September Reading!

[sweet_sparrow]

Hey all! I'm feeling a wee bit swamped in stuff. (And the final days of September/beginning days of October are looking set to be an emotional rollercoaster.)

So I thought I'd inquire into everyone's reading a little earlier. (Obviously, feel free to wait to answer or not answer at all.) What have you been reading in September?

I'd expected to get loads of reading done with classes started up again, but I feel sorely disappointed. That may be because September has been an abysmal month for reviewing, though.

Books I've Read:

Ancient Irish Tales by Cross & Slover (Sorry, lazy. Their names are long.)
Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
Complete Short Fiction by/of Oscar Wilde
Far from You by Lisa Schroeder
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (dnf)
Haiku by Patricia Donegan
Mella and the N'anga by Gail Nyoka
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger (I've been trying to say something about this book since I finished it.)
The Sound of Water by various poets
Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
Writing with Power by Peter Elbow

It's actually not much different from other months. That's about 12 books. My favourite was definitely Mella and the N'anga. I may finish Cybele's Secret before the month is out, but we'll see... I've also been reading Casting the Runes and Other Stories. Soon I shall be all out of coursework mandatory reading... Well, except for LotR, but I know I like LotR and cannot call it 'mandatory'.

What's your reading been like?

Comments

[sweet_sparrow]

Awww... I'm in the minority of people who actually likes phonetic spelling, but it can be murder to read and I like studying varying ways in which dialect and accent gets done. ^-^

[holyschist]

You might try Nalo Hopkinson; she writes SF, magic realism, historical fiction, all with a strong Caribbean setting. The book of hers I read (Midnight Robber, not the one I'd recommend for a first Hopkinson necessarily, since it's one giant trigger warning) was written in a combination of a hybrid Caribbean Creole, "standard" English, and mixtures, and it's in word choice and grammar more than spelling. Took a few chapters to get used to.

“But doux-doux”, Prince of Cemetery said, “Your granddaughter head full of spirits already; she ain't tell you? All kind of duppy and thing. When she close she eyes, she does see death. She belong to me. She is my daughter. You should 'fraid of she.”

Normally I am very wary of dialect, because it's often written poorly by outsiders to that dialect (I pretty much agree with this post on the importance of syntax and the pitfalls of 'phonetic' spelling). Hopkinson does dialect right, and it's integral to the story.

[sweet_sparrow]

THANK YOU! That sounds perfect. ^-^

(Dialect is so much more than spelling, indeed, but syntax is far harder to do right than phonetics, so people don't often bother. One of the reasons I'm really interested in the topic is that it's integral to one of the stories I'm working on. It's good fun, but it's also despairingly hard to get right.)

[holyschist]

The thing about Midnight Robber -- or any of Hopkinson's work -- is that it's natural language for her. The Creole in MR is mostly Trinidadian, according to interviews, with some Jamaican. I'm not entirely convinced someone who didn't grow up with Caribbean English and Creole could use it so effectively and naturally.

I think most of the really bad uses of dialect come from authors who don't really know much about dialects in general, much less the one they're trying to use. I can't imagine, even with tons of research, trying to write something as far from my own experience as MR.

(Use of language aside, Hopkinson is an absolutely amazing writer. Her work often deals with heavy and difficult themes, though, so you might want to read some reviews to decide where to start.)

[sweet_sparrow]

No one but a native speaker and/or a really, really linguistically talented person can, I think. Most authors, if they want to write dialect they don't speak, would be better off asking someone who speaks it for help.

For my project I get to figure out all the rules behind syntactic choices. Or at least figure them out closely enough that I can use them consistently. (UG may hate it. I don't know enough about it to be sure.)

(This sounds fine. The little snippet there has me intrigued. ^-^ It'll just take me ages to get to any of them.)