March Books--I Read a Book!

[lisamnz]

Ha, wrong thread! I posted this in Feb.

The Book of Sand, Theo Clare (aka Mo Hayder, aka - really - Clare Dunkel)

Anyone?

I'm wondering if the two planned sequels will still now happen.

[lisamnz]

I read ALLLLL the David Eddings when I was young. I wouldn't read them now. I also discovered Robin Hobb and couldn't go back.

[sophie]

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Oweena… you were right… an excellent book. It’s an interesting hybrid of a book, between history and poetry and literature, telling the story of a family, a community and a people of that place. The main character, Ailey, is a product of all that and she carries the story through her development. Highly recommended.

[lillielangtry]

Mar 24, 2022 21:36:31 GMT -5 lisamnz said:

I read ALLLLL the David Eddings when I was young. I wouldn't read them now. I also discovered Robin Hobb and couldn't go back.

I have been meaning to try Hobb for ages.

[scrubb]

Finished "The Poppy War" by R.F.Kuang. Description from good reads: "epic historical military fantasy, inspired by the bloody history of China’s twentieth century and filled with treachery and magic"

It started out well - poor, mistreated orphan girl manages to beat out everyone else to get into a top school (turns out to be a military school) where she remains the subject of discrimination, but outperforms everyone else. Fantasy twist. I thought it was probably YA fiction.

But less than half way through it suddenly jumps through a couple years and gets a war started and it's really grisly and horrible after that. And the whole fantasy/gods part turns kind of stupid. And the main character becomes totally unlikeable and also written inconsistently.

Not recommended. I'm not sure why I forced myself to finish it.

[sophie]

Tilly and the Crazy Eights by Monique Gray Smith. A feel good novel about 8 elders from a Canadian First Nation who decide to do a bucket list trip and go to the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in New Mexico. It’s an easy read but well done with each character well developed. It’s my book club’s choice for this month and it’s one more book that I never would have been exposed to if it wasn’t for that wonderful group.

[ozziegiraffe]

17. The Shack, William Paul Young. A fictional account of a man’s meeting with God after a terrible tragedy. God is depicted as an African American woman, a middle-eastern man and an Asian woman, challenging all his preconceived notions.

[sophie]

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain. Set in the early 1990’s on the California coast north of SF, this novel follows the search for missing teenaged girls by an investigator who is, herself, burned out and dealing with personal trauma. Loosely based on real events in that time, it is well written. Not a book to be read when you are alone in a dark house.

[scrubb]

Blergh. The Lost Girl in Paris by Jina Bacarr

A book set in WW2 that was mostly a romance. It was not good writing, although at least the characters weren't unbearable. Not all Book bub sales are a good thing. It was either in "literary fiction" or "historical fiction" but it should have been in the romance section.

[Queen]

Mar 22, 2022 14:55:14 GMT -5 sprite said:

Away with the Fairies, A Phryne Fisher mystery.

I enjoyed this. I've seen some of the TV series, but didn't know how the writing was. Phryne is just a little too perfect, but the other characters are enjoyable, and the two stories (a murder and the kidnapping by pirates of her lover) were well-balanced.

There was a vital clue that revolved around a chemical reaction, but I'm not so sure that it's correct. No matter, it was fun.

Would it help to know that Prussic Acid is Hydrogen cyanide? As a gas it's toxic to humans at relatively low concentrations.

(I had to look it up)

[Queen]

The Good Women of China
Xinran

really interesting, Xinran hosted a radio programme in the late 90s that included listeners letters and a call in session, this was incredibly unusual for the time. It focused on women - also unusual at the time! And this book shows the effect centuries of misogyny have for the women of today in China.

We're 25 years on, and few of the interviews/stories relate to young women but the ones that do point to change coming. I'd be really interesting to hear whether that change has happened (I suspect maybe a little... )

[lillielangtry]

Malla Nunn, When the Ground is Hard
A YA novel set in a Christian boarding school in Swaziland (Eswatini), about a growing friendship between two girls and their shared love of Jane Eyre. This was very enjoyable (despite, again, not being a typical genre of mine). It wasn't perfect - I felt like the initiating incident, of one of the girls getting dumped by her group of friends, wasn't fully fleshed out and those girls were just ciphers of "mean girls", when some of the other characters were complex and sensitively drawn. There could have been more of the Jane Eyre storyline. But interesting and quite moving in parts.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
*hollow laughter*
I bet many of you have read this as it was first published in 2014 and it was very successful. I've been kind of wanting to read it since then. And I had to choose now, two years into a pandemic, to read about a pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population, leaving isolate settlements of survivors. Some years after the collapse, the Travelling Symphony is a group of nomadic actors and musicians that goes from group to group, playing music and putting on Shakespeare plays. When they find that one settlement has been taken over by a mysterious "prophet", things turn a violent turn.
This is going straight into the small group of well-written apocolyptic novels that will really stick with me, most notably Atwood's Year of the Flood and Naomi Alderman's The Power. It's gripping and very well-structured. But it's hard to say if I actually "enjoyed" it given... all that's happening in the world. In fact it put me into quite a strange mood yesterday, my boyfriend was a little alarmed.
If you are looking for a pandemic novel, though(!), this one is highly recommended.

Edited to say - ah yes, the advert now reminds me there's a series of Station Eleven, but I can't access it.

[Liiisa]

Heh heh heh lillie I just got around to reading "Station Eleven" last year, so yes, I get it.

She's got a new book coming out now, which I just read a review of in the NYT this morning. Amusingly, one thing they said was "During the visit, the writer faces endless questions from readers about the imaginary disease she wrote about — perhaps a sly reference to Mandel’s own experience talking about... Station Eleven"

[scrubb]

I really liked Station Eleven. I read it long before experiencing a pandemic so it was different, I guess. But I felt that the book doesn't focus on the pandemic at all.

Another good pandemic read (!) is "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis.

[scrubb]

Oops, forgot to say that I finished a book - Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Weaver. I like the odd mystery and thought I'd try a Dexter one. The writing isn't bad, although sometimes it's a bit overwritten. Plus, plot points were signaled way too obviously (one of them was eye rolling that the characters fell for it). The plot was really over-the-top, too. Like, I really don't think that there are a lot of cannibals out there. It was all very grisly. Which I suppose isn't a surprise, but it wasn't graphic except for a couple scenes near the end, and Dexter's thoughts are often very superficially amusing - yet it still somehow got across the horror.

I don't think I'll be reading more Dexter mysteries. While trying to write from the POV of a psychopathic serial killer is interesting, it's hard to say whether or not he succeeds. And the metaphors used to describe his psychosis, while poetic, began to feel overegged by the end so I don't think I'd get through another book full of them. Plus the whole unpleasant grisly thing.

[Liiisa]

11) Premee Mohamed, Beneath the Rising

This could have been kind of formulaic (two teenagers, one a girl who is a prodigy inventor and the other, the boy who is her best pal, end up fighting off the forces of the Elder Gods in order to save the world from a mystical cataclysm). However, the two main characters make it much more interesting; I found it kind of hard to put down. It's based in Canada, and the boy is from a Guyanese family, so there are these cultural and class/race aspects that make it more interesting.

[lillielangtry]

Mar 27, 2022 15:29:45 GMT -5 scrubb said:

I really liked Station Eleven. I read it long before experiencing a pandemic so it was different, I guess. But I felt that the book doesn't focus on the pandemic at all.

Another good pandemic read (!) is "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis.

I think you're quite right that the point of the book is not really the pandemic; it's more about how humans create society and what they preserve, etc. But obviously now compared to 3 years ago, it resonates differently. There's one scene of a flashback to the pandemic where a character is in a hotel and sees the receptionist's eyes over their mask and knows that the man is willing him to stay back and that made me pause.

[mei]

It took me two months, but I finally finished my #5 for the year: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I found it in a local little free library so thought I might as well read it since it's so well known. I did enjoy it but it's a very different genre from what I usually read. And happy that it's finished so that I can move on to new books!

[lillielangtry]

I love Mantel, but it's an incredibly dense read, yes!

[Oweena]

Mar 25, 2022 0:02:12 GMT -5 sophie said:

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Oweena… you were right… an excellent book. It’s an interesting hybrid of a book, between history and poetry and literature, telling the story of a family, a community and a people of that place. The main character, Ailey, is a product of all that and she carries the story through her development. Highly recommended.

Glad you felt the same as I did sophie.

[Oweena]

We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange

Quick review: Irish-American family and their dysfunctions.

Longer review: Everyone has their secrets (affairs, miscarriages, drinking problems, marriage on the rocks, etc.).
The more I got into it the more I felt like I was reading chick lit, which is definitely not my bag. All flawed people who claim to love each other but can't share even the basics of their feelings yet in the end all of it is resolved and true love triumphs and the family comes together. Blech, too tidy wrapping up of all the storylines for my taste.

[scrubb]

Trick, by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri). An older man, an artist, goes from his home in Milan back to Naples, where he grew up but left as soon as he could, to look after his 4 year old grandson for a few days while his parents are at a conference. They live in the apartment where the old guy grew up.

The story is told from the grandfather's point of view. He's cranky, and worried about a job he's supposed to be doing (illustrating a book by Henry James). The 4 year old is precocious and usually good, but can be a demanding, defiant little terror, too. The cranky old narrator spends the 4 days re-examining himself, his self-worth, how he defines himself, and feeling like a failure. He doesn't appear to feel much affection but is really vigilant about his grandson, and he does spend a ton of time playing with him even when he doesn't want to.

Calling him cranky is a bit condescending, really. He talks a lot about rage and anger, as he rails against his own character defects, and against aging.

I liked it, quite a bit, but didn't love it. Definitely worth reading, and quite short so it doesn't take long. The intro by Lahiri suggests it's best read alongside of the Henry James book that the character is illustrating - The Jolly Corner. I might look for it to see if it opens up more of what this book is saying/doing.

Interesting that Jhumpa Lahiri is doing Italian translation - she grew up in the US with an Indian mother (who according to what I read, wanted to raise her kids to be Indians, not Americans). I wonder when she learned Italian? The book talks about language a fair bit - he repeatedly talks about the coarse, street talk of Naples and how he distanced himself from it as part of his drive to get away from his roots.

[lillielangtry]

Scrubb, Lahiri wrote a book about her experience of learning Italian, it's called In Other Words. She completely immersed herself, moved to Italy, and originally wrote her novel Whereabouts in the language. She doesn't do things by halves!

[scrubb]

Interesting, lillie! In the introduction Lahiri talks about asking the author about a particular word choice and if it imparted the same sense as his word choice in Italian. I don't know how often translators are able to go back and forth with the author that way?

[lillielangtry]

Mar 29, 2022 23:46:51 GMT -5 scrubb said:

Interesting, lillie! In the introduction Lahiri talks about asking the author about a particular word choice and if it imparted the same sense as his word choice in Italian. I don't know how often translators are able to go back and forth with the author that way?

If they are living, and reasonable people, it's quite common I think and certainly improves the result. I see literary translators on Twitter discussing contact with their authors, although of course the amount of this does vary and it's different if they are, say, an English translator and their author does understand English. I once saw a comment from Ken Follett that he ignores his translators' questions since they take up too much time, but happily he's in the minority, as far as I can tell. For example the two translators of Nino Haratischvili's The Eighth Life had not, I seem to remember, been to Georgia - she wrote it in German and they're German translators. While of course they would research and read about the history of the country during their work, I bet they still had some questions about the details. If the publisher of the translation is very small, which is often the case, the translator may also be involved in promoting the book (and I bet the name Jhumpa Lahiri did your book no harm at all).

I also have contact with the authors of the texts I translate, since they are generally my colleagues (I'm an in-house translator). I generally do a first draft and then send them back their texts annotated with comments of anything I found unclear or need further explanation of, or I just call them, and then I finish off based on their answers. There's a wide variation of responses, I must say, with some people seemingly delighted to discuss their work with you and others acting like you are a nuisance, or stupid. It's also very common for translators to identify mistakes or inconsistencies in the text, even one that has been edited already, since we read so closely. Sometimes my authors make changes to my translations, which can be a tricky situation - there are a few whose English skills are truly excellent and they tend to ask the right questions, but the ones who overestimate their own skills and introduce errors into my work are very frustrating! But I digress...!

[sprite]

Mar 25, 2022 0:18:34 GMT -5 lillielangtry said:

Mar 24, 2022 21:36:31 GMT -5 lisamnz said:

I read ALLLLL the David Eddings when I was young. I wouldn't read them now. I also discovered Robin Hobb and couldn't go back.

I have been meaning to try Hobb for ages.

I really enjoyed Hobb.
It is the standard 'secret boy has powers we never dream of and goes through great journey to become saviour of his people...' but the other characters are themselves, not just props for him.

[sprite]

Mar 30, 2022 0:27:40 GMT -5 lillielangtry said:

I once saw a comment from Ken Follett that he ignores his translators' questions since they take up too much time, but happily he's in the minority, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, while Follett writes good stories, it ain't exactly high literature, so a good translator could only improve things...

[lillielangtry]

Ha! Yeah I thought of that, but the questions are not necessarily related to syntax - they might be things like "what is this childhood dessert you refer to on page 68?" or "what shade of blue is the robe in chapter 3 supposed to be?". I can't remember what tweet Follett was responding to, but it was something about an author being asked about a sexual innuendo by one of her transators - I mean those don't really crop up in my work but they have got to be tricky to translate!

[mei]

#6 The High House by Jessie Greenspan.

Moving, depressing, sad, well written. A story of three people living through climate disaster. Most other 'climate fiction' I've read brings in something hopeful, even if it's not always easily recognizable. But this book... not so much unfortunately so it can be a tough read.

[ozziegiraffe]

Mei, I don’t think I need to read fiction about climate disasters at the moment.