KOKORO BY NATSUME SOSEKI

when it rains it pours, right? and now, i will blog for the next three hours to reinstate my little to nonexistent presence here on this loved blog.

i'm not adding a pic because the only editions i could find online have super boring covers...and the blk/wht portrait of soseki himself won't make you wanna read him either.

let's just say, i read a third (or was it a quarter?) of norwegian wood. didn't like it. or maybe i read everything, or skimmed everything, and asked my boyfriend (the only other books i've known him to read from cover to cover is harry potter. ugh i should have known...) what happened in the end. because it's sort of like - well which one of the two girls does the main character get with in the end?? something i half-heartedly wanted to find out because i owed the book, or my one-third investment in it, at least some amount of curiosity, and to seek closure.

kokoro is NOT like norwegian wood. kokoro is SINCERE and BEAUTIFUL. it was written in the 1910s and translated into english (in the edition i read) in the 1950s. but the prose is so clean and fresh and modern. not modern in the clever syntactical, meta self referential, irony irony post modern literature kind of way. the language is simple, as is the story telling. but powerful and vivid. and the pace is cliffy-hangy. it's a page turner! a quick read, but leaves you with a good strong moral story. read it if not for the story, then for the aesthetic. after kokoro, i sampled a whole slew of novels, none of which i was able to get into because i found the language superfluous, and therefore tedious and petty.