Well, since I started a blog, I've got to write something... I'll talk about what I usually like talking and thinking about the most, which is what I'm reading at the moment.
I got The Mahabharata from a local bookstore in 神保町 called 一誠堂書店. It's a very nice bookstore with some seriously rare, good quality books. I didn't really think I would be able to afford a purchase from here, but alas this was a great bargain and I'm glad I jumped on it early.
I got it a few weeks ago so I haven't been able to get too into it (although I had read the abridged Penguin version of the Mahabharata a year ago, which made me really want to own a proper copy). But even reading the introduction has been fruitful. You can see a lot of parallels between, say this book and the Bible, where the generations of descendants are described on and on in this endless fashion, which seems pointless other than as historical markings, but the translator says that at least in the Mahabharata it seems to be a carefully deliberated riddle. The Bible (Old Testament, especially Genesis) has this very deliberate nature of layering stories one after another that serve to capture a sense of totality through division; that is, of combing through all the patterns of what could be possible (I'm thinking of the origin of the universe story obviously, as well as details on acts of trespassing committed between various levels of family (father-son, father-daughter, father-mother, etc...), and the ways that people in the bigger history of the origin of Israel seem to mirror each other in what they did, coming and going from the same lands, conducting the same rituals. So seeing these similar themes in other religious scriptures is intriguing.