What are you currently reading?

Started by facehugger, April 07, 2007, 12:36:10 AM

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Danny

Quote from: Bunny on May 03, 2007, 07:59:08 AM
Please tell me that you weren't reading these for school.

No.  Reading these become I'm Catholic.  0:)

sonic1

Until I master French (which I intend) I am reading this English Translation of Proust, my summer's reading (or lifetime's).



and also enjoying this side-read:


Harry

#162
Still reading a fascinating book about Charlotte Bronte, written by Rebecca Fraser, considering this is her first book.
Its brimful with so many details that life at the rectory is almost there to touch.

Maciek

Quote from: bwv 1080 on May 03, 2007, 10:08:56 AM
BTW are you a fan of Stanislaw Lem?  The Cyberiad is about my all time favorite book

Not really, I like the thought/content but find his style a bit tiring (it's very old fashioned and mannered). From what I've seen that doesn't come through in the translations. Which is probably a good thing. Maybe I should start reading him in translation? ;) I do quite like his essays though - very intelligent science journalism. Not sure if that stuff has been translated into any human language?

Drasko

Quote from: MrOsa on May 04, 2007, 12:55:04 PM
Not really, I like the thought/content but find his style a bit tiring (it's very old fashioned and mannered). From what I've seen that doesn't come through in the translations. Which is probably a good thing.

Last I read of him (quite a while ago) was His Master's Voice and remember quite liking it, his style, in translation, came across as very dry and academic but I found it well suited for the matter.


rockerreds

William James-Writings 1902-1910

Steve

#166
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust.

I need to get through the entire set this summer.  ;)

You've chosen well, sonic1

sonic1

Quote from: Steve on May 05, 2007, 08:40:11 AM
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust.

I need to get through the entire set this summer.  ;)

You've chosen well, sonic1

Thank you. I am reading the modern library translations, mainly because it is all the same translator. I actually read another translation of the second book, but was frustrated with the various translators of the other books. I sort of need one voice for one story. Except with the bible of course.

Maybe after I read this translation, I will try the others.

Steve

The modern library version was my introduction to the work, and I still keep it as reference. However, this new translation from Lydia Davis of Swann's Way really piqued my attention. This set from Penguin Publishing has received some great attention. As to the uniformity of translation, I can understand that. Although sometimes, you just want the best translations available, and you have to settle for more than one.

What sort of progress have you made? it would be really interesting to post our reactions to the text once in awhile on this forum.  :)

Greta

Quote from: Haffner on April 27, 2007, 06:36:45 AM
"The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy"
Fascinating!

Is that the one, on its Amazon page, that had tons of long, long reviews where guys were going back and forth philosophizing on Wagner's philosophies?  ;D

I definitely have to get that one sometime! Report back when you've finished it...

dtwilbanks

I'm reading this. It takes place in Scotland where baseball bats are not used for their original purpose.


Greta

As for what I'm reading myself:

Egon Gartenberg's Mahler: His Life and His Music - a solid biography on Mahler's life and a long section that details the themes and background information for each symphony and lieder cycle.

Principles of Orchestration, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Fascinating! So well explained, though of course it's dated, instrument combinations that would have been taboo then, well, in today's music anything goes. Just very thorough and nice to work through.

The Fresco, Sheri S. Tepper - Just a book for fun, I hadn't read any of her books in a long time, but this one seems quite interesting. A middle aged unhappily married bookstore clerk, takes a walk in the woods and meets a couple of aliens who give her a cube she needs to urgently give to the President - you can see that's a great setup. ;)

She reallly a fine writer, she describes things so precisely and takes you into another world. Her books from the 90s are my favorites, the best being Raising The Stones about a civilization on another planet. Also Grass is another, more spiritual one.

Heather Harrison

Right now, I am in the middle of this:



It is a book about the history of how the periodic table of the elements was developed.  It goes into more detail than the usual brief accounts that occur in science books, including some discussion on early contributors who have been largely forgotten.  I have been interested in chemistry since I was a child.  When I was a teenager, I actually went to the trouble of memorizing the entire periodic table.  (I was a very nerdy kid, and when I grew up I became a very nerdy adult.)  Now, I am in the process of collecting pure samples of as many of the elements as I can get, and I have succeeded in obtaining some that I thought I would never see.  (I recently got a nice crystalline lump of thulium.)  So given my current collecting interest, I find this book interesting.  But anyone who is interested in the history of science might like this book; the periodic table, along with the discovery of the periodic law, was one of the most important advances in science in the 19th Century, and its history has been somewhat neglected.

Heather

Don Giovanni

sonic1 and Steve, good luck with the Proust. I think you may need it.

sonic1

Quote from: Steve on May 05, 2007, 05:06:58 PM
The modern library version was my introduction to the work, and I still keep it as reference. However, this new translation from Lydia Davis of Swann's Way really piqued my attention. This set from Penguin Publishing has received some great attention. As to the uniformity of translation, I can understand that. Although sometimes, you just want the best translations available, and you have to settle for more than one.

What sort of progress have you made? it would be really interesting to post our reactions to the text once in awhile on this forum.  :)

I started with the second book (the penguin addition) and now I am going to read the entire set over again, so basically I am at the beginning again with Swann's way. The Beckett essay on Proust is really nice BTW; it outlined some perspectives that will certainly give me a starting reference point. I will post my thoughts here as they are significant enough to post. I will start off by saying that Proust has an incredible way, shakespearian almost, of revealing the deep driving intent of his characters, and how they all train-wreck into each other-though not as train-wreckish as Shakespeare. It is how he exposes these characters over the span of a book that is so amazing to me.

Choo Choo

I'd be very interested to hear your verdict on the Scott Moncrieff translation.  I started on the (later) Kilmartin set years ago, and struggled through to the end of Within a Budding Grove (i.e. abour 1/3rd of the way through) before deciding I had other plans for the rest of my life...

dtwilbanks

THE HOUSE by Bentley Little. So far, so Little.

Choo Choo

#177
Meanwhile I have just finished Yours, Plum - a collection of the letters of P G Wodehouse, edited by Frances Donaldson.  It's a lightweight read - good for dipping into - but doesn't add much to the rest of the canon.  Interesting though to see PGW referring to people (mostly, other authors) as "bastards" and "lice".  That's not the impression you usually get.

One thing that does come out of it is the extent to which his "official" memoirs (Bring On The Girls) and published letters (Performing Flea) were edited for publication, to the extent that the former is largely fiction, as PGW cheerfully admits - i.e. the stories he recounts may have happened - but not to him.  It does seem as if his motivation was to make for a better story, rather than just boosting his own reputation.

I am genuinely puzzled by the arrangement he had with his wife.  They appear to have spent months on end apart - sometimes, in different continents - and even when under the same roof seem to have led largely separate lives, meeting up during the day in way that comes across as oddly formal.  In one letter he writes of the circumstances which had led to them spending a night in the same bed, as if this were something so remarkable that he just had to sit down and write a letter to somebody about it.  Then there's the matter of his wife's collection of "followers" (young men), some of whom appear to have lived with the Wodehouses - an arrangement which (the editor remarks cryptically in a footnote) "does not seem to have disturbed Plum at all."  Yet he consistently paints a picture of two people who adored each other.  One of these days I must find a real warts-and-all biography and get the real skinny.

Don Giovanni

Quote from: Don Giovanni on May 06, 2007, 09:32:33 AM
sonic1 and Steve, good luck with the Proust. I think you may need it.

I didn't mean to strikethrough sonic1 in my original post.

orbital


One fascinating story after another. I can imagine how much even better they would be in Spanish