Not national security secrets or murder mystery secrets in this book. The subtitle is A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family. While living in Japan in the early 1990s, Bumiller interviewed Mariko, her husband, children, parents and friends over a period of more than a year, as she tried to understand Mariko’s life and Japanese culture in which she lived.

Mariko was a 45-year old middle class housewife with a salariman husband who rarely returned home before 10:30 at...

A good month for reading, as it turned out. I finished a couple of long-term projects and abandoned one.

Alice Munro, Runaway - stories by the Canadian writer

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus - I dropped out more than half-way through. I learned a lot about interpretations of the New Testament, but decided I had had enough detail of German scholarly controversies.

Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette - too long, too many weeping and fainting...

If you have never heard of Lion Feuchtwanger or The Oppermanns, neither had I until I picked up his book recently, quite by accident.

What a story! A German Jewish writer, Feuchtwanger fled Germany in 1933 for the south of France, where he wrote this novel. Reading it is like seeing one of those insects preserved in amber, a relic of a certain time, caught when he could not have possibly have known what the future would be.

The Oppermanns were three brothers and a...

October looks a little light on reading compared to some earlier months.
Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us - Jewish immigrants who were not Sephardic or German, just "the rest of us"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night - our book of the month
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady - reread after many years, terrific psychological insights, apt descriptions
John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism - if you want to understand the Bibie, don't take...

September was a good reading month.

Ivan Turgenev, Rudin - an early Turgenev novel, a portrait of a man who is all hat and no cattle
Laura Lippman, The Last Place - I enjoy her mysteries with a Baltimore setting, although the plot in this one was more clever than believable
Alexander McCall Smith, Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations - not top drawer McCall Smith, skip it
Evelyn Waugh, The End of the Battle - the third of his WWII trilogy, should have read the...