Tarzan, like Superman, has always existed. At least, that’s how it feels to me… there was never a time in my life when Tarzan didn’t already exist. But once upon a time, someone imagined him, and gave him life on paper. More than a hundred years later, he lives on, though his creator is long gone. It was a strange experience to read the original Tarzan story.
Category: books
I read a lot, yet I still buy books faster than I read them. There always have been and always will be books in my life.
Madame Bovary: A post about book covers
I have to say, I really admire the graphic designer who decided to put a blown-up image of a face on the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary. My other favorite cover is the one chosen for the Standard Ebooks ebook, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He apparently jotted down some philosophical thoughts in a diary as he was marching around on various military campaigns, and these fragmentary thoughts form part of the corpus of texts associated with stoicism, an ancient school of thought that encourages people to take life as it comes, good or bad.
The book is not coherent, and there’s a lot of repetition. It wasn’t written as a thoughtfully organized presentation designed to be consumed by others. And my understanding is that it’s not even complete. Bits of text are lost because the source is old and “corrupt”.
If you want to understand stoicism, I think it’s probably better to read some modern synthesis before or after reading old source texts. Still, I think it’s worth reading source texts like this one, because whoever writes the synthesis is going to put their own spin on whatever was “meant” by the original authors; but the same thing can be said for any English translation! I think it must be impossible to translate philosophy without making some biased assumptions about the author’s intended meaning. Maybe all we can really wrap our heads around is what people today construe stoicism to be. We just have to guess at what it used to be originally; and there may never have been a consensus among thinkers even then.
So anyway, what are some of the ideas to be found in the text?
Continue reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Selected works of Henry James
As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.
- 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
- 1880 – Washington Square
- 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
- 1886 – The Bostonians
- 1897 – What Maisie Knew
- 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
- 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
1903 – The Ambassadors1904 – The Golden Bowl
I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.
Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
My German colleague recommended this book and lent it to me. It is a semi-autobiographical account of when the 6th German Army was encircled by Soviets at Stalingrad in 1942 and then, due to freezing winter temperatures and lack of supplies as much as actual fighting, was defeated in 1943. The message is, of course, that the human costs of war are tragically high.
The book was interesting in several ways…
Continue reading Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
How to Write a Book Proposal (3rd edition) by Michael Larsen
This book isn’t about how to write a non-fiction book, but about how to write a proposal, the document that will get a publisher interested in selling it. As author, you have to have a very clear idea about the people who are going to read your book, how many of them there are, and how to get their attention. After all, if you don’t know who you’re writing for, and you can’t guarantee that at least couple thousand people will line up to buy it, why should a publisher be interested in investing resources in your project?
I read this book because I had a specific idea for a non-fiction book that I could write. Unfortunately I think the time to have published it was like the end of 2023, beginning of 2024, and it would also probably have required me to have a collection of followers eager for my opinions specifically on that topic. I think I may have missed the boat.
This is the 3rd edition of this title. I bought in a used bookstore in 2023. It was published in 2004, and says quaint things like, you might want to use a computer to draft your proposal, because word processor software can make it easy for you to move things around; or you can just use 3×5 notecards. It’s very likely the 5th edition is more informative for someone writing in 2026. There’s even an eTextbook.
Notes on writing and fantasy fiction
Below is an attempt to consolidate what I know and would like to share from my experience in and around publishing and my knowledge as a reader.
Here’s an outline of the post:
Writing advice
Literary fiction vs. commercial fiction
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
SPJG posts about writing advice books
SPJG posts about avoiding writing mistakes
Miscellaneous links
Recommended authors: children’s and YA fantasy
“Recent” (1980s onward)
“Classic” (1900 to 1980)
Publishing
Purpose
Audience
Context
Process via self-publishing
Process via traditional publishing
Writing communities
Singapore Writer’s Group
NaNoWriMo
Reddit
Conclusion
Celebrating 5 years of We Love Translations!
It was exactly five years ago that I launched the website We Love Translations.
I’ve learned a lot in that time about the work of translation, patterns in translation histories, the market for classic literature, the relative popularity of different works, and about running a website.
Continue reading Celebrating 5 years of We Love Translations!
Books I read in 2025
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.
What’s the best translation of Around the World in Eighty Days?
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?
