Not my grail of tea

Shusaku Endo, Stained Glass Elegies (tran Van G. Gessel): For the most part, Endo operates within a matrix of Japanese Catholicism and its suppression, illness, and the war's domestic effects, in that (dis)order, with an overlay of the interplay between cowardace and martyrdom. The stories here struck me as hit and miss, many of them sketches better elaborated in his novels, of which I've enjoyed Silence, but among the standouts here are "Mothers", which extends considerations of faith broached there.

Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland: A moral traveller seeking lost wilderness, finding lost churches; a window on a past window on the past ... I'm deferring Boswell's parallel account for now, as variances between them don't particularly interest me, and as I've had enough of preparatory sketches for the moment.

It being National Poetry Month, my attention naturally turns toward detective fiction: That Awful Mess and Savage ...