Random Literature Thread

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

Postby Jurgen Wullenwever » 2016-02-22, 20:26

Johanna wrote:In the last 10-15 years?

Ah, well, those might be 1990s stuff, but I am not completely sure of all. It seems that A Memory of Light by Jordan and Sanderson topped the NY Times fiction best seller list in January 27, 2013, and that is only three years ago. And Raymond Feist has had books high on Sunday Times UK bestseller lists in 2009 #5, and 2013 #2 from what I can gather just now, and 2008 #7 London Times bestseller list, some of which came to #16 in NYT at that time.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Johanna » 2016-02-22, 20:41

Jurgen Wullenwever wrote:
Johanna wrote:In the last 10-15 years?

Ah, well, those might be 1990s stuff, but I am not completely sure of all. It seems that A Memory of Light by Jordan and Sanderson topped the NY Times fiction best seller list in January 27, 2013, and that is only three years ago.

Oh, that one... I thought that series would have lost most of its readers by then, not top the best-seller list :shock: :?

Not that it is very good, but it's also not a Tolkien pastiche once you get that far into it, even if it started out that way, it's simply way too massive.

Also, I think Jordan got most of the Tolkien stuff via The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay rather than directly from the source, reading the early books of Wheel of Time and the entirety of the latter side-by-side was almost like having a checklist. Not that it matter, Kay stole it from Tolkien after all :P
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Jurgen Wullenwever » 2016-02-22, 20:57

Johanna wrote:Not that it is very good

Sounds subjective. :| For me, it promised more than it gave, but on the whole, it has meant a lot of emotional reading, while GRRM was mostly disgusting reading that I read just to keep informed of what happens.
Johanna wrote:Also, I think Jordan got most of the Tolkien stuff via The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

I never had that impression, but I do not really remember FT apart from details. Guy Kay always had his mutilations in his (other) books, while Jordan had people being broken down inside instead (in WoT, not in Conan).
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Johanna » 2016-02-22, 21:11

Jurgen Wullenwever wrote:
Johanna wrote:Not that it is very good

Sounds subjective. :|

When even the die-hard fans go 'yeah, there's a stretch of five or so books the size of bricks in the middle where everything is soooooooo slooooooooooow', you know something's amiss ;)

And don't get me started on how all men and women think about each other like they do in a bad high school movie...

Jurgen Wullenwever wrote:
Johanna wrote:Also, I think Jordan got most of the Tolkien stuff via the Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

I never had that impression, but I do not really remember FT apart from details. Guy Kay always had his mutilations in his (other) books, while Jordan had people being broken down inside instead (in WoT, not in Conan).

It's the details that make them that similar.

Evil god imprisoned under a mountain in the north for X thousand years before the start of the series? Check
His name is modelled on 'Satan' and contains the exact letters A A H I N S T? Check - Sathain in the Fionavar Tapestry, Shai'tan in the Wheel of Time.
Seals to that prison in the form of magical stones/glass start to break? Check
A society of female magicians? Check
King Arthur or someone with his name is in that world or part of its history? Check
Parallel worlds that may look very similar but there's something off between them? Check

There were more, this is just off the top of my head and I haven't read either in at least ten years.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-22, 22:55

Seeing the thread for Günter Grass makes me realise that it's odd no one has commented on the passing of Umberto Eco. His Il pendolo di Foucault (in William Weaver's brilliant translation) was the book that taught me (a) I was capable of reading big fat works of fiction (600+ pages in the English version) and (b) sometimes you have to read a big chunk of something to decide whether it's worth reading or not. I remember vividly my reaction when I confessed to a classmate that I was getting bogged down in the book and he said, "After the first hundred pages it starts to pick up". It was disbelief. 100 pages! But he was right and now that's become my rule of thumb.

Not only did I eventually finish Foucault's Pendulum, but I went back and reread it years later and found it just as enjoyable. I've also read Baudalino and La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (translated as The search for the perfect language), but for some reason I've never made much progress in Il nome della rosa. (I enjoyed the movie, though I was deeply disappointed that the notoriously explicit sex scene involved some boring twink instead of Sean Connery.) And I haven't gotten around to reading his more recent works either, though we own copies of them all.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Varislintu » 2016-02-23, 11:55

linguoboy wrote:Seeing the thread for Günter Grass makes me realise that it's odd no one has commented on the passing of Umberto Eco.


I guess there's less to say when people die quite old. Just like Harper Lee, at 94.

Meanwhile, Mugabe and Castro live on and on... :ohwell:

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-02-24, 4:58

One of my best friends did point out to me that Umberto Eco died. Same with Harper Lee. He's very fascinated with people who live long lives and sometimes says he wants to do the same.

I guess I usually just don't talk about people dying. Hell, I have close relatives (including at least one first cousin) who AFAIK are seriously ill right now, and I don't even talk about them, much less an author I've read at most once.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-24, 17:47

Cheese and rice, people, it's just a rhetorical flourish!

Harper Lee's passing didn't affect me one bit. She'd been ill for months (something widely reported during the hullabaloo around the publishing of a sequel to Mockingbird) and, as famous as her one novel is, I'd never read it. Moreover, I find it odd when people make as big a deal out of someone like that passing as they do at the passing of someone much more creative and productive. Like when Glen Frey died so soon after David Bowie. The Eagles were a mediocre 70s band and Frey had long since dropped off the radar of all but diehard fans. There's simply no comparison to Bowie, who has still making interesting and challenging art literally until the moment he expired.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Varislintu » 2016-02-25, 17:50

linguoboy wrote:Cheese and rice, people, it's just a rhetorical flourish!

Harper Lee's passing didn't affect me one bit. She'd been ill for months (something widely reported during the hullabaloo around the publishing of a sequel to Mockingbird) and, as famous as her one novel is, I'd never read it. Moreover, I find it odd when people make as big a deal out of someone like that passing as they do at the passing of someone much more creative and productive. Like when Glen Frey died so soon after David Bowie. The Eagles were a mediocre 70s band and Frey had long since dropped off the radar of all but diehard fans. There's simply no comparison to Bowie, who has still making interesting and challenging art literally until the moment he expired.


Ah, Bowie... He became the focal point of my early pregnancy hormone-induced over-sensitivity. I have actually sat and cried over him. Several times. Every time they played him on the radio. The ridiculous thing is, I was never a fan (but I do respect him as an artist) and I know next to nothing about him. He just became some kind of trigger for me, poor guy.

Okay, enough of the preggo reports.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-26, 16:20

Last week I realised I've never read a work of fiction longer than a short story from any Romanian author. (Yes, I'm including Ionescu.) Anyone have any recommendations?

I'm also looking for recent Chinese fiction translated into English, preferrably from female writers. With the male writers I've been reading, I'm beginning to feel like they're all just writing variations of the same novel and I'm getting bored with it.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-02-26, 17:34

linguoboy wrote:I'm also looking for recent Chinese fiction translated into English, preferrably from female writers.

How recent? Past year, past five years...?

There's such a lovely story I know from 1979 written by a Chinese female writer (maybe you know it, too), but I doubt that's recent enough! :silly: It's gotta be one of my favorite written works, though, right up there with "Cranes" (학/鶴) by Hwang Sun-won.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-26, 18:18

Yeah, no, like 21st century. I am really, really tired of reading about what a sucky time everyone had in the CultRev.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Johanna » 2016-02-26, 19:21

Not female and I haven't read him, but Cixin Liu was awarded a Hugo last year for his The Three-Body Problem, apparently it's the first translated novel ever to win.

Edit: Apparently you can't escape the Cultural Revolution even in a contemporary science fiction novel, but from what I can gather, it's used in order to explain why someone in the 70's would want a hostile alien race to invade our planet and it's much more concerned with the science-fiction related stuff. I don't know how much of the book takes place in China in that era either, significant parts of it seem to be set on the homeworld of that alien race, and in the present (2007).
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-02-26, 19:25

linguoboy wrote:Yeah, no, like 21st century. I am really, really tired of reading about what a sucky time everyone had in the CultRev.

Just to be clear, the one I'm thinking of only briefly mentions the Cultural Revolution, really. It's more about whether women should get married by a certain age. But yeah, that's all I personally know of, I'm afraid, unless you count finding people and their works listed on Wikipedia. :lol:

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-26, 20:06

Johanna wrote:Not female and I haven't read him, but Cixin Liu was awarded a Hugo last year for his The Three-Body Problem, apparently it's the first translated novel ever to win.

Thanks for reminding me of this. I have been meaning to read it ever since I heard it was nominated.

Johanna wrote:Edit: Apparently you can't escape the Cultural Revolution even in a contemporary science fiction novel

It's a trauma arguably unlike any other faced by a nation even remotely the size of China. That leaves a mark.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-29, 3:25

Johanna wrote:Not female and I haven't read him, but Cixin Liu was awarded a Hugo last year for his The Three-Body Problem, apparently it's the first translated novel ever to win.

Well whaddya know--turns out my husband has a copy not only of that title but of a collection of his short stories as well. I'll start with the latter and see if I find them interesting enough to give the novel a shot.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Car » 2016-03-03, 17:33

A question for the librarians on here: Where can I check which language a book was originally written in? I know if you can look at the book, it may say "Translated from language", but you can't always do that and not all books are translated from the original. I read somewhere worldcat.org can be used for that, but I fail to see how.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-03-03, 17:41

Car wrote:A question for the librarians on here: Where can I check which language a book was originally written in? I know if you can look at the book, it may say "Translated from language", but you can't always do that and not all books are translated from the original. I read somewhere worldcat.org can be used for that, but I fail to see how.

Look it up there and if there's a fully-cataloged record (which there should be for most recent works by major publishers), this information will be in there.

For instance, I just searched Blue fox by the Icelandic writer Sjón and--as you can see from this record I found--there's a note "translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb."
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Car » 2016-03-03, 19:02

linguoboy wrote:
Car wrote:A question for the librarians on here: Where can I check which language a book was originally written in? I know if you can look at the book, it may say "Translated from language", but you can't always do that and not all books are translated from the original. I read somewhere worldcat.org can be used for that, but I fail to see how.

Look it up there and if there's a fully-cataloged record (which there should be for most recent works by major publishers), this information will be in there.

For instance, I just searched Blue fox by the Icelandic writer Sjón and--as you can see from this record I found--there's a note "translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb."

Thanks. That still has the same problem, though. Just consider this book I read. I read it in German and it entry reads:
"Deon Meyer. Aus dem Engl. von Ulrich Hoffmann", but that's not the original version. If I look up the English version, it says "Deon Meyer ; translated by Madeleine van Biljon." The "other title" information ultimately redirects me to the Afrikaans original, but it would have been so much easier if they had mentioned straight away what the original language is.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-03-03, 20:22

Car wrote:Thanks. That still has the same problem, though. Just consider this book I read. I read it in German and it entry reads:
"Deon Meyer. Aus dem Engl. von Ulrich Hoffmann", but that's not the original version. If I look up the English version, it says "Deon Meyer ; translated by Madeleine van Biljon." The "other title" information ultimately redirects me to the Afrikaans original, but it would have been so much easier if they had mentioned straight away what the original language is.

Well, the problem is that a lot of non-English-language records in WorldCat are vendor records from European publishers which are not fully cataloged. (A properly-cataloged record would have listed the original title rather than the title in the language it was translated from.) There may be some way to filter out vendor records on the public end (I know there is on the technical side) so that you get higher quality hits, but I don't know offhand how to do that.

When I want to find out more about an author or a work, I actually turn to Wikipedia first most of the time. If you go to the English-language entry for Meyer, for instance, the very first line is, "Deon Godfrey Meyer is a South African thriller novelist writing in Afrikaans." If you look at the German-language entry, you'll even find it lists Der traurige Polizist alongside both the title in the original Afrikaans and the English translation.
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