What are you reading?

childeroland said:

Which translation of Crime and Punishment?

I've been meaning to get around to Doctorow at some point, don't know why I haven't.

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I wonder if I would do better with a different translation of C&P. I read it in high school and our teacher gave us a list of characters and all their name variations so we could cross-reference. I still have the list tucked into the book. I want to reread it, but the thought seems wearying.



I'm about to start RELIC thanks to someone's mention in the great book series thread, and then I'm going to read both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for the first time.

I am now reading The Mirador by Sarah Monette.

I just finished Borges' Ficciones, Merimee's Carmen and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and now I'm working through Moby Dick, Ovid's Metamorphoses (the 1567 Arthur Golding translation), and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. Moby Dick's been taking me a lot longer than I expected (much less to do with the book than other things going on) but I'm hoping to have it and the others done in the next few weeks, before the new Pynchon novel comes out.

I'm also reading James P. Cannon's History of American Trotskyism, to be followed by Constance Ashton Myers' The Prophets Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 and Robert Alexander's The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s, the last few books for a paper I've been working on for approximately the past five million years. Fun stuff.

Dark Prince by Christine Feehan

A Boy of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews because it sounds like a good vacation read (I'm off to Victoria, B.C. tomorrow!). And then, for my cottage vacation, I got Julie & Julia. I love to cook and it just seems light and fun.

Just finished It's Superman! by Tom de Haven. I loved it. It's another take on the origin story, and I love what he did with it. Clark is kinda dumb, and a terrible reporter. Lois is not unduly burdened with chastity. Lex is an utter, utter bastard, but in a fun way. Superman isn't invulnerable, and when he heat-visions stuff he gets a headache. Et cetera.

It was fun.

Currently rereading Spook Country by William Gibson. I think it's cool that in the 20 years or so since I first read Neuromancer technology has come far enough that Gibson can write a straight thriller with no SF elements and it still makes sense to shelve it next to Count Zero. Also, I love love love Gibson's style.

extortionist said:

I just finished Borges' Ficciones, Merimee's Carmen and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and now I'm working through Moby Dick, Ovid's Metamorphoses (the 1567 Arthur Golding translation), and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. Moby Dick's been taking me a lot longer than I expected (much less to do with the book than other things going on) but I'm hoping to have it and the others done in the next few weeks, before the new Pynchon novel comes out.

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Jesus christ. How does it compare to David Raeburn's (2001) translation for Penguin Classics? That's the only version I have read, and it was quite awesome. Still like Lucan better though.

And Thomas Pynchon is still alive? Wow.

I've just found a seven volume version of FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS. Holy crap this is going to be awesome.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first English language novel.

Kurtz said:

Jesus christ. How does it compare to David Raeburn's (2001) translation for Penguin Classics? That's the only version I have read, and it was quite awesome. Still like Lucan better though.

And Thomas Pynchon is still alive? Wow.

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To be honest I haven't read any other translations yet, but as I understand it the Golding translation is interesting more for its novelty than its accuracy. It's the translation that Shakespeare and I guess Ezra Pound preferred, but it's not entirely true to the original and it's a little bizarre.

It's written in these strange 14-syllable rhyming lines (it was written a century before Paradise Lost, so English epic poetry still had to rhyme), but Golding apparently wasn't the greatest poet so there are a lot of fill words added to complete the lines and a lot of the rhymes are stretched (not just the usual differences in pronunciation you see with Elizabethan stuff). He also added some imagery and references that are distinctly English and couldn't have been in the originals. At the same time it's probably worth a look if you're insane like me and get a kick out of Elizabethan poetry. Here's a random quote:

And if it to be beleved, as bruited is by fame
A day did passe without the Sunne. The brightnesse of the flame
Gave light: and so unto some kind of use that mischiefe came.
But Clymen having spoke, as much as mothers usually
Are wonted in such wretched case, discomfortablely,
And halfe beside hir selfe for wo, with torne and scratched brest,
Sercht through the universall world, from East to furthest West,
First seeking for hir sonnes dead coarse, and after for his bones.
She found them by a forren streame, entumbled under stones.

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That's one of the better parts I've come across so far, but you can see he sacrifices language and construction for the sake of rhyme and meter.

It's a good read but I'll be reading a more modern and more accurate translation after I'm done--but then the Metamorphoses seems to deserve a second read regardless.

And yeah, Pynchon's somehow still alive and still working. He's a few years younger than McCarthy, which is a little terrifying--who becomes the living American canon after them?

The Summoner -- Gail Z. Martin

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

Bill Mauldin's Army. It's a collection of Willie and Joe cartoons.

I am reading City of Bones...

Of Human Bondage -- W. Somerset Maugham

I am pleasantly surprised at how much I like this so far.

The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett

So far (250 pages) so good.

Rereading Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon

I kind of went on a comic book binge there for a while. I was reading Gotham City Sirens, Teen Titans, Dark X-Men, X-Men Forever, Uncanny X-Men and Astonishing X-Men. I still have one X-Factor book and one Green Lantern book waiting to be read.

extortionist said:

Ovid

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I may have to give this a go, the nearest I've come to it was Pope's Iliad that bugged the hell out of me, it skewed the original so much and was just distracting. In terms of English poetry (although I love Blake so probably only longer poetry) I agree with Milton when he said

Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them.

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It's different with languages like Spanish or Italian, where it's really easy to make rhymes, but with English and German it sounds weird at best and bad and cheap at worst.

The 2001 translation of Ovid is really quite good, although the edition I bought had some weird formatting that screwed the flow of some lines up. It still has some wonderful parts, I especially enjoyed the parts with Polyphemus, and the different view Ovid had of Ulysses/Odysseus. He's a real bastard in the Aenied and Ovid continues the bold tradition.

Currently I'm re-reading the Proteus, Scylla and Caribdis, Wandering Rocks, Oxen of the Sun and Penelope passages of Ulysses. Just trying to get my head around them. I've also got Foxes Booke of Martyrs, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the 1936 Burton translation of selected tales from the 1001 nights (oh it'll be fun, apparently back in the 30's paragraphs were seen as for wimps, there are literally no paragraph breaks in the entire book, add that to the archaic vocabulary and we have a book less readable than Molly's monologue in Ulysses)

On to What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman.

Kurtz said:

I may have to give this a go, the nearest I've come to it was Pope's Iliad that bugged the hell out of me, it skewed the original so much and was just distracting. In terms of English poetry (although I love Blake so probably only longer poetry) I agree with Milton when he said

It's different with languages like Spanish or Italian, where it's really easy to make rhymes, but with English and German it sounds weird at best and bad and cheap at worst.

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...doesn't Milton follow that very statement by mentioning that Spanish and Italian poets have started breaking away from rhyme?

Anyway he's certainly correct that rhyme is by no means necessary (though he himself wrote some great rhyming poetry, and I'd say many other English-language poets have used rhyme to great effect), but it was Paradise Lost itself, if I'm not mistaken, that broke the tradition of writing English-language epic poetry in rhyme. He added that preface, along with the summaries at the beginning of each book, in the second edition after people were confused and possibly outraged by the initial printing.

But things like Golding's translation of Ovid, which came a century earlier, were still firmly rooted in that tradition, so I can't really blame him for doing the translation the way he did (the same way you couldn't really blame a modernist for not being a post-modernist). He can be criticized for not pulling it off so well as a greater poet might have, but the rhyme itself is like the nonstandardized spelling--a product of its time.

The 2001 translation of Ovid is really quite good...

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Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Currently I'm re-reading the Proteus, Scylla and Caribdis, Wandering Rocks, Oxen of the Sun and Penelope passages of Ulysses.

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All the most difficult chapters in a row? Have fun with that. Scylla and Charybdis (one of my personal favorite parts of the book) and Wandering Rocks are, I think, pretty straightforward once you understand the main ideas of the chapters, but the others are just plain hard to get through regardless.

extortionist said:

...doesn't Milton follow that very statement by mentioning that Spanish and Italian poets have started breaking away from rhyme?

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You would be right, he does. The 'arguments' are later additions because it's hard enough to follow as it is. Perhaps my views on rhyme aren't rational, it's a reaction to the masses of awful, awful poetry that was shoved down my face for GCSE English literature. I think it's a matter of finding the right poets.

On my first few readthroughs of Ulysses I just ended up either skimming the difficult passages or skipping them entirely. After getting hold of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living I've been inspired to get my hands dirty with Ulysses again.

Oh and also read Lucan's Pharsalia if you like Ovid. It's a really neat deconstruction of that whole genre of Roman epic poetry. Pity it is unfinished, it cuts off about halfway through series one of Rome.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo. The premise is great, and I want to love this book. I really do. But I don't. All the backstory is *killing* me.

Post Mortem / C. Woolrich (short story)

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's third (nonfiction bestselling) book, after The Tipping Point and Blink. They're all fascinating reading about social trends and such, but I have to agree with the reviews I've stumbled across, the author oversells his points and arguments, they're not nearly as strong or as clear-cut as he presents them.

Four Freedoms, by John Crowley.