August 2010

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

1. Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King.  This is Mary Russell Mystery number eight, which I reread one sleepless night to prepare for book nine.
2. The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King (45%).  After a bit of confusion with a footnote, I learned that Laurie R. King wrote a crossover novel between her two series, so I read that part that was relevant, though it turned out not to be.
3. The Language of Bees by Laurie R King.  And this is Mary Russell Mystery number nine…which ended with a cliffhanger, the first novel in the series to do that so far.  I am angry and disappointed.  I am off Mary Russel for the moment.
4. The Darling by Russell Banks.  I read this book in preparation for my McCarthy/Banks class.  It reminded me of “How to Write about Africa.”
5. Kraken by China Miéville.  There’s a giant squid.  And people worship it.  And the world is ending.  How can you get more awesome than that?
6. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.  A first in a fantasy trilogy that I bought on a whim.  I enjoyed it enough to be anticipating the second one.
7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  In the words of a colleague, “Either the best Father’s Day present or the worst Father’s Day present.”
8. Chalice by Robin McKinley.  A light, fun young adult fantasy novel.  It isn’t The Hero and the Crown, but what is?
9. Gil’s All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez (30%).  Unfortunately, this book was not nearly as funny as I expected.
10. Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.  But this one was exactly as funny as I remembered.
11. A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner.  Whenever I don’t know what to read, I usually reach for the tried-and-true.
12. Blackout by Connie Willis.  This is the first half of the Blackout/All Clear novel.  I would very much like to know what happens next, please.
13. Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet.  A thirteen-year-old girl growing up in Cairo with her father deals with abandonment by her mother and her crush on a perfumer.  It was not bad.
14. The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy.  Now that class has actually started, you’ll be seeing a lot more McCarthy on my list.  This was his first novel.  It’s not my new favorite or anything.

Best book of the month:  Kraken.

Worst book of the month:  The Art of Detection.

Book that didn’t even make the list:  Tam Lin by Pamela Dean.  I opened it, I closed it, what else can I say?

Most anticipated book of next month:  Best American Short Stories 2010!

Most anticipated book of the month after that:  All Clear.

August 28

1.  Tomato Soup.  Today I went to World Market and bought some organic tomato soup…in a box.  I know, that’s what I thought too: but soup is supposed to come from a can!  However, I hope I am open-minded enough to accept new ideas and concepts.  Soup from a box.  I’ll keep you posted on how it tastes.

2.  Prime Directive.  I have been watching, for the first time ever, in the order they were aired, the episodes of Season 1 of The Next Generation.  And I know that everyone who knows me already knows this, but some things just bear repeating.  Oh how I love Star Trek.

3.  Homework.  I am also in the process of writing twenty-odd discussion questions to kickstart class on Tuesday.  I am supposed to be leading discussion about The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy, and I feel, at this point at least, that I have every possible conversation topic covered.  My questions/prompts are already reaching toward the fourth (single-spaced) page, and I’ve only done justice to about half of them.  So finishing those up will be my tomorrow.

4.  Tam Lin.  Although I finished a draft of my conference paper about The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, I haven’t abandoned research yet, using the occasion as an excuse to investigate other young adult fantasy adaptations of the Scottish ballad “Tam Lin.”  I’ve since abandoned Tam Lin by Pamela Dean on the basis of too much dialogue and not enough rescuing mortals from fairies, and am about to begin reading Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, for which I have higher hopes.

5.  A Brief Survey of My Life.  Soup, Star Trek, reading for school, reading for fun.  Then thinking about thinking.  That sounds about right.

August 27

1.  Grad School Slogan.  You don’t have to like it, but you do have to read it.  I’m afraid that although I’ll be taking a class that focuses on two major authors, Cormac McCarthy and Russell Banks, I will be enjoying very little of the reading.  Of the eight McCarthy books we’ve been assigned, I’ve read three and liked none; of the five Banks books, I’ve read two and liked none.  Okay, to be honest, about one of them I was simply apathetic.  I’m still investigating why this is, but in the meantime: Oh well.  I’m sure to learn something despite myself.

2.  Teaching.  Incidentally, today was my first day to stand officially in the front half of the classroom.  The poor freshmen never knew what hit them, but whether this is a blessing or not remains still to be seen.

3.  Blackout.  Why, Connie Willis, did you write a thousand-page novel and publish it in two volumes?  And, more importantly, why does the second installment not come out until October 19?  I can’t even talk about whether I liked the book(s) or not because, and this is essential, I haven’t finished reading it–them–yet.

4.  P.S.  And on a side note, science fiction is not all robots and laser guns, thank you.  Most of my characters are psychologists or politicians or linguists or journalists.  You know, people who are interested in other people.  Because learning about people is what literature is all about.

August 25

How to Translate a Sentence:

Or, why German is really hard

Here is an exercise  sentence from Chapter Eight in the textbook I bought to help me learn to translate written German:

Das Zeughaus illustriert das Wesentliche des preußisch-berlinerischen Stils: einen Sinn für Realität findet man hier zusammen mit verschnörkelten Dekorationen.

Das Zeughaus, the gloss at the bottom of my textbook tells me, is a “military storehouse,” which is something that is culturally intrinsic to Berlin and isn’t a word I am likely to find in my dictionary.  Illustriert is the regular present tense of the infinitive “to illustrate,” so it probably means “illustrates,” though it could also mean “does illustrate” and “is illustrating.”  Das Wesentlich is a nominalization of the adjective “fundamental,” so it could mean “fundamental” as a noun, or “essense.”  Des preußisch-berlinerischen Stils is an adjective phrase meaning “of the Prussian-Berlin style,” which I didn’t even have to look up.  So the first part of the sentence was pretty straightforward, that is, I could translate it left-to-right.  “The military storehouse illlustrates the essence of the Prussian-Berlin style.”

Einen Sinn für Realität means literally “a sense for reality,” but of course in English we would say “a sense of reality.”  Findet man is a tricky part.  German has a pronoun meaning “one,” which in English sounds formal and awkward:  “one finds” isn’t natural, so the typical thing to do is convert the sentence to passive tense.  That means that the direct object, the sense of reality, becomes the subject instead of the direct object, i.e. “one finds a sense of reality” becomes “a sense of reality is found.”  Hier zusammen means “here” and “together.”  German puts descriptive clauses in almost the reverse order of English, although I would tend to stick the word “here” at the beginning of the sentence.  Mit verschnörkelten Dekorationen means “with ornate decorations,” and although the adjective was glossed, I would have had to look it up.  And German plurals are more likely to end in an N than an S, and the adjective also receives a declinsion, but which doesn’t appear in English.

All together, please.  “The military storehouse illustrates the essence of the Prussian-Berlin style: here a sense of reality is found together with ornate decorations.”

Am I right?  Here is the textbook’s translation of the sentence.

The “Zeughaus” illustrates the essential features of the Prussian-Berlin style: a feeling for reality can be found here together with ornate decorations.

Well, not quite.  They kept “Zeughaus” as it was, since it’s apparently the name of the building.  They also made my “essence” into “essential features.”  They kept the word “here” where it fell in the original sentence, even though I think a native speaker wouldn’t have said it that way, and they changed my plain “is found” into “can be found.”

Sigh.  Are four differences a lot?  I don’t know.  But it took at least ten minutes to get this far, so I’m going to call it good.

August 22

1.  Chess.  I’m on a losing streak, having lost eight out of ten games since May.  If you’ve ever dreamed of beating someone in chess, you could always challenge me, since my luck (or else my attention) appears to be elsewhere.

2.  Anastasia.  On the other hand, in a move of pure lovableness, Anastasia slept on my chest right under my chin last night for an hour and a half while I was reading.  She started out curled up in a ball and slowly unrolled until she was draped across my neck.  Now I understand why people wore furs, because the two pounds and eighteen inches of ferret made me really hot.

3.  God.  I woke up to my alarm this morning, intending to get up for church, but instead slept another hour and a half.  Sorry, sorry.  I’m glad God isn’t much into lightning bolts these days.

4.  Dreaming.  I did manage to have a really bizarre dream.  It was loosely set in a house where I used to live as a child, but the group of people with me–or rather, whom I was indefinably among–came from a book called The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which is a very strange book indeed.  One of the party had just been bitten? or poisoned? and someone else was asking him what he wanted on his gravestone.  He chose the epitaph from the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, which goes something like “Died saving his family from a destroyed sinking battleship.”  And then we all went down the hall and got on a train and then I woke up.

August 20

1.  Still Here.  But there’s nothing much going on.  I spent fifteen days reading five books, then four days reading four books.  Now I’m casting about for something indulgent to read before school.  I’m thinking about Blackout by Connie Willis, but am not sure whether I’ll be able to finish it in time, as it’s some 500 pages.

2.  School Stuff.  I went to campus today and got my parking sticker, which will enable me to park in a wholly different set of equally full parking lots.  Seriously, I think I’ll have to get to campus before 8:00 to snag a space less than a five-minute walk from my building, though that’s an improvement on how far I sometimes had to walk last semester.  I just want my university to raze the two largest parking lots and build a seven-story garage.  No really, they need to.

3.  Conference.  I’m also working on a conference paper for a conference in October, and find myself, as usual, to be too long-winded.  A conference paper should be able to be read in twenty minutes, give or take, and after doing some quick math (normal reading speed of 15o words/minute times 20 mins = 3,000 words; 3,000 words divided by approximately 250 words/page = 12 pages), I see that I’ll definitely go over.  It isn’t that my paper isn’t better after I’ve cut it by 10-15%; it’s just that the delete key can sometimes be quite painful.

4.  Iron.  I need to buy one.  So that I can do it to some of my clothes.  But it’s the one household chore I just can’t stand.  Sigh.

August 13

Literary Crushes

Day 10.  I’ll be posting one a day for the next ten days–a list of my top ten completely platonic and not in any way obsessive literary crushes.  Here follow my all-time favorite cerebral, brooding, and sometimes tragic heroes in my very favorite books about them.

Eugenides.  The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.  Although The Thief is the first book about Eugenides, the irrepressible Queen’s Thief of Eddis, I like him best in the second book, where he begins to suspect that the gods he worships have betrayed him to his enemies.  After capture and brutalization by the Queen of Attolia, Eugenides can no longer steal as he did before, and although his obsession with Attolia threatens to bring him and his country to ruin, he has not fallen completely out of the great game yet.  What does the Queen’s Thief decide to steal next?  The enemy queen, of course.

Key points: politics, anguish, obsession, thievery, gods, royalty, feats of daring

THE END