Just zoomed through How to get filthy rich in Rising Asia which is by the same author as the Reluctant Fundamentalist. Like that book its quite short and a good afternoon's reading.

I just finished Shift and now I'm on to Dust. I really liked the way he structured the beginning of Shift with all the different narrators from the sections from different times contrasting with each other. It made it more interesting that just a straight linear narrative, I think. More of a puzzle to piece together that way. I read that Ridley Scott bought the movie rights and I think that Wool would make a great movie as written, but Shift would be really tricky to bring to film.

She was the original translator, but apparently just cuts chunks of what she can't understand out of the translation. P & V are widely regarded as the best but at the same time have had a ton of publicity/marketing on their translations. When I went to read C and P I had a look on amazon and theirs seemed very broken/difficult to relate to for the most part, whereas McDuff read the most smoothly to me. Each to his own I guess

All the kings men. Just finished HOC season 2 and wanted to pick up something political. Great novel, great characters, ending was not my favorite but oh well

Finished one translation of Hunger, awaiting the arrival of a second.

Started Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Has anyone read The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil?

If so, what did you think of it?

The early stuff surfer detective was fun to read, really enjoyed it. The Power of the Dog was an absolutely great book.

Started Hunger by Knut Hamsun as translated by Robert Bly (a short time ago, I read a different translation).

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown...about the US Crew team that went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Very very good read in the vein of Unbroken

Started reading Tales from Tennessee Lawyers by William Lynwood Montell.

ya those were my 2 favs.
you should def check out mark haskell smith.

start with baked.

Reading Churchill's 6-volume history of WW2. Just started book 2. Will probably stop and take a break long before the end. The first one was very interesting as the build-up to 1939/1940.

I don't know anything about these translations but may have an observation that is at least relevant to the Pevear and Volokhonsky trans. When I decided to read War & Peace three years ago, I started out in the Maude translation (using an old Norton Critical Edition), then about a third of the way through I switched to the newer translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky because I saw it strongly recommended by a reviewer of their new translation of Dr. Zhivago. I read it in that edition for a while, encountered an awkward passage, and switched back to the Maude. I did that a couple of times, feeling that each translation had its strengths—but I finally settled on the Maude version, which felt more lively in its syntax and style.

Here's an example of the differences in their approaches to the translation of a passage: “Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul” (Maude). “The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man.” (P&V).

(But P&V had better footnotes).

P+V have come under fire recently: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/ar...an-literature/.

sadly the link is only to an abstract, but if anyone wants the full text shoot me a pm.

Love the punning title: "The Pevearsion of Russian Literature"

Just finished a book called Watching Swifts by RJ Askew which I think was only ever an e-book Kindle edition, and was published in 2011, and I honestly dont have the foggiest idea how I ever came to have it or decide to read it.

And man is it a weird book, at least for me. It reminded me most of Italo Calvino, it has a little more structure than his writing, but it is essentially poetry masquerading as prose, is definitely romantic and sad, imagery is great.

Currently reading Nabokov's Lolita. About 1/3 through it, absolutely fantastic so far.

"Love is a verb" by G. Chapman - Im not religious so it kinda bothered me how religion got stuffed down my throat. Otherwise the stories are short and sweet. Overall a nice soft reading.

17 years on my bookshelf - Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence is finally conquered.

If you liked the story of the build up to 1939/1940, read "Munich 1938" by David Faber. Came out in 2010. Great coverage on all fronts. Just rips Chamberlain for trying to appease Hilter at every turn, and Hitler laughingly asks for more and more so that anything he asks for but get denied he could start the war.

Great read

Rage by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

9/10

This is a fierce book. I can understand completely why King decided he didn’t want it in print any more…the reality that’s happened that echoes this book is too soon, it makes sense. But it’s too good a book to be lost, and I can see it being dissected and analysed in a hundred years’ time.

The thing about this book, is that it confirms to what the very best King does…it rings absolutely pure and true of authenticity. King has a power to convey in words the feeling and mood that feels completely genuine, even when you know that, say, a high-school girl or boy would clearly never, in a million years, say some of the things King puts in their mouths.

Yet King’s writing transcends the need for authentic dialogue by replacing it with authentic mood and the essence of a situation. When he talks about specific things, he has an ability to plug into the mainline of human experience.

King, at his best, is truth. This book, while it’s become a precognitive echo of how things have turned out, conveys something of the horrible, complex truth of certain states of mind.

It's a shame that to some people 'King' equates to 'hack'. To me, he equates to 'truthsayer', and the truth is there, no matter how fantastic the material.

I knew nothing of the controversy until you posted this and so went looking. From the Wikipedia account.
It certainly brings up the question of the dangerousness of art (or videogames, I guess) ...

yup cuz had they just not read/seen anything violent they would've been upstanding members of society.
totally normal kids till they read that damn book.
they were prolly listening to Manson too.

Reading The Sound and the Fury, not liking this at all.

Started upon A Clockwork Orange - what the hell needing a translator to get past the slang...