It’s a miracle that the Katsushika Central Library had four whole volumes of In Search of Lost Time, and I have now exhausted all of them. This one, like volume II, is kept in the stacks and thus I needed to request that it be taken out a few times, and did my best to keep renewing it rather than returning it entirely. I took a break in the middle, but could not stay away for long.

“You mean to write a book,” she turned to myself, “you ought to make a note of Charleval and Merlerault. You will find nothing better.”

We’ve obviously been too easygoing, and the gaffe Swann is committing will reverberate all the more inasmuch as he was held in high esteem, received even, and was just about the only Jew whom one knew. People will say to themselves, “Ab uno disce omnes.” (The satisfaction of having found in his memory, at the appointed moment, so opportune a quotation, alone caused a proud smile to illuminate the melancholy of the great nobleman betrayed.)

This came recommended by Brain vs. Book, the Japanese book & manga blog in English that I always wanted. This blog made me want to read more, to read in Japanese more, to spend more time in bookstores, to talk to people about books, to write more about the things I read, to read primarily on paper again. To confidently consider myself a “book person”, to affirm that the written word is my preferred primary interface to the world. Having seen a writeup there and added it to my infinitely expanding OmniFocus project “Japanese Books to Consider”, I found this volume shining up at me from the featured, cover-out, horizontally-stacked lower shelf thingy at Daiwa Books in our neighborhood. (Surely this special shelf has a name?… Yes! 平台 hiradai!) Booksellers love this book about a bookseller; it seemed to be enshrined there on the hiradai with a bit of extra affection.

I too of course love books about books and book culture. I stress about how to find the right recommendations of what to read next. A gimmick of this series is that each chapter centers around characters’ experiences of a real book, with margin notes about its publication calmly suggesting that you, too, might go seek them out. So to meander through this charming manga is to skim through a tour of recommendations from the author’s own idiosyncratic tastes, each infused with a bit of story and meaning — I’m most keen to read Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa myself.

This came recommended as a proper fantasy with heart and tenderness. Indeed, it gives me some of the same grand history-informed fantasy atmosphere as A Song of Ice and Fire, but in a world with cosmic justice instead of a grim, uncaring procession of events. Bujold has some of the most noticeably high-craft writing of anyone I’ve read in recent memory, exhibiting jewels of unfamiliar words that turn out to be perfectly apt once you look them up. The characters are likeable and I like them.

My friend Jon made me a very current-day gift of a ChatGPT essay on the creative writing projects that we’re both doing, including incisive book recommendations that could give us inspiration. Most of what it came up with were ones I already knew and took inspiration from, like Egan’s Permutation City or of course Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. But this astonishing, impossible-seeming, extraordinarily high-concept SF from 1937 was totally new to me.

I have not read much from between the world wars. Star Maker has a preface which questions the value of doing something that seems as frivolous as writing fiction when the world is in imminent peril, and concludes that continuing to pursue one’s creative mission is as important as ever. I’m glad Stapledon did.

I often measure SF by its “idea density” — the frequency at which it deploys concepts that make me stop and really think about their ramifications. It’s what I love best about a Stephenson or an Egan. It was astonishing how often Star Maker did this to me, without even correcting for when it was written.