DISCOVERIES

TO read for pure pleasure or to read for wisdom, there lies the question. Whether ‘tis nobler to fall asleep, book propped on chest, or read riveted through the night.

Michael Dirda, book critic for the Washington Post since 1978, not only reads for meaning but believes that books, carefully positioned at life’s familiar turning points, can provide depth and direction. Dirda has always read, he tells us, “to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present.”

In this spirit, he suggests books for all aspects of life, including work, love, living in the world, matters of the spirit and even old age and dying. It’s a dangerous business, suggesting books, but Dirda (for better and for worse) cleaves fairly close to the classics and the Western canon -- what he calls “the great patterning works.” He’s pretty much avoided the rabble and riffraff, the experimental and the ethnic. One hears them banging at the doors to “Book by Book,” which can at times make it hard to concentrate on the author’s worthy suggestions.

---

MA JIAN wrote “Stick Out Your Tongue,” an unsentimental, unromantic collection of stories set in Tibet, 18 years ago. The Chinese government immediately banned them, claiming that he had failed “to depict the great strides” made by the Tibetan people since China’s occupation of their country in 1950.

The narrator, a somewhat dishonest, unlikable wanderer who blames his ex-wife for his vagrant life, recounts several stories (campfire-style) of ordinary Tibetans: the sky burial of a 17-year-old girl sold and married to two 40-year-old brothers; a young man, educated in China, who returns to Tibet looking for his nomad family on the high plateau; an old man confessing incest with his mother and daughter; and the education and untimely death of a young woman who was the incarnation of the Buddha.

The stories are shocking in their insistence on the relative unimportance of the body -- beautiful people with pure hearts are routinely chopped into pieces or abused until they devolve into ravaged animals. Perhaps it is the altitude, or the clear, pure air of Tibet, that makes the details (colors, landscape) prickle even on the page: “When the surface of the lake mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water, I was filled with a sudden longing to take someone in my arms.” In a brief afterword, the author, who now lives in London, explains his reasons for not idealizing the Tibetans and reveals his true sadness over the fate of that country: “In this sacred land, it seemed that the Buddha couldn’t even save himself, so how could I expect him to save me?”

*

Stick Out Your Tongue

Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 104 pp., $16

---

HERE are two books by the Belgian painter, poet and philosopher Henri Michaux (1899-1984) under one cover: “Par des Traits” (1984) and “Saisir” (1979). These are accompanied by Michaux’s strangely moving little line drawings, part insect and part kanji -- what he referred to in his 1972 autobiography, “Emergences-Resurgences,” as “[l]ine not yet having made its choice, not yet ready to have the point explained.... Watchful, wandering line.”

The drawings are “[g]estures rather than signs,” Michaux’s attempt to “[r]ediscover all-at-onceness” between thought and expression, text and picture. Sometimes the little figures rush across the page in Michaux’s effort to not “grasp,” to let his ideas out, “to go at it like crazy.”

“Who has not wished at some point,” he asks the reader, “to create an abecedarium, a bestiary, or even an entire vocabulary, from which the verbal would be entirely excluded?”

*

Stroke by Stroke

Henri Michaux, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth

Archipelago Books: 224 pp., $16 paper