a little embarrassed by how little attention we pay to the history and literature of the countries on either side of us. (I haven’t read many Canadian authors, either, but that will be next year’s project, all right?)

As part of a general household theme of cutting back and paying off debts, I have been trying to enforce a self-imposed book-buying moratorium, and I am not doing very well so far. Yesterday I received an Amazon order containing three books — Gilligan’s Wake, by Tom Carson, Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff, and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, by Steven Sherrill. A few hours later, already feeling guilty about those three totally unnecessary purchases, I went to Borders and came back with The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Crafts and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford.

The reason I bought all of these? I mean, besides the fact that I clearly have a psychological problem of some kind, since I already have a thousand or so unread books in my house? I’m afraid that I will forget them. I read reviews or mentions or recommendations, and maybe I add the book to my Amazon wishlist (and then break down and buy it next week) and maybe I forget it forever. But unless the book is actually here in my house, the odds are that I will forget it and never get around to reading it.

I’m going to try to use this page to avoid this insanity. When I want to remember a book, and more importantly want to remember why I want to remember a book, I’ll just make a note of it here. And then probably break down and buy it next week, but whatever. It’s a step! I’m also making a point of checking my school library’s online catalog and keeping track of call numbers on my wireless device, and maybe that will help a little, too.