reading

Translation

Maybe it’s because I’m bilingual, but I find that reading translated works is almost always less satisfying to me than reading things in their original language. I read Crime and Punishment during my last semester, and while I ended up loving it – which isn’t to say it didn’t drive me crazy – I also didn’t like it nearly as much as any of the other classics that I read that semester that had all be written originally in English.

Now I’ve started reading The Red and the Black, and I’m enjoying it immensely. The beginning was slow, though, and it took me some time to get into the flow of the writing style; once I did, I managed to begin to find the characters and the social dynamics to be fascinating.

And yet – there’s something missing there. I think, though I can’t be sure, that it’s the fact that I’m reading a translation from the French. I feel that there’s something inevitably lost in the translation process, and it’s something that is impossible to regain unless I learn to read French perfectly and read it in the original. Even then, I’ll have had to have lived in France long enough to understand the ins and outs of the idioms, the connotations of certain phrases and the way I’m supposed to feel about Napoleonic history.

I’m so glad that I’m bilingual and am able to enjoy reading books in two languages – English and Hebrew – and feel the incredible and fascinating difference between writing styles in each of them. However, I wonder whether I’d notice that hard-to-describe lack in the translated works I’m going to be reading this semester if I was monolingual.

Thoughts? Comments? Have any of you felt this or do you think I’m crazy?

Some Thoughts, and My 2011 Reading List

It’s already 2012 in my current time zone and, so far, nothing seems so different about 2012. Just like on birthdays, the actual movement of the clock from 11:59PM to 00:01AM wasn’t a noteworthy experience full of internal fireworks going BANG and making everything in my head rearrange itself somehow. Thank goodness – can you imagine how unpleasant that would have been?

I’ve never made New Year’s resolutions. I judge myself too harshly and obsess over things too easily – if I made resolutions, I’d feel horribly guilty if I broke them, and keeping them would turn into an unpleasant and burdensome chore that I’d learn to despise. So I make small resolutions, daily goals that I can write down in my planner and joyfully tick off at the end of the day.

I also don’t seem to go for introspection. I’ve realized lately that I have a lot of trouble with sitting and thinking. I know some people who consciously take time to think over their issues, to reach decisions, to make sense of what they’re doing. I don’t do this. It seems to happen on its own, in between reading and showering and going about my daily life. I often wonder what I’m missing and whether my insights are somehow less worthy because I didn’t put in the deliberate time to reach them. I think that’s why I don’t manage to write long pieces about my life very often. I get bored with only being able to experience what I experience and think what I think; I suppose that’s part of why I read so much.

My only real resolution for 2012 is to manage to read one hundred books or more. And now I present the list of books I read during 2011:

Reading List, 2011

 

 

January

  1. A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
  2. To the Lighthouse by Virgina Woolf
  3. The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
  4. How the Elephant Got Its Trunk by Rudyard Kipling
  5. Mai: The Psychic Girl Perfect Collection (Volume 1) story by Kazuya Kudo, art by Ryoichi Ikegami [graphic novel]
  6. Mai: The Psychic Girl Perfect Collection (Volume 2) story by Kazuya Kudo, art by Ryoichi Ikegami [graphic novel]
  7. The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
  8. The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis
  9. Mai: The Psychic Girl Perfect Collection (Volume 3) story by Kazuya Kudo, art by Ryoichi Ikegami [graphic novel]
  10. The Loneliness of the Mind Reader by Dalit Orbach
  11. Henry IV Part I by William Shakespeare

 

February

  1. Maurice by E. M. Forster
  2. The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré
  3. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
  4. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
  5. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré

 

March

  1. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss [reread]
  2. The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
  3. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
  4. The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint
  5. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
  6. The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin

 

April

  1. The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth
  2. The Quest for le Carre ed. By Alan Bold
  3. The Faerie Queene, book VI by Edmund Spenser
  4. IT by Stephen King
  5. Utopia by Thomas More
  6. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  7. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  8. Muse and Reverie by Charles de Lint
  9. Overqualified by Joey Comeau

 

May

  1. Bad Love by Jonathan Kellerman
  2. Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales by Tamora Pierce
  3. Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman
  4. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  5. Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card

 

June

  1. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  2. Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen
  3. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  4. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
  5. Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
  6. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
  7. Young Zaphod Plays it Safe by Douglas Adams
  8. The Hug by David Grossman
  9. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
  10. Neuland by Eshkol Nevo
  11. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

 

July

  1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling [Reread]
  3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  4. The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powel
  5. Pipelines by Etgar Keret
  6. Naamah’s Blessing by Jacqueline Carey

 

August

  1. Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton
  2. Watchmen by Alan Moore
  3. Embassytown by Charles Mieville
  4. The Conspiracy Club by Jonathan Kellerman
  5. I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
  6. Breakable You by Brian Morton

 

September

  1. Missing Kissinger by Etgar Keret
  2. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley
  3. The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain [Reread]
  4. Scott Pilgrim v. the World by Bryan Lee O’Malley
  5. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O’Malley
  6. Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together by Bryan Lee O’Malley
  7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen [Reread]

 

October

  1. Masfield Park by Jane Austen [Reread]
  2. Spuds by Karen Hesse
  1. Galilee by Clive Barker
  2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens [Reread]
  4. The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard by A. E. Coppard
  5. Wolf Moon by Charles de Lint

 

November

  1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  2. God’s Eyes a-Twinkle: An Anthology by T.F. Powys
  3. Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

 

December

  1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  2. Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley
  3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  4. Fairest by Gail Carson Levine
  5. The Dylanist by Brian Morton
  6. Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones
  7. The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones

     

 

 

Real Contact

I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s a fantastically strange novel, almost like a collection of short stories that span through a few decades and show the connections between a huge cast of characters that hardly seem like they should be related and yet are.

I don’t want to spoil it for those who’ve never read it, so I’ll just say that there’s a portion in it that deals with characters living a decade or so in the future, a time at which it seems that texting is the primary method of communicating with people. One of the characters seems profoundly uncomfortable with real speech and much prefers the cleanliness of the short messages we sent to each other via text, or T as it’s called by then. This disturbed me profoundly and I’m having a hard time getting through this section. The notion of real contact between people being something that’s disappearing is something I dislike. I also don’t really believe it’s true.

As a child of the generation that has grown up with increasingly small cellphones, increasingly faster internet and the increasing ubiquity of social networking in our lives, I still don’t believe that the near future contains the loss of real speech or contact between people. In my world, at least, social networking is another means of communication, true, but it’s far from being the only one or the most preferred one. I know few people who spend more time communicating with friends online than face to face.

Thoughts? Comments? Opinions?

All of the Reading

Today has been a reading day. This semester it seems that reading is overtaking writing in my daily activities, and while that’s okay, I’m still glad that I have my post-a-day challenge to keep me writing, as well as my writing class. But today is just one of those strange days where I feel like my eyes have been zooming back and forth continuously, reading one thing or another. One day, I’m going to want to remember the kind of Sundays I had at college, so here is what I read today:

1) David Copperfield while eating my breakfast in my pajamas.

2) The workshop submissions for my writing class. It was my second read, and I had a pen in hand to make notes and marks, but there weren’t many to make on the two stories I read today, since they were excellent.

3) Crime and Punishment, with many post-it notes and a pencil. I’m reading it very closely, for the second time (only read up to page 450 the first time, though, and am reading it again because after conversing with my professor, I decided that it required the kind of reading where I pay attention to little details and make a ton of notes. Which is what I’ve been doing.)

4) David Copperfield again while eating lunch.

5) I was in a writing workshop last year as well, and I’m working for the teacher who presided over that class. He trusts my judgement, which is incredibly flattering, and part of my work for him is reading stories by these two authors he hadn’t heard of till recently and deciding whether any of their stories are good enough to pass on to him and his current (or future) writing class. So I spent an hour reading a couple stories by A. E. Coppard in the one book of his that’s free on Google Books: Adam & Eve & Pinch Me: Tales.

6) Finished reading a play by a guy who was, funnily enough, in the same writing workshop with me last year. I’m going to be directing a reading of this play – an entirely new and foreign experience for me, but one I’m quite looking forward to, especially since the play is beautiful and moving.

Now I’m off to the library to read some more Crime and Punishment.

All of the reading. All. Of. It.

 

Life?

I’ve been bad. I knew it would happen, and here – it has. Neglect has set in once more. And I was doing so well! I was posting every day, in the morning, even while I was in Vancouver! Oh, well. So it goes. Life happens. I know I shouldn’t beat myself up about it (but, well, it’s me, so I’m going to – but I needn’t subject my readers to my self-flagellation!)

Back on my beautiful campus, the past three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, moodiness, and more activity.  Here’s some of what I’ve been up to:

1) Classes:

-The Nineteenth Century Novel: for all you readers out there, doesn’t this sound exciting?! It is! The professor is perhaps the oldest on campus and gets tired rather quickly, but he has amazing insight and is still passionate about what we read. So far, we’ve read Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Talk about incredible syllabus. I’ve also been reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky for the independent-study portion of this class. I’ve yet to make up my mind as to whether I like it or not.

-The Talking Cure: my very first psych-course ever, this lecture is turning out to be fantastic. There’s a lot of intricate reading, but it’s fascinating. I’ve been spending a lot of my out-of-class time discussing what I’ve been learning in this class. This is one of the things I love about college – these kinds of conversations are fun and mutual.

-Writing Workshop: I’m writing short stories for the first time in my life. I’ve been known to post some lengthier things here, in installments, but none have ever been very satisfying to me. A couple had resolutions, sure, but mostly I seem to know how to end very short pieces with a punch. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it’s interesting to be in a class that is solely for the purpose of writing short stories: our teacher is a meticulous reader and reads every workshop submission twice which is why he won’t accept novels. The experience of writing a short story is interesting and, to me, vastly different than that of writing a novel.

2) Book club: Two friends and I have started a weekly meeting in one of the coziest spaces on our campus and we invite people to come and read with us. For fun. Because we all have lots and lots AND LOTS of reading for classes, but we all miss reading for pleasure. Our book club was started so that we would have prescribed weekly time to just read for fun. We’ve had two meetings so far, and it’s been extremely fun.

3) Drama: No, not the kind of drama you’re thinking of! Thank goodness. There is drama on campus, of course; it’s inevitable, in such a small school or, indeed, anywhere. But I’ve been making sure not to involve myself actively in any of it. No, the drama I mean is my acting-for-fun impulse. I’ve been in our weekly cabaret/sketch style show, and have also been chosen to play Frank N’ Furter in our shadowcast production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that will be happening a couple days before Halloween. This is my dream role, and I can’t describe the absolute astonishment I felt for being picked out to play the wonderful character. Lots of fishnet tights are in my near future.

Alrighty. Now I’m kind of all caught up. I need to catch up with all my bloggy-friends’ blogs. I miss reading them, and I’ve been trying not to fall too far behind on anyone, but I’m probably failing miserably. I will do my very best to begin posting regularly again and not to be a stranger to y’all.

Happy Thursday!

Big Apple, Small Room

It took me a while to convince my mother that our apartment wasn’t twenty-five square feet. I needed to remind her that if it was, that would mean it was the size of my aunts’ terrace.

Nevertheless, the space is small, the bed slopes, the internet is having issues, the shower-curtain smells suspiciously of new plastic (was there blood on the previous one? Is that why it was changed so recently) and the air-conditioning not so much hums as grunts and complains loudly that its back is hurting. We shut the poor thing off and slept with the windows open.

Does it sound like I’m complaining? Oh, dear me, no! Part of life in the big city is the itty-bitty one room apartments that make up those jigsaw puzzles of lights-in-windows that can be seen anywhere, always, because it never goes completely dark here. I heard something about some legendary blackout that happened sometime, but I can’t imagine it. How would people so addicted to their machines function?

Friends, good food, and fun awaits. Oh, yeah, and then school starts in a couple days. But until then, I’m going to make the most of this place.*

*By that, of course, I mean I’m going to go with my mom to read at the Highline park. But hey, that’s pretty dang adventurous for me!

An Honest Cover Letter

Dear Publisher or Literary Agency,

I love reading. I love writing. I bet you hear this all the time, but I just want you to know that I mean it. When I begin to talk about books, I feel my stomach leaping and the tips of my toes curl in excitement. When I sit down to write every day, I feel as if this is something I will gladly be doing for the rest of my life, even if it doesn’t result in a lot of money. I’m fully willing to become a waitress to support my writing habit.

However, it’s probably harder getting published as an unknown waitress who writes during her hours off than as a literary agent or editor at a publishing house. Working with you will give me an “in.” Am I being too blunt? Forgive me, but that’s the point. I’ve spent the last two and a half hours drafting (or attempting to draft) clever, concise and comprehensive cover letters in which I subtly explain why I will get down on my knees and beg to work for you. My mind is fairly wrung out, and so in order to refresh and cleanse it, I’m telling you the truth.

The truth is that while my biggest goal isn’t to become a publisher or literary agent, these are jobs that I would do a lot to get if they would help me support my writing habit while also letting me deal with books all day. I’ve been working in a bookstore during the last month, and I’ve found that the mere presence of hundreds of books is enough to keep me motivated and happy. Only think how well I’ll work for you at a job that would involve not only seeing books but reading manuscripts and writing letters!

I fear that my formulaic cover letters will get swallowed in the mass of other likely, qualified candidates that will contact you. If I had the guts, I’d send you this letter instead – although, to be fair, I’d probably work at it a lot longer and make it wittier and more touching than it is.

The bottom line (or, rather, lines) is that I love books, I’m passionate about the written word, and I would love to work anywhere that helps in the process of getting a book from the writer’s personal hard-drive and into the bookstore where I happily purchase it. Even though you’re businesses and your goal is to profit, you also save my life along the way by continuing to publish the books without which I wouldn’t know how to survive the emotional and mental turmoil that every human being goes through.

Hire me, hire me, hire me,

Help me keep writing and books in my life forever by letting me leap into the publishing world during my sophomore year at college,

(I promise you won’t regret it,)

Sincerely,

SlightlyIgnorant

Frowning in the Desert

Standing atop a dune, he truly comprehended the connection between sand and glass. Tumbling, slipping and sliding his way up the miniature hill, he’d cut his shins and forearms on the stinging sand. His hands were scraped raw. There were tiny grains of sand – grains of glass? – inside every fold of his body, cutting and scraping away uncomfortably. It was incredible to him that such small flecks of matter could sting so much.

The desert was not his home. He never intended to make it one. In fact, he hoped that he would, very soon, be miles away from the place. The broken-down plane that lay some yards away seemed to mock him, telling him he would never find his home again. He’d tinker with the engine tomorrow; today, tonight, he couldn’t stand the thought of being defeated by a machine he’d mastered through long years of study. And to think that he could have been a painter!

The desert around him was too vast to contemplate. He knew he would go mad if he tried very hard. So he decided to accept it in chunks; that night, all he needed to accept was the discomfort of the sand in his body. Thirst, hunger, loneliness and despair – these he’d leave for the following days.

Sliding down the dune, he returned to the shadow of his plane. He didn’t notice the beauty in the fact that there was a shadow at nighttime, nor did he notice the stars that lit up the sky like the brightest Christmas trees back home. He didn’t think, yet, of the secrets that the desert might hold or the treasure implied in those secrets.

He also didn’t think of the boy who would wake him up when dawn came; he didn’t know anything about him yet. Although he hated grown-ups and refused to admit he was one, he never thought that night of the sheep he’d be drawing in the morning or of the rose he’d be introduced to. So much was in store for him as he lay down to sleep, rather hopelessly trying to brush sand off his hands, but at that moment he could only frown and begin to weep.

For the Love of Words

Frequently. Free-quent-lee. I love the sound of that word. The way it clicks around my mouth but ends in the soft “ly” sound, making it like a bite of dark chocolate that tastes bitter and sharp at first but then melts exquisitely on the tongue.

Exquisite. That’s another good word. It seems to glint in my head as I say it, and I imagine a dragon guarding its gold; which of them is more exquisite, the hoard or the magnificent beast sitting near it, eyes burning almost as much as its mouth, flames curling around its nostrils? The shimmering pile of coins twinkles in the firelight… exquisitely.

Descriptions can evoke such strong images, and part of every description are the words we choose to include in it. Words, themselves, can call up memories and ideas that flash on the screen of our mind’s eye without our ever realizing it – but somehow, complete ideas of whatever we’re reading are transported to our consciousness.

Words are magical. Ma-gik-kl. Another beautiful word.

Hire Me?

To Whom it May Concern:

Let’s be honest. You’ve got all those lovely books on your shelves above that big, fat, oak desk of yours – but you’ve only read three of them. The rest you got as gifts over the years, liked the look of, and put them up there. This way, when big, important, pretentious clients come to talk to you, they can throw out a remark about whatever book they’ve happened to have read that they spot on your shelf. Sometimes, they hit on one of those books you’ve read, and the two of you can prove to each other how intelligent you are. But more often than not, you need to glance at the shelf to remember what book they’re referring to, take it down, and look sneakily at the back while pretending to show them the lovely edition you have, just so that you can remember what on earth the volume is about.

This is where I come in. I am offering, for a small fee, to spend my days reading all your books, and dedicated a half-hour a day to telling you what each book is about. Trust me, it’s much nicer to hear someone tell you about a book than to read the back or the inside flap. I’ll be able to convey the main themes and even, if your memory is good, the main characters’ names. I can guarantee that you’ll feel a lot smarter than you are with very little work!

In case you think there’s a catch, I promise you there isn’t. I am simply a bookworm looking for a way to get paid to read books. This service that I’m offering is one that I will enjoy, and we all know that happy workers make better workers. Think about it.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon,

Slightly Ignorant Eager Reader