Because it’s 448 pages, maybe you think The Taken is a long book. Didn’t feel that way! It was unputdownable. This, from someone who doesn’t usually read murder mysteries.
This is Alice’s second book about DI Erica Martin. The first was Bitter Fruits.
Set in Durham, the books both feel very British in terms of punctuation, spelling, phrasing, and brand and place names… plus there’s lots of tea and biscuits. Makes me want to go drink a cuppa.
Genre: fiction (mystery / thriller)
Date started / date finished: 07-Dec-16 to 09-Dec-16
Length: 448 pages
ISBN: 9780718181109 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2016
Amazon link: The Taken
Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym.
Since most things are not transparent, we don’t use ‘opaque’ nearly as much as ‘transparent’ to describe things; the opaqueness of material objects is assumed by default.
However, ‘opaque’ beautifully describes ideas that are somehow inscrutable—inaccessible because perfectly obstructed by some stark, looming, indifferent, featureless impediment.
If transparency is commonplace and opaqueness is abstract, translucence, the middle child, is enigmatic, shimmering and mystical. It evokes iridescent dragonfly wings and Tiffany windows.
For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something like ‘betting one’s life’ on something.
Why did I think that? Phonology interfering with morphology.
Once the two words ‘pains’ and ‘taking’ lost the hyphen between them, there was a tendency for the second syllable to absorb the consonant at the end of the first, according to the phonological principle that we automatically maximize syllable onsets. That is, if it’s possible to lump a group of consonants together, we do it at the beginnings of syllables, not at the ends.
In short, because English allows the consonant cluster ‘st’, the morpheme ‘stake’ naturally obtrudes and creates confusion as to the word’s actual underlying components.
In truth, the ‘s’ is ambisyllabic—has the quality of ambisyllabicity. It belongs to two syllables at once, even though it started out belonging to a single morpheme.
An Introduction to Fiction reminded me why I felt put off by a lot of the literature I studied in high school English classes: modern literary criticism is oppressive in its political correctness, and the stories themselves are almost uniformly depressing.
On page 274 of this textbook, Ursula K. Le Guin, in her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, provides a possible explanation for literary gloom: “[W]e have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”
Tolstoy is one of those sophisticates. You will surely recall this famous line (from Anna Karenina): “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
We believe this, do we not? Genre fiction stories in which the characters catch the killer, go on adventures and return triumphant, defeat cosmic evil with the help of magic swords and stalwart companions, and/or fall in reciprocated love with their true soul mates are derided as shallow and commercial, no matter how inventive, entertaining, or uplifting we find them. We are apparently supposed to prefer deep explorations of the multitudes of ways people’s lives can and do go wrong. Blech.
In short, the textbook was mostly a downer. Nevertheless, some of the analysis of the components of fiction was interesting, and I did like a few of the stories. See below for more on what I liked and what I learned, as well as when and why I read the book.
I’ve come a long way since the days when I consistently spelled the word ‘British’ with two t’s, which is phonetically intuitive but correct nowhere on the planet. Nevertheless, there were still some new factoids in What You Need to Know about British and American English.
When and Why I Read It
I write English lessons for students in Singapore; it’s important to know the British English standard here.
Genre: nonfiction (language / English)
Date started / date finished: 07-Nov-16 to XX-Nov-16
Length: 216 pages
ISBN: 9814107832 (paperback)
Originally published in: ????
Amazon link: ???
The book was published by some Singapore company called Learners Publishing, which was apparently acquired by Scholastic.
Huh. Well. I liked Dark Matter (Season 2) much better than Dark Matter (Season 1). The dialog and plotting improved, and now—ta-da!—I care about the characters as a cohesive group.
There were a variety of meta-improvements as well: they got rid of the cheap, irrelevant title sequence that calls to mind Transformers, and they gave the episodes titles. Yay!
And, incidentally, I learned that the ship is called The Raza as in “tabula rasa”, meaning “blank slate”. The premise of the show is that the crew are all given a new start, a blank slate. I’m glad there’s a reason for the weird (deliberately alien-sounding) name of the ship, but I wish the ship had been given a meaningful name by the characters, not the writers of the show. In the universe of the show, the ship was called The Raza before it was crewed by people with their memories wiped, which makes no sense. In contrast, Mal names his second-hand Firefly spaceship Serenity after fighting on the side of the Independents, the losing side, in the bloody Battle of Serenity Valley…
There was this awesome image of the crew that was rectangly-shaped in the more useful direction than the DVD cover I’ve used, but I think maybe that image is fanart and I didn’t want to just lift it from Google images, because that’s a bad impulse to indulge. Sometimes even a financially dangerous one!
While I returned from Vietnam to Singapore, my husband went on to Bangkok. After seeing how pleased I was to find The Little Prince in Vietnamese, he wanted to surprise me by bringing back The Little Prince in Thai. I spoiled his plan by asking him to look for it when I checked in with him online during his stay. Then he felt it was incumbent upon him to come up with an even surprisier surprise.
The result: The Little Prince deluxe pop-up book! Since I had The Little Prince in English and six other languages (not counting Thai), clearly I needed to have the book in 3D.
It’s pretty spectacular! I was indeed surprised.
The text in the pop-up book is the translation by Richard Howard.
After a bit of Googling, I realized: nine versions is just a drop in the bucket. There are more than 250!
For comparison, the sensationally successful Harry Potter books are “only” available in about 70 different languages (someone’s got them all); I have copies in about 30 of them.
What about the The Bible? It’s available in over a thousand languages.
Given how many versions of The Little Prince there are, owning just one version for English (well, two, counting the pop-up) is paltry. I should figure out which English translation I have, because apparently there are several, and some are more well-regarded than others—or perhaps it would be fairer to say the different versions well-regarded for different reasons.
More on the subtleties and pitfalls of translation and publication across language barriers, with specific reference to The Little Prince, at the link below.
I watched Clueless to be able to compare it with Jane Austen’s Emma, on which it was based. I’d never seen it and had no 90s nostalgia for it at all. It was a decent retelling for its length, but I wasn’t amazed.
There are advantages and disadvantages to reading annotated editions of classics. The advantage is that you get a lot of added historical context (details about clothing, buildings, transportation, manners, etc.) and literary criticism (similarities and differences between related works). The disadvantage is that you aren’t left to see the story and characters reveal themselves to you, or to draw your own conclusions about the author’s themes.
On balance, for Emma, I’d say it’s worth reading an annotated edition if you already know the plot. Knowing the plot made the book a bit—only a bit!—tedious to read, since I spent the entire novel waiting for Emma to discover a bunch of things I already knew… she is, like Cher in the movie Clueless (1995), well meaning but oblivious. Thus, there’s a tinge of “unreliable narrator” syndrome, but in fact the narrator is much wiser than the protagonist, so I’d say the novel doesn’t cause disastrous levels of reader impatience. This is Jane Austen we’re talking about! Her stories are entertaining practically by definition. What more can I say?
Genre: fiction (literature)
Date started / date finished: 31-Oct-16 to 27-Nov-16
Length: 863 pages
ISBN: 9780307390776 (paperback)
Originally published in: 1815
Amazon link: The Annotated Emma
