Coffeespoons

I think you can tell I'm a fan of NYRB. I actually squealed when a Random House executive gave me a catalog (as if I couldn't go find the books online). Ah well. What I liked a lot about the catalog, though, is the list of NYRB Classics recommended for young adults, which includes Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue. It was new (as in newly released), it was Asian, it was NYRB. That was that. Tun-huang 's summary sounded very promising, and I quote: More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and why? In Tun-huang, the great modern Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue tells the story of Chao Tsing-te, a young Chinese man whose accidental failure to take the all-important exam that will qualify him as a high government official leads to a chance encounter that draws him farther and farther into the wild and contested land...

I've come to the conclusion that I will never be able to write a review that will do justice to John William's Stoner , so I might as well write the review anyway. Actually, this isn't really a review, so much as a log of what I think about this book, two months after I read it. And my first think is... Oh my God, I love this book. Considering it's been two months since I first read it, and I still think and feel the same, it must be true love. I swear I'm not the only one. In fact, I got this book because folks over at The Millions were raving about it last year. Since I was trying to introduce myself to NYRBs, I figured I should start with the best, hence Stoner . Also, during our NYRB Reading Week , a couple of participants wrote very eloquently about Stoner . The funny thing is, almost all the reviews I've read of Stoner prior to reading the book say that when you read or write the summary, it doesn't seem like an interesting book at all. C...