Tag: book log

I read a lot, and I keep a log. Here’s this year’s log and the complete log (which goes back to the beginning of 1999). Read the posts in this section to find out what I thought about these books.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles E. Wilbour

Les Miserables is reeeeeallllly long. I remember enjoying The Hunchback of Notre Dame, including the philosophical passages (“this will kill that,” i.e., the printing press will kill architecture), and in general I believe in reading unabridged books, but I understand why people might be drawn to an abridged version of Les Miserables. The pacing is stop-and-go, since Hugo frequently alternates between telling his story and telling history.

» Learn about the translations of Les Miserables

See below for some thoughts on the novel in general and the Wordsworth Classics edition of the Charles E. Wilbour translation in particular.

Continue reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles E. Wilbour

When and Why I Read Les Miserables (Vol 1)

I might have read it in high school, but if I did it was probably an abridged version. Time to attack the real thing! My copy is the Wordsworth Classics two-volume edition, translated by Charles E. Wilbour.

Genre: French literature
Date started / date finished: 27-Sep-21 to 19-Oct-21
Length: 494 pages
ISBN: 9781853260858
Originally published in: 1862/1994/2002
Amazon link: Les Miserables (Vol 1)

The Plague by Albert Camus, translated by Robin Buss

Many thousands of copies of this book have sold because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It makes sense to me that people are staying home and reading more, but I don’t quite understand why people are devouring novels about epidemics. Personally, I’d rather read to take my mind off the virus—something with dragons, perhaps. Reading epidemic fiction seems like a short, straight path to hypochondria. But maybe people are reading for reassurance.

What kind of book is The Plague? Hopeful? Relatable? Witty? Philosophical?

Continue reading The Plague by Albert Camus, translated by Robin Buss

When and Why I Read The Plague

Rachel of the Hungry Hundred Book Club chose this book for April 2021.

Genre: Modern French Literature
Date started / date finished: 19-Apr-21 to 26-Apr-21
Length: 272 pages
ISBN: 9780141185132
Originally published in: 1947/2002
Amazon link: The Plague

The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend Steven Pinker’s style-guide / usage manual, but it does have a couple of important things to say about written English.

Respect Your Tools
Language has its own internal logic. Good writing respects that logic. Writers should study grammar explicitly rather than rely on intuition in order to communicate clearly, show respect for their readers, and inspire confidence in their work. Good writers are those who read widely enough to absorb good practices from a longstanding written English tradition. They know the rules but also when to break them.

Break the Rules
The Ancient and Venerable English Teachers’ Code—beloved by Grammar Nazis, Prescriptivists, Fussbudgets and Curmudgeons—is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules, and some of the guidelines will lead you astray because (a) Some were written by people who didn’t understand English and (b) Thanks to natural and inevitable language change, the English we use today differs from the English of the past.

See below for more details about what I liked and what I didn’t like about Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style.

Continue reading The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

When and Why I Read The Sense of Style

I bought this a while back. Finally getting around to it.

Genre: writing
Date started / date finished: 22-Nov-20 to 01-Dec-20
Length: 368 pages
ISBN: 9780143127796
Originally published in: 2015
Amazon link: The Sense of Style

The Golden Chersonese by Isabella Bird

I wrote a post about The Golden Chersonese for Asian Books Blog.

A paperback edition of The Golden Chersonese was published in 2010 by Monsoon Books. The text is also available free from Gutenberg.org along with various other works by Isabella Bird.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/393

Bird traveled around the world in the late 1800s, largely unaccompanied. This volume of hers, one among a dozen published works, contains letters describing her experiences in the Malaysian Peninsula, where she traveled after stopping briefly in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.

Reading the letters without much in the way of added historical context left me feeling somewhat adrift, but the book was worth reading for the strange feeling it gave me of traveling not just in space but in time.

See below for some notes on what makes this travelogue very much of its time and not ours.

Continue reading The Golden Chersonese by Isabella Bird

When and Why I Read The Golden Chersonese

"A nineteenth-century Englishwoman's travels in Singapore and the Malay peninsula."

Genre: travel / Southeast Asia
Date started / date finished: 09-Nov-20 to 23-Nov-20
Length: 352 pages
ISBN: 9789810844844
Originally published in: 1883/2010
Amazon link: The Golden Chersonese

Singapore Siu Dai 1 and 2 by Felix Cheong, illustrated by PMan

Both servings of Singapore Siu Dai offer comics and brief comedy sketches that exaggerate the ironies of life on the island and lovingly poke fun at aptly named fictional characters meant to caricature the island’s people.

Though I can’t help but feel that the target audience consists of people who are familiar with acronyms like MOE (Ministry of Education) and the ubiquitous Singlish speech particle ‘lah’, there’s a glossary that explains these and other potentially opaque terms, noting whether they are Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin or Singlish.

Luckily for foreign readers, one of the entries explains the phrase ‘siu dai’, which means ‘less sugar’, the idea being that these sketches depict Singapore, warts and all.

There’s a third Siu Dai book that I haven’t yet managed to snag.

When I Read Singapore Siu Dai 1 and 2

Singapore Siu Dai 1
Date started / date finished: 17-Nov-20 to 17-Nov-20
Length: 129 pages
ISBN: 9789810788582
Originally published in: 2014

Singapore Siu Dai 2
Date started / date finished: 19-Nov-20 to 23-Nov-20
Length: 139 pages
ISBN: 9789810925499
Originally published in: 2014

The Complete Eh, Goondu! by Sylvia Toh Paik Choo

This is the grandaddy of all the other books on Singlish. This paperback, containing reprints of two originally separate volumes from 1982 and 1986, contains a wealth of acronyms, onomatopoeias, words, phrases, and chants in or derived from English, Malay, and the locally spoken Chinese dialects Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew.

Continue reading The Complete Eh, Goondu! by Sylvia Toh Paik Choo

When and Why I Read The Complete Eh, Goondu!

This is a list of Singlish words and phrases with explanations, grouped into chapters.

Genre: Reference (English, Singapore)
Date started / date finished: 26-Oct-20 to 19-Nov-20
Length: 221 pages
ISBN: 9789814328456
Originally published in: 2011
Amazon link: The Complete Eh, Goondu!

Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2 by Catherine Lim

Award-winning Singaporean author Catherine Lim has written many books, but this is the first one to find its way into my collection. I don’t think it’s typical; it’s a rather short novel based on a cruise she went on.

I’m not a fan of semi-fictionalized stories (like Roots) that chase two rabbits and catch neither. Memoir-type stories are interesting as accurate representations of unusual situations, whereas novels entertain by telling carefully constructed, dramatic stories. If you’re composing a memoir, you create drama by choosing what to include and what to omit, but you don’t invent things. If you’re writing a novel, you invent pretty much everything. If you switch back and forth from recording to creating, I never know whether you’re relating something that happened, or something you imagined. The result is a feeling of cognitive dissonance.

The genesis of Meet Me was, according to the author’s preface, accidental, and its publication reluctant. When Lim was on the Queen Elizabeth 2, she wanted to write satirically about the people she met. After penning her thoughts, however, she found that the ship had subverted her intentions and made her instead write unflatteringly about herself, at which point she thought maybe she wouldn’t actually publish anything about the cruise. Nevertheless, here we are. And there she is on the cover.

If you’re going to read a navel-gazing book about a female author’s mid-life crisis, read Eat, Pray, Love. There’s a reason Elizabeth Gilbert’s quest to find God or a man or whatever is one that hundreds of thousands of people have read about and/or watched. To the extent that Gilbert rewrote her own experiences by leaving out the messy or unsatisfying bits, her story became stronger as a story. When we read narrative non-fiction, we still look for narrative as well as truth.

When and Why I Read Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2

First book I've read by this well-known Singapore novelist.

Genre: fiction
Date started / date finished: 10-Oct-20 to 11-Oct-20
Length: 210 pages
ISBN: 9971643324
Originally published in: 1993
Amazon link: Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2

The Maze Runner Trilogy by James Dashner

I tend to like teen novels about dystopias. I do NOT, however, like zombies. I’m really glad I checked out these books from the library rather than buying them (as I was considering doing), because, as it turns out, they’re about—guess what?—zombies.

The book series, kind of like a zombie, refuses to die. It keeps getting more and more volumes tacked on, so there must be people who enjoy this sort of thing. I decided reading the original trilogy was quite sufficient. Oh, and I’ve seen the first movie twice now. The original book trilogy, consisting of The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials, and The Death Cure contains a complete story arc.

When and Why I Read The Maze Runner

I was underwhelmed by the movie of The Maze Runner, but often novels are better than their movies. Still, I decided to borrow this one from the library before buying, like, the whole set of books, in case I don't actually like them.

Genre: young adult / fantasy
Date started / date finished: 20-Sep-20 to 22-Sep-20
Length: 375 pages
ISBN: 9780375896773
Originally published in: 2009
Amazon link: The Maze Runner

Don Quixote by Cervantes (translated by P.A. Motteux)

The language in this translation helped transport me to another time and place where I was entertained by all manner of well-meaning but misguided behavior. What made the silliness tolerable was that the narration doesn’t force the reader into the character’s perspective. I could sit back comfortably and laugh because the character is always over there, on a stage, so to speak. I like omniscient narrators; I don’t like unreliable narrators. Here’s what our omniscient narrator says about Don Quixote (page 14):
[H]e rode so softly, and the sun’s heat increased so fast, and was so violent, that it would have been sufficient to have melted his brains had he had any left.
The elevated language and long, flowing sentence, of which this is just the very tail end, left me unprepared for the apt insult lurking all the way at the end. When I read this joke, I knew I was going to enjoy the novel. I was utterly floored in the second half of the book to learn that the characters are aware that they have been written about. The idea of breaking the fourth wall is older than I would ever have guessed! The narrator goes to great lengths to insist that he is now narrating the ONE TRUE SEQUEL, never mind those bumbling copycats who had tried, between the publication of Part 1 and the publication of Part 2, to steal the author’s glory and book sales.

When and Why I Read Don Quixote

I was too tempted by the price! Bought it for 50% off SG$5.89. But according to the rules I've been trying to follow for a couple of years now, if I buy it, I can't just put it aside for another day. Last in, first out. Means I have to read it. So that's what I'm doing!

Genre: Classic Literature (Spain)
Date started / date finished: 05-Apr-20 to 18-May-20
Length: 768 pages
ISBN: 9781853260360
Originally published in: 1605/1615/1712/1993/2000/2008
Amazon link: Don Quixote

Which translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment should I read?

I read the Garnett translation. I was happy with it, to the extent that “happy” is the right word to describe the experience of reading what I found to be a depressing novel.

What is the BEST translation of Crime and Punishment?

I did some research on the available translations, which I have presented in a long, illustrated post on my other website, We Love Translations, called “Which translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment should I read?”

That post compares in-print translations. I count seven in-print translations of thirteen total, listed here:

# Translator Year Publisher
Frederick Whishaw 1885
1. Constance Garnett 1914 Heinemann
David Magarshack 1951 Penguin
Princess Alexandra Kropotkin 1953
Jessie Coulson 1953 Norton
Michael Scammell 1963 Washington Square
2. Sidney Monas 1968 Signet
Julius Katzer 1985 Raduga
3. David McDuff 1991 Viking
4. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky 1992 Knopf
5. Oliver Ready 2014 Penguin
6. Nicolas Pasternak Slater 2017 Oxford
7. Michael R. Katz 2018 Liveright (Norton)

I recommend the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment.

Buy Garnett / Wordsworth paperback from Amazon

Buy Garnett / Wordsworth ebook from Amazon

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