“The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories” by Henry James

 I enjoyed reading James’ “Turn of the Screw” when I was still in high school, so I had no idea that this collection of his short stories would be so difficult to process. His writing is very dense indeed. I did enjoy the last 2 stories, which had a supernatural element. But “The Beast in the Jungle”, which is supposed to be a masterpiece, was definitely a hard slog.

The Consolations of the Forest” by Sylvain Tesson

 This book describes French author Tesson’s experience of living alone in a cabin on the shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia for 6 months. I found it very slow going, but a lot of his imagery was beautiful, I liked the occasional Russian (Slavic) interactions, and some of his philosophical observations were profound. I was a bit saddened to read that he has strong right wing inclinations.