I'm in between projects which means that I'm reading more heavily than usual as I try to figure out what the next project will be. Some microreviews/notes:

Silk
by Alessandro Baricco
A "novella" written in 1-2 page chapters, Silk tells the story of a French merchant who travels to Japan on multiple visits to purchase the country's famed silkworms and bring them back to his rural village which depends on the silk industry. Throughout the course of his exchanges, the merchant, who is married, falls in love with a young, mysterious woman in Hara Kei's retinue. She writes him a note on a scrap of paper that he has translated back in his native France by the Japanese madame who runs the local brothel. After which point he becomes even more obsessed with returning. But when he returns a fourth time, he finds a country at war. There are no silkworms to be purchased and Hara Kei, his once benevolent liaison, nearly kills him for scheming to have a relationship with his mistress. Soon after the merchant returns to France, a letter written in Japanese arrives. When the merchant develops the courage, he goes back to the Japanese madame to have the text translated. An erotic and passionate missive, the writer of the note makes love to the merchant on the page, then begs him to forget her. Herve lives out the rest of his mediocre days and his wife passes away. When visiting his wife's gravesite, he notices a wreath of blue flowers that he has come to associate with the Japanese madame who once helped him. He tracks her down and discovers that it was his deceased wife who asked the madame to copy out a note in Japanese which she had written - hoping that her husband would let go of his romantic fantasy. The book relies heavily on repetition of certain passages (the detailed journey from France to Japan) and creates a poetic rhythm to its narrative.

Feast of Love
by Charles Baxter
A former student in Boston gave me this book when I left town, and as with all gifted books (Silk was a 30th birthday gift), I feel compelled to read them - perhaps more so than the books that I personally accumulate, waiting to be read. This book was a finalist for a National Book Award, and I can't say that I can see why - there was one particularly powerful scene/confrontation in the book between 2 of the characters where a young woman almost gets raped by her father-in-law, but other than that, I found it a difficult book to sustain. The story is told thru the 1st person point of view of various characters - a bookstore manager, a barista, a philosopher who is neighbor to the bookstore manager, and the bookstore manager's 2 ex-wives. The bookstore manager is not particularly compelling - the first woman he marries becomes a lesbian and the 2nd woman he marries leaves him within a month to go back to the married lover she was with before and during her marriage to the bookstore manager. The barista and her lover have lots of sex throughout the book and have an empassioned relationship that ends when he abruptly dies of a heart condition while out on the football field. The father-in-law of the barista is a mad drunk who makes a play for her when she is pregnant. I totally couldn't relate to the characters in this book, nor did I find them terribly sympathetic. I almost entirely skipped over the passages narrated by the philosopher who held a great deal of guilt for his son's mental illness, too many high falutin' references to Kierkegaard and such.