Books

Currently listening to Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. You know you're enjoying a book when it sends you to look up the author or some info about the story. (A Golden Age - interestingly another debute book - also sent me seeking info).

Hotel was a very pleasant surprise - some books with a lot of hype are just here today gone tomorrow - I haven't finished this yet - but it seems to surpass that. But - maybe I'm just biased because the story is set in Seattle :- )

O'Henry

Alister is in Wales and so I am taking the opportunity to clean, cook and listen to books on tape. Today, I listened to some O'Henry short stories. I loved O'Henry when I was younger -I remember that the stories were engaing and often full of the ironic. Today, listening to them read, I realized for the first time that O'Henry wrote with Rythm and Rhyme. - his stories are definately prose, but his writing has a natural, conversant flavor with enough description and cadence that you can actually hear a rythm and a rhyme as the text is read - I specifically noticed this in the Elsie in Manhattan story - in fact the ending was quite disspointing because the final lines broke the cadence.

It's interesting the things you notice when you hear a text vs. just reading it.

Back to the classics

In my quest for classics - I have just finished listening to a Globe Radio Production of Madame Bovary. If you care about these things, and you might one day read Madame Bovary - be aware that this blog post will contain ***SPOILERS***.

Frankly, I thought it was a waste of time and don't understand why it is a classic. True - the author's voice was very picturesque - but the character - Madame Bovary was not sympethetic in the least. She was revolting with no redeemable thing in her and then her husband - who was nice just pines away and dies for no reason at the end of the book even though he learns what a terrible woman and wife she was. In fact - he is still making excuses for her and even tells one of her lovers that he understands!

I don't mind if a character is abit dodgy - I love Flannery O'Conner's stories and her characters are often quite raw - but the differnce is that they are not beyond redemption -- or they at least realize how rotten they were. Emma - in typicall selfish fashion - realizes she doesn't want to die for no other apparent reason than that it is painful and gruesom and not at all romantic - the crowning dissapointment of all of her dissapointments- unrealistic expectations that were not met.

Simultaneously to Madame Bovary, I am reading Crime and Punishment. How I managed to pick two books about morally revolting people, I 'm not really sure - but so it goes. Even before he commited the murder, I was unsure if I really wanted to read about such a character - and Alister can't remember how it ends but says "his conscious tortures him - so how can he be a complete moral rebrobate" So I haven't gone too far past the murder - but in my opinion, someone who can kill someone simply because he fell into a brooding depression and made it worse by not talking to people or seeking work and all of those other things that get yu out of the world inside of your head - well, I'm just not sure if I want to read about such a character if nothing then comes of it - i.e redemption and sympathy are not achievable.

Books and such

I know, I know. I'm doing a lousy job at posting once a week.
Part of that is because I've been doing some free lance translation and editing and just being kept busy with other things as well.
In the mean time, I've been trying to find time to read/ listen to classics. I just finished Ivanhoe, which I read as a Senior in high school and loved and thought it time to read again. One thing I missed/forgot had no idea of was that King Richard the lion heart was a Norman - ie French - which I found amazing since he was so well loved.
I then decided I really needed to actually KNOW Shakespeare rather than just know of him - and I found this great site that actually has audio recordings of a lot of his plays for free. So this is my new kitchen listening :-) I'm trying to convince Alister to read them with me - but part of the idea of reading is to get AWAY from the computer - and although we can find the scripts easily enough - I don't think we really want to print them out - so i'll have to ask around and see what copies of Shakespeare are floating around in Kiev among my acquaintances.
I was trying to find a free audio of Measure for Measure but with no luck. Anyway - this is play I have heard absolutely nothing about and thought it would be fun to read "Shakespeare's darkest tragedy.
We also watched (from the climax to the end! - talk about a weird place to start) the Merchant of Venice - which was also fantastic and I am determined to read/watch/ listen to the whole thing soon as well. Thankfully - we were able to make out what was going on - listen to a couple of fabulous monologues in the court room scene and use Wikipedia to fill in the blanks. It was especially interesting to read it in light of reading Ivanhoe as well since the theme of prejudice against Jews is obviously a center of both.