What are you currently reading? (part 2)

[vijayjohn]

I'm still struggling with reviewing the first 56 quatrains of Mayūra Sandēśam. The poem is divided into two parts, one of the 68 quatrains and another of 73. I haven't quite gotten to the point where I've given up for good on the idea of reciting the first part without interruption, but I'm close. I've definitely gotten to the point where I've ditched the idea at least while I'm just trying to remember all the words I'd already memorized earlier. Oh, and speaking of the words, I've forgotten what probably half of them even mean anymore. I can't get over how boring the content is.

Apparently, the palace where the author used to live is falling apart even though his descendants live there. Mayūra Sandēśam is available in at least one library in Kerala for sure, but I have yet to find any evidence that it's available for sale anymore. It seems that my dad had to memorize the whole poem when he was a kid. Nowadays, I'm not sure anyone around my age can recite it from memory, so I'm trying to.

[Yasna]

I finished reading The Master Algorithm, which gave a nice overview of the history of machine learning and where it is taking us. It's hard to exaggerate its potential.

I also read Beloved by Toni Morrison. It was interesting, but the storytelling was overly convoluted at times.

I'm currently reading 빛의 제국 (Your Republic Is Calling You) by Young-ha Kim.

[linguoboy]

I wanted to read something important to my late husband on my trip out west to finish burying him so I chose Faulkner's Light in August. It turned out to be a study copy he used while pursuing his doctorate. Even back then, his handwriting was illegible, so often I had only a vague impression of what he found significant in a particular passage or chapter.

The novel itself is superb, beautifully written and very engaging, though the racism of the characters makes for some heavy going. (Page per page, there may be more occurrences of "nigger" than in Huckleberry Finn.) Some of the twists get a bit melodramatic but I can excuse them as a touch of postmodernism in a modernist reworking of Southern Gothic tropes.

Uncharacteristically, I haven't been reading anything else in the meantime (which tells you how engrossing the work is) except that yesterday I picked up a book of short stories by Rebecca Makkai and found one about a dead circus elephant surprisingly affecting.

[vijayjohn]

I read the next two quatrains in Mayūra Sandēśam. Just now, I tried to recite them all to myself without looking at the text, and I remembered all 58 of them, possibly without even having made any mistakes! Yay! (It seems I even managed not to run out of breath! Of course, the master bedroom is right next to mine, and my parents are asleep, so it's not like I recited them aloud or anything).

Meanwhile, I've started on Colloquial Irish, Minna no Nihongo, part two of Yookoso! (both this and Minna no Nihongo are textbooks for Japanese), and Spoken Amoy Hokkien. I've also been translating some textbooks for learning a Formosan language called Amis from Chinese to English.

[Osias]

I'm reading lots of comic books from the nineties and seeing all the jokes and dialogue that were cut in the translation/adaptation process.

[vijayjohn]

In addition to the books I mentioned in my last post in this thread, I have also started on the Introduction to Biblical Hebrew by Thomas Lambdin, Complete Icelandic, Georgian: A Reading Grammar by Howard I. Aronson, Begegnungen (Sprachniveau A1+) by Anne Buscha and Szilvia Szita, Bahan Ajar Bahasa Indonesia Tingkat A1 by Tim Penyusun, and The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2300 Characters by Andrew Scott Conning.

[md0]

Grammar as processor : a distributed morphology account of spontaneous speech errors (Roland Pfau, 2009)
Always nice to see people bothering to test the predictions of theoretical models against real data.

[linguoboy]

The Makkai was excellent. I may have to buy her new novel.

I felt the need for some German so I combed through my shelf and pulled out Klaus Mann's Mephisto. The story of an actor's rise against a backdrop of rising Fascism? It seemed relevant. (There's a savage portrait of Emmy Göring--it's a roman à clef--in the first chapter, 90% of which could be applied to Ivanka Trump.) It's pretty easy going; I only look up words if I really want to.

At the used bookstore today, they had some new collections of Böll short stories that I can slip into the gap on the shelf. Those will come in handy next time I feel the need to read some German but don't want to dive into another novel.

[france-eesti]

I just took Anna Karenine from the public library... To give it a try I'm ashamed to be utterly ignorant about Russian literature, apart from a few chapters of Dostoevsky!
People say it's close to Madame Bovary. Has anyone ever read both of them?

[Antea]

Madame Bovary était un de mes livres de lecture obligatoire en Première. Je n’ai pas beaucoup aimé . Anna Karenine, je l’ai commencé quelques années après, mais je ne l’ai pas fini. Par contre, une de mes copines de classe a dévoré lu les deux livres, la même année, et elle a adoré, comme quoi je suppose que si tu aimes le genre

[france-eesti]

Merci ! j'ai lu Madame Bovary aussi à l'Université (en première année de fac anglais/portugais) et j'ai bien aimé ! Mais j'étais dans le contexte de "lire de la vraie littérature", maintenant je ne le suis plus depuis longtemps... Donc on verra bien ! Anna Karenine est beaucoup plus impressionant par sa taille que Mme Bovary

[JackFrost]

Présentement, pour faire passer le temps dans métro malgré que j'aie toujours accès aux réseaux cellulaires, je lis l'amant russe de Gilles Leroy. Je l'avais déjà lu quelques fois et on dirait que ce roman est toujours l'un de mes préférés.

People say it's close to Madame Bovary. Has anyone ever read both of them?

Non. Quand j'ai checké le résumé sur la Wiki, mettons que ça me tente pas de les lire. Et là, je pense pas qu'on a vraiment aimé la plupart des lectures obligatoires. Surtout quand certains profs avaient un gros jerk-off collectif pour les œuvres de l'ostie de XIX^e siècle ou pour une jeune fille qui se mourait coincée dans l'ostie de boue après une coulée destructrice quelque part en Amérique latine. Mais j'étais un jeune gars qui s'intéressait plutôt à Harry Potter (dis-moi que c'est pas la ~vraie littérature~, come fight me), à l'histoire et aux encyclopédies.

Désolé si je râlais simplement.

[france-eesti]

Euh mais j'ai lu Harry Potter en français, anglais, portugais, italien, espagnol, hongrois, et je l'ai chez moi en tchèque et néerlandais aussi !
Donc loin de moi l'idée de critiquer quelqu'un qui lit Harry Potter et même le considère comme de la littérature ! Je suis pareil !

[linguoboy]

People say it's close to Madame Bovary. Has anyone ever read both of them?

I have. Pretty sure I posted about both of them in this thread if you're curious what my impressions are. (In short, I liked them, but I'm much more of a fan of 19th-century novels than Jack Frost.)

The central characters are similar, but the milieux are different enough (rural France vs urban Russia). There's a lot more politics in Karenina (you'll need footnotes). I don't think either author particularly sympathises with these women's choices but I felt Flaubert was being a bit more ironic whereas Dostoyevsky seems interested in indicting Russian society as a whole.

[Antea]

(In short, I liked them, but I'm much more of a fan of 19th-century novels than Jack Frost.)
.

Personally, my dislike doesn’t come for being 19th century novels, because I loved Zola and Balzac, and others as well. But on the contrary, I didn’t like Flaubert or Stendhal, so maybe is the subject of the book itself that I don’t like

[Ciarán12]

Jogador No. 1 (original: "Ready Player 1")

Nice and easy bestseller/chewing-gum-for-the-mind page-turner. Apparently, that's my comfort level in Portuguese at the moment as I don't need to resort to a dictionary and can read at more or less the same pace as I would in English. So far I'm about a quarter of the way through and should be finished by next week.

[Osias]

Viu o filme? É muito diferente?

[Ciarán12]

Viu o filme? É muito diferente?

Nem sabia que existe filme! Vou dar uma olhada nele depois de terminar o livro.

[Osias]

[linguoboy]

Finished Mephisto. I am never going to stop being dismayed by how long it takes me to finish a damn novel these days. I even set aside almost all of last weekend for reading and hardly made any progress.

I did start two new books: Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet by Herta Müller and Le village de l'Allemand by an Algerian writer named Boualem Sansal. I'm kind of surprised by how difficult I'm finding the Müller. Her writing doesn't seem that dense but somehow it still takes me longer to read a page of her than a page of Klaus Mann, despite the fact that the print is much smaller in Mephisto. I can't say much yet about Sansal's style. He uses some argot, but not so much that it makes reading a struggle. It concerns two brothers of mixed parentage who grow up apart from their parents and try to piece together their history after their deaths, which was enough to pique my interest.

Oh, and I haven't given up on messing around with Y pla yet. It's still on my bed paired with my Collin's Welsh dictionary, since I still need to look up at least every tenth word.