December/End of 2010

[sweet_sparrow]

Hi, all! I hope everyone's been having a good month and that those who celebrate anything this month have had a wonderful time with their respective feasts too! I also hope I'm not offending one with the phrasing here. Please let me know how to do it better?

I know it's not quite the end of December yet, but I won't be getting any more books finished before the end of the year. (At least I'm pretty sure of this. Any reading in these coming few days that I aim to do is The Tale of Genji and seeing how I'm not even half-way through that and getting this far took me almost the entire year... No way I'll finish before the end of 2010.)

What've you been reading in December? Have you had time to read? What have your favourites of the month or year been? (I was actually considering making another post for the best-of-2010 sometime in early January. Thoughts?) Do you think you'll finish another novel before 2011 and do you have any plans for next year's reading?

I'm still at least knee-deep in finishing my essays for university, but I got a surprising amount of reading done. Nineteen books or thereabouts! I've only managed to review six of them, though. I've also abandoned more books this single month than I've managed to do in the entire year, I think.

My favourite of December was After by Amy Efaw. It hit just the right note for me and I thought it was incredibly powerful. My biggest disappointment was A Concise Chinese-English Dictonary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. I just didn't get along with the characters at all, so the story fell apart.

- Highway Robbery by Kate Thompson
– War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
– Beastly by Alex Flinn
– Bang, Bang, You’re Dead! by Narinder Dhami
- The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson (dnf)
- Another Faust by Daniel Nayeri & Dina Nayeri (dnf)
- Aurelia by Anne Osterlund (dnf)
- Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs (dnf)
- The Description of Wales by Geraldus Camenbrensis
- Fairest by Gail Carson Levine (dnf)
- Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick (dnf)
- Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki
- The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
- They Called it Passchendaele by Lyn MacDonald
- Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip (reread)
- The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (reread)
- An Earthly Knight by Janet McNaughton (reread)
- Dark Lord Seeks Friendship, Maybe More by Elisa Viperas (dnf)
- Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

For 2011, I've made a stack (well, two) of books that I'd like to try and get read. We'll see how it goes. I'll probably get distracted, but the stack is there at any rate.

Lastly, is anyone interested in end-of-year book polls? I used to post them yearly on LJ when I could make polls there and had a blast with them. For those unfamiliar with the idea: you make a ticky box poll of all the books you've read in the year and see how many people you've never met have read the same books (at some point in their life or that year, but the former seems more popular). It's like a big, interactive meme basically. (Mine for this year is here if you'd like to see how the poll can work. Apologies for the mini-plug, but I've no idea how to give an example without it.^-^; ) If people are interested, we could perhaps either all share links to our polls or make a post that collects them all in the comments or some such?

Hope everyone is well and having a great time! Soon another year'll be over. O_O Where did it go?!

Comments

[sweet_sparrow]

Might be an idea. ^-^ My issue is the writing style, though. I don't really get on with the style of older literature, though I haven't yet figured out quite why. (Also, it's massive, so I can't carry it around with me at all.)

*low whistle* I wonder if they've gone through many changes from that idea to the books they are. I'd pegged them squarely in children's literature.

I'm glad. ^-^

[holyschist]

Well, Heian literature is really difficult, and Genji is extra-difficult when compared to, say, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. And if you're reading an older translation from when it was fashionable to make translations pseudo-archaic? It's like the difference between Cleaves' pseudo-archaic translation of Secret History of the Mongols and Onon's readable translation or de Rachewiltz's scholarly-but-straightforward translation. But I'm expecting to find Genji slow even with a newer translation.

I wonder if they've gone through many changes from that idea to the books they are.

She's talked about it some; in the original, it was made clear that Roger and Thom were having sex (I have a lot of Thoughts about Thom's aboutface from The Most Paranoid About Roger to raising him from the dead because Delia made fun of him...earlier Thom wouldn't have cared what Delia, or anyone else, thought. Basically, I think Roger managed to get some kind of hold over him during ITHOTG, and it would make sense if sex gave him that opportunity. On the other hand, I find it really problematic that not only is Roger apparently a bisexual villain, but he's a bisexual villain she based on an ex-boyfriend). I think Jon and Alanna were originally supposed to stay together.

Pierce is good at a lot of things, but antagonists with human motivations (rather than McEvil villains) is not really one of them; ditto realistic political complexity; ditto making the stakes high because the protagonists could--and do--lose things and people that are important to them. I don't want to say YA audiences aren't demanding, because they are, but they're demanding of different things than adult audiences, and I'm not sure Pierce could write well for an adult audience.

[holyschist]

Word of God on the original SOTL: http://tpwords.wordpress.com/2007/08/26/roger-thom-and-alanna-in-the-original-sotl/

Tim had most of it right about the original (which even he never read!): Thom was gay, Roger bi (he slept with Delia–still did, as far as I know–and made a pass at “Alan,” who beat feet), and their relation####p actually began when Thom first came to court. Honestly, do you think knowing his twin disliked Roger would stop Thom? He always did love to swim against the current, and whoever he was bedding wouldn’t influence his feelings for Alanna in the least. And Roger thought he was using Thom. In the revisions, of course, he *did* use Thom, and if they weren’t sleeping together in LIONESS RAMPANT, I think they might have gone that way if Roger hadn’t been nuts at that point.

You can thank my high school/1979 boyfriend for the idea that Alanna kills Roger once and then he cracks up in the tomb and comes back, by the way.

[sweet_sparrow]

I haven't read too much classical literature (that isn't English - being English student and all), to be honest. Genji'll be my second Japanese classic. I think I just don't get on with translations well even when they're decent-to-good.

I can see why that would be more suitable to an adult audience... (I think. My idea of age-range can be a bit wonky.) *fascinated by all these things she never knew about the books* I wish I could remember the books better so I was a better person to talk to about them, though!

[holyschist]

Even "translating" Genji into modern Japanese is...challenging. There's such a vast gulf between Heian Japanese and modern Japanese, much less Heian Japanese and modern English that the translator is faced with a lot of hard choices, all of them with a price. It's like the usual problems with translations on steroids.

[sweet_sparrow]

It sounds horridly complicated. O_O That said, I'm actually pretty pleased with the translation I've got for all my complaining. (It's by Edward Seidensticker.) I have absolutely no judging credentials, of course, but it strikes me as being a pretty conscientious attempt. There's loads of footnotes to explain puns that got lost, identify poetry fragments, short cultural notes of importance to the passage and notes on where passages are unclear and such anyhow. I don't think it's the most scholarly of editions (if only because it's already over a thousand pages), but even so.

[holyschist]

I'm probably going to go for the Tyler Genji when I tackle it, since his version preserves the oblique references instead of using names. I'm not holding my breath that I will have the literary fortitude to read both.

[sweet_sparrow]

I think mine doesn't do that, but I'm not sure. There's a lot of 'The lady of [such and so]' going on anyhow.

You mean tackle both translations or both the translation and the original? I'm guessing the former, but...

[holyschist]

Both translations! My Japanese reading level was never past first grade or so (if that), and these days is nonexistant--and Genji is difficult for lots of native speakers.