The best novel I read this year was probably Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore, though I also really enjoyed Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. I hadn’t read either of them before.
I achieved a major goal for the year: reading an English translation of the hugely long classic Chinese novel, Water Margin, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh.
See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2025.
Siqi and I didn’t travel as much this year as last year (that would be pretty hard to do, actually), but we did get to travel together both within China (Wuyi, Ningbo, and Shenzhen) and internationally (Madrid). Separately, I went to Harbin and Beijing for work and also went to a conference in San Diego and visited with family in San Diego and Atlanta.
In 2025, I watched 46 movies and 3 different tv shows.
I watched 9 movies on planes and Siqi and I watched 10 movies in theaters. The rest, we watched on DVD or online. Also, I watched a bunch of stuff by myself when I was sick.
See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.
I sometimes use the generative AI tool Perplexity when I’m working on We Love Translations. What do I use it for, you ask?
I have a Tumblr account called I Laughed At This Stuff. I created it as a place to reshare memes, because I didn’t want to post them here on SPJG or on my Facebook account, which have other purposes.
I posted some stuff there, but I now have a huge file of images saved from the internet (okay, mostly Facebook and Boredpanda, but Facebook and Boredpanda got at least half of them from Reddit and Tumblr) that I have always been intending to add, but never did. The farther behind I got in uploading, the less likely I was to start uploading again…
The Tumblr posts I want to create would consist of:
Given that, since sometime in 2018, I have accumulated over 12,000 images that I might want to post (I don’t actually want to post all of them, just the best ones), manual posting is increasingly impracticable.
That’s where Perplexity comes in. It’s an AI tool that I decided to subscribe to, even though I hate subscriptions. It turns out, it’s good at helping me use software to speed up manual tasks.
The AI tool Perplexity helps me in a variety of ways, especially with my work on my other website, We Love Translations. But look at happened when I asked it to help me make a collage of 10 of the covers of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days!!!
Continue reading What’s the best translation of Around the World in Eighty Days?
The colorful fantasy car racing scenes are magical, but they’re also emotional, because the underdog main character’s victory is a victory for Justice itself. Speed Racer demonstrates that integrity matters, that you can win by being honest (though not by being naive), that cheaters, in fact, never prosper in the long run. It’s not subtle. It’s not realistic. But it has an awesome kind of purity. There’s nothing quite like it.
It scrambles the timeline in the sequence at the beginning, which seems like genius to me now that I know who all the characters are and where the plot is going, having seen the movie several times. It probably didn’t make nearly as much sense the first time through.
See below for a detailed plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
BTW, this story perfectly fits the Save the Cat genre called “institutionalized,” in which the main character encounters a group or a system and has to join, escape, or destroy it.
Some scattered thoughts:
It was really weird seeing different actors for Superman/Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry White, and Clark’s parents, because I’ve been watching the 1990s Lois and Clark TV series. That show belongs to a completely different era. (I like the show better than this movie. No contest.)
You might think car racing films are all the same. The main character is a driver with a tragic backstory or an attitude problem (or both), and he needs to move on or grow up (or both). But, just like no two murder mysteries are really the same, the details make each car racing story different.
For example, what makes The Love Bug special is that the eponymous Volkswagen beetle is sentient and can drive by itself.
What makes Speed Racer special is that it’s about an honest underdog fighting a dishonest system.
What makes Death Race special is the stakes: prisoners enter car races to win their freedom—or die trying.
What makes F1: The Movie special is that the main character, driver Sonny Hayes, “the best that never was,” doesn’t care about being in the spotlight. Eventually the story reveals why that is, and transforms this detachment from a weakness into a strength. Meanwhile, the audacious stuff he does is absolutely hilarious, albeit unrealistic.
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
There are eight complete translations of Gargantua and Pantagruel, plus one of just the first two parts.
For lots of details on all nine translations, please visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English:
» What’s the best translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel?
There are three modern translations in print, plus various updated versions of the original English translation from 1694, by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux.
Urquhart’s parts of the translation are, like a lot of old, initial translations into English, not very exact. But maybe they don’t have to be; maybe energy, enthusiasm, and humor are more important in some sense, especially for a work like this one. Urquhart’s might not be the best translation, but it’s been around for hundreds of years; it’s a classic in its own right.
See below for a timeline and quotes describing some of the many various editions of the early translation efforts of Urquhart, and Motteux, who finished what Urquhart began.
Continue reading What’s the best translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel?
