What are you currently reading? (part 2)

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2016-07-28, 16:50

france-eesti wrote:I just wanted to say that as a purist, I consider that you can only understand an author if you read the original version in the original language (when it's possible, of course).

Why not add "at the time that they wrote it"? After all, "le passé est un pays étranger".
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Varislintu » 2016-07-29, 7:21

Translations depend a lot on how much money the publisher has wanted to put into it, I think. Some are excellent language-wise, some are so clumsy you can practically tell how grammar works in the original language through the translation. :P


Well, I was afraid I'd have a really crappy end result for books read this year, since the child project has been a bit of a distraction (as in, directly affecting reading since I've read a lot of non-fiction related to the topic, not nearly all of which neatly counts as "a book read"). But actually, I just did a tally in honour of having started my mother's leave, and if I just finnish a few pieces that I have a few dozen pages left on, I'll be doing quite nicely, even being a bit ahead of my minimum requirement.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby france-eesti » 2016-07-29, 8:56

You'll have time to read while breastfeeding, because you basically cannot do anything else while your baby extracts your colostrum or milk :mrgreen: I remember in the 1st month of feeding my daughter, I read a whole trilogy (okay, it was an easy reading) but just because I'm not a TV person and I was immobilized on the sofa and couldn't move. So might as well... :silly:
(fr) Native - (en) Fluentish - (pt) Fluentish when I was younger - (hu) Can sustain a conversation with a patient and kind magyar or order some beer and lecsó in Budapest - (it) On Duolingo ma posso ordinare uno Spritz ed antipasti in un ristorante :blush:

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Varislintu » 2016-07-29, 14:18

france-eesti wrote:You'll have time to read while breastfeeding, because you basically cannot do anything else while your baby extracts your colostrum or milk :mrgreen: I remember in the 1st month of feeding my daughter, I read a whole trilogy (okay, it was an easy reading) but just because I'm not a TV person and I was immobilized on the sofa and couldn't move. So might as well... :silly:


That sounds good to me! :lol: :mrgreen:

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby IpseDixit » 2016-07-29, 14:24

And you can use your baby as a bookstand. :silly:

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Varislintu » 2016-07-29, 19:35

IpseDixit wrote:And you can use your baby as a bookstand. :silly:


Even better! :lol: (I kind of do that now, with the belly. :para: )

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Lada » 2016-08-03, 6:17

france-eesti wrote:You'll have time to read while breastfeeding, because you basically cannot do anything else while your baby extracts your colostrum or milk :mrgreen: I remember in the 1st month of feeding my daughter, I read a whole trilogy (okay, it was an easy reading) but just because I'm not a TV person and I was immobilized on the sofa and couldn't move. So might as well... :silly:

wow, that never crossed my mind! I was reading while my son was sleeping, and even now I continue doing this, especially when we are in the park :)

During last time I've read quite many books:
-short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
-Tibetian book of the Dead
-Lev Tolstoy's "Resurrection" (though the book is not short, I've read it quite quickly and probably this book is the deepest one I've read in the last decade, It's immensly wise and currently important and will be important for ages I guess), and three or four his short stories.
-Michail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" (reread the school programme of Russian literature)

And now I'm reading Mikhail Bulgakov's "Morphine" about authors addiction to it...

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Postby Olinguito » 2016-08-07, 13:18

I've almost finished reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

It is the year 632 AF ("after Ford") – six hundred and thirty-two years since Henry T. Ford pioneered the assembly-line method of mass production, and the revolutionary concept has developed and expanded to the point where even human beings are genetically mass-produced on an entirely global scale. Babies are no longer born from mothers; they are all conceived in test tubes and, once born, conditioned to play specific roles in the society. There is universal stability. If, from time to time, an individual citizen starts having revolutionary ideas and shows a tendency to change the social order, he is banished to remote islands to live with other outcasts with like-minded ideas.

What kind of a global civilization is this? Are people happy? Not really, but there is order and stability, which is deemed more important than happiness in an individual. And the people are so heavy conditioned to prefer order and stability to personal happiness that they, one and all, accept their places in society and are happy with their unhappiness.

Brave New World was first published in 1932. It would be 21 years before the structure of DNA was unravelled by Watson and Crick, and 46 years before Louise Brown became the world's first test-tube baby – yet Huxley was already toying with the possibility of human genetic engineering on a worldwide scale. When he wrote the book, the author actually championed some (if not all) of the ideals of a utopia in which all human beings could be made perfect, or as nearly perfect, by the unbridled application of science. He was to change his mind somewhat after witnessing the horrors of World War II.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-08-07, 14:08

As usual with Malayalam novels, I've been taking my sweet time to read Randidangazhi (to my dad, in the case of this particular one). It's about enslaved low-caste people, so not surprisingly, the storyline is not a particularly happy one. Luckily, the last chapter wasn't so bad. I wonder how the next one will turn out.

Mayura Sandesham, on the other hand, has been going very well. I've memorized 18 quatrains now, and I think I understand them. Sometimes I think about what it would be like to translate these quatrains into English. It seems hard to convey how difficult they are for a native speaker of Malayalam to decipher in an English translation without using some combination of Shakespearean English and lots of loanwords from Latin and/or Romance languages.

I managed to translate a bit more of my grandfather's diary yesterday, too. Next comes his very brief description of (his experiences during) the final stages of the Burma Campaign, particularly in 1944, and after that, his account of the war's aftermath, which probably held more personal significance to him.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2016-08-18, 17:42

So I'm just shy of the two-thirds mark in the Snopes Trilogy now. It's actually an easier read than I expected when I took it on, it's just a question of ignoring all the other distractions in my life long enough to devote myself to it.

The Laing eventually came together and I actually felt a little melancholy finishing it, which I guess means I came to a better understanding of the characters than I suspected while I was reading it. I've moved on to Yaşar Kemal's sequel to İnce Memed (translated into English as They burn the thistles), which is just as artless in its style as the first book. That work ended up engrossing me nonetheless and I'm hoping the same happens this time, but so far there's no sign of that.

So I'm also carrying around Daniel Woodrell's The outlaw album for times when I need more oomph. I don't think there's a story in there which doesn't centre on violent death in one form or another. Well worth it, though.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Car » 2016-08-18, 19:43

I finally managed to read the third book of the Frank Stave series, Der Fälscher, by Cay Rademacher and absolutely loved it. I thought the second book was a tad weaker than the first (but that was absolutely brilliant, so it was still very good), but the third one is just as good as the first one. It's just a shame the series is over, although the author started writing another series which seems just as promising.

I started reading another Deon Meyer's Cobra now in English translation.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-08-27, 13:55

I'm afraid my anxiety over my new job has been slowing everything down a bit. I've memorized 24 quatrains of Mayura Sandesham (though not confidently) and read only nine chapters of Randidangazhi so far (out loud, to my dad). I've only translated the beginning of the next paragraph of my grandfather's diary, too.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Yasna » 2016-08-27, 15:33

I've had an underwhelming reading summer thanks to Short Stories in French: New Penguin Parallel Text by Richard Coward. In my opinion, readers should serve as a bridge between textbooks and target language books. As far as I can tell, this book chose stories purely based on literary value, rather than on what would best help to bridge that gap. There was little dialogue, but lots of ornate, convoluted language. Perhaps a decent reader could have still been made out of this material, but the translator apparently fashioned himself a literary translator that won't stoop down to us learners and give us a translation that sticks closely to the original texts. So a great deal of time is spent with more or less literary analysis in order to make sense of how the translation relates to the original text. What a drag. But when it comes to languages, I am nothing if not persistent. So I battled on, certainly learning a good deal, but at a far higher cost in time and energy than should have been necessary. I finally finished it on my way to Montreal, and donated the book to my Airbnb room since I never want to see it again.

On the brighter side, 野火 by Shohei Ooka was a treat. Reading books like this in the author's own words is a large part of my motivation for learning languages. It is the fictionalized account of a Japanese soldier battling starvation, guerrilla fighters, and treacherous comrades as American forces invade the Philippine island where he is stationed. It's more like a psychological thriller than a typical war story. The narrator is exceptionally perceptive, giving us unusual insights into the experiences of a desperate soldier. As far as languages go, there is a little Cebuano spoken in the book. I'd be interested in seeing how translations handle this, since the dialogue is written in katakana, which presumably does not give a very good idea of how the Cebuano should be romanized to someone who doesn't know Cebuano.

I'm currently reading with great pleasure The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera.
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Kafka

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Yasna » 2016-09-08, 18:09

I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was a good finish to my lackluster summer reading. I think I'll try reading it in Russian once I'm able to, as it would presumably be closer to the original, all else equal.

I'm currently reading The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe by Michael Pye.
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Kafka

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2016-09-08, 18:59

İnce Memed II wasn't doing it for me and I needed a break from the Faulkner, so I picked up McCullers' The heart is a lonely hunter and am making decent progress in it. For bedtime reading, I needed something lighter, so I grabbed Nick Hornsby's About a boy and finished it in a week. I was glad it turned out so differently from the movie; that made it feel it was worth my time to consume both.

Now I'm vacillating about going back to Os Maias (which I had spoilered for me by Wikipedia) or finding something else equally trivial but enjoyable.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Car » 2016-09-08, 20:25

I finished reading "Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics" by Tim Marshall.
I'll just copy what I wrote on Goodreads:
Principally, this is a great read, it does tend to sound repetitive after a while and presents too many well-known facts on the one hand while not going into details where it would have been helpful. Also, it would have been good to cover all the regions in the world, not just some of them. But despite these flaws, it is a very good book that made me want to read more about the topic - the bibliography contains many books that seem to be worth reading, too.


Oh, don't let the title fool you. I almost was fooled by it myself.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-09, 20:19

I made a mistake in my last post in this thread. I had read only eight chapters of Randidangazhi, not nine. I just read the ninth chapter of it to my dad. I have made no progress on Mayura Sandesham, since I was kind of sick last week, only tried to review the quatrains. In my grandfather's diary, I'm in the middle of what in the original is a very long paragraph about the Japanese pulling out of Burma.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2016-09-30, 16:11

Dreary weather makes me crave traditional horror and a few days ago I stumbled across the English horror writer Ramsey Campbell, whose first book of tales (The inhabitant of the lake and other unwelcome tenants[*]) is so firmly within the Lovecraftian mode, it could fairly be called pastiche. However, it did remind me that the real strength of much weird fiction is not immediate. It's only later, when minor events and phenomena in your surroundings which passed unnoticed before give you a lingering sense of unease, that you come to realise the effect the work had on you.

It was also a pleasure, after inexplicably spending a whole month on a fairly simply novel, to finish a book of fiction so quickly. (It took me about two days, mostly because I ended up spending ten hours at the hospital yesterday.)


[*] Erroneously published as The inhabitant of the lake and less welcome tenants.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby suklaa » 2016-10-01, 18:42

Books to finish reading:

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs & The Hidden Reality by Brain Greene.

Would be very curious to read from anyone who has read either of the two!
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*Investing in learning Swedish... finally progressing. Would appreciate any help!*
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-01, 19:44

I just read the 11th chapter of Randidangazhi to my dad a little while ago. I'm also getting close to the end of the part of my grandfather's diary that he calls "Vol. I" ("Vol. II" being much shorter), and I've more or less memorized 28 quatrains from Mayura Sandesham.

We've had no luck finding another copy of Mayura Sandesham anywhere so far, so maybe it's out of print. If I really do manage to memorize all 141 quatrains, maybe I'll record myself reciting them.


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