Out of the way

I guess I have to read 52 and a bit. And so far as far as I can tell I have read 51 plus lots of "bits".

The most recent was "Pélérinage aux Trois Montagnes", a French translation of a collection of stories by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. As with more or less all the Mishima I have read (which includes his "magnum opus", the quadrilogy that starts with Spring Snow and includes "Runaway Horses") it primarily deals with unstated, frustrated and repressed love, death, human weakness, the ephemeral nature of beauty and the timeless beauty of nature.

I like the style, as I have read it in translation. One of the reasons to learn Japanese is to read the original, which I am told is like the sensation I get from the translations - but I cannot judge.

So I have one book to make the 52 - and it might just be an Italian translation of a Spanish original recently popularised as the Hollywood film "Motorcycle Diaries". So far it paints an interesting picture of a Doctor called Ernesto but known worldwide as "Mate" (Well, in the Argentine Spanish original "Che").

Or it might be something else. Who knows? 40 pages of Italian takes me longer than a couple of hundred pages of english so if I happen to run into another book in the meantime it might sneak through...