Editor: Natalie Rothstein Text: Madeleine Ginsburg, Avir Hart, Valerie D. Mendes, et al. Photographs: Philip Barnard Year published: 1984 Pages: 176 Genre: History of clothing styles Where got: Public library
I was planning to read a Danish book titled Krop og klær: Klædedragtens kunsthistorie (Body and clothes: The art history of dress) for this week’s review, but leafing through it I realised I could never finish it in one week AND enjoy it, because it’s been a while since I’ve read anything more complicated than craft magazines in Danish, and there is a fair amount of technical vocabulary in it that requires the use of a dictionary. I did want to read something about textiles, and picked up this overview of dress history as seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Dress Collection. It is published by the museum and contains a large number of photographs of clothes from the collection, with historical overview, description of each item of clothing, and a glossary of clothing terms.
During my last two visits to London I had plans to visit the V&A, but both times I had to cancel. This book will hopefully compensate just a little.
The Story: Three stories are told simultaneously: the framework story of the storyteller, telling the story of how he was once stuck in L.A. due to bad weather at his destination and met a (possibly) crazy old man who claimed to be and angel and told him the story within the story, of the first crime committed in Creation: the jealous murder of one angel by another. The title of the story, Murder Mysteries, comes from the fact that the angel telling the story was the one sent by the Creator to investigate the murder and punish the murderer. The punishment meted out, it is suggested, was the prelude to the fall of Lucifer.
Technique and plot: Being a graphic novel, the story is mostly told in images, and so is a short read. Most of the time goes into looking at the artwork. The graphic form is, of course, exceptionally well suited to the fantasy genre, and the artist has done a good job of representing angels, although I wonder why they all have to look like handsome, muscular and nude (but genitalia-free) men. Possibly it has to do with auto-censorship and the fear that the books would be outlawed to sex shops should a naked female breast be seen. Or possibly it has to do with artistic tradition. We would, after centuries of being shown them in art, expect angels to look like beautiful men, nude or clothed. Images of Heaven alternate with images of Los Angeles at night, one place being bright, shiny, new and intimidating and the other dark, worn, and boding. The L.A. artwork is realistic, with muted colours, and the Heaven artwork is fantastic, a collusion of abstracts and unreal-looking buildings, plants and whatnots in riotous colours.
Some may find the story repulsive because of images of angels making love, and others may find sacrilege in it. God (here called “Lord” or “The Name”) is not exactly shown as the bearded and paternal old man one is used to from Sunday school…
Rating: A sad little murder story with a sting in the tail. 3 stars for the story, 3 stars for the artwork = 3 stars overall.
Story: Neil Gaiman Artwork: P. Craig Russell Year published: 2002 Pages: Not numbered Genre: Graphic novel Where got: Public library
Have I mentioned that Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite authors? The first book I read by him was Stardust, a fairy tale that reminded me of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Earlier I had read Good Omens which he wrote in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, and loved it. It is, in fact, one of my perennial reads. Gaiman’s prose is very visual, and translates well into the graphic novel form (I would love to see American Gods made into a graphic novel). This appears to be a stand-alone short story.
Contents: As I mentioned earlier, this is a collection of essays/scripts for talks which Durrell recorded for the BBC. It is about animals, places and people that he has come across, and starts out with two descriptions of animals and their habitat, goes on to discuss animal courtships, architecture, warfare, inventions and endangered animals, specific animals Durrell met and liked, like The Bandits (kusimanses), Sarah Huggersack (anteater), Wilhelmina the whip-scorpion and Pavlo the marmoset, and ends with two portraits of people Durrell met on his travels.
Technique and plot: Durrell was a born storyteller. He wrote beautifully and evocatively about subjects dear to him, among which were animals, nature and nature conservation and interesting people. This book gives a taste of each subject, and would, I think, make a nice introduction to Durrell for someone who has not read anything by him before. It is the best of his collections that I have read, as it has a theme even if it is not a single story. The other collections contain essays and short stories that have too widely different subjects to be really good.
Rating: A good introduction to Gerald Durrell’s writings and a good read for amateur naturalists and children who are interested in nature and animals. 4 stars.
It’s strange to read Gerald Durrell’s wonderful books knowing that he hated writing and only did it to finance his animal collecting expeditions and his zoo. It certainly does not show in his writing (well, at least not his early writing. Some of his last books feel a bit rushed). His style is beautiful and he had the gift of being evocative in his descriptions of animals, people and places. To read his description of a bower bird decorating his bower for a non-existent mate and a bird of paradise displaying his singing and dancing skills in front of an unappreciative audience (Encounters with Animals) is in some ways a more alive experience than watching the same scene unfold in a nature documentary.
I was ten when I first read Durrell’s classic memoir, My Family and other Animals, and I have read it approximately once a year since. It was brilliantly translated into Icelandic and the translator was able to capture perfectly the style and humour of the original. It was 6 years before I read another one of his books (in English), and after that I was hooked. So was my mother, and between us we own most of his non-fiction books, and a couple of his novels.
Durrell is one of the authors who awakened in me the desire to travel to exotic places. I know of course that the countries he describes don’t exist any more as he describes them, and although I get a glint in my eye whenever someone mentions the Greek island of Corfu (the setting for My Family and other Animals), I am not sure I want to visit it, knowing it has become a tourism magnet and party island. I would much rather keep the unspoilt, pre-WW2 image of it. Patagonia (The Whispering Land), which at the time of Durrell’s visit was relatively unspoilt and certainly not a tourist destination, is now a popular place for backpackers to visit, thanks partly to Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theraux. I do want to visit it, but I fear the magic Durrell found there may be gone. Guyana (Three Singles to Adventure), Cameroon (The Bafut Beagles, The Overloaded Ark), Paraguay (The Drunken Forest) and Mauritius (Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons) are all on my “want to see” list and so is the more mundane destination of Jersey (Menagerie Manor, The Stationary Ark). I would not have considered any of these places as desirable destinations (well, maybe Mauritius) if Durrell had not described them so beautifully.
Gerald Durrell tried his hand at writing novels, but they were not in the same league as his non-fiction. Rosy is my Relative is a funny and farcical book, based on true events, and the best of his novels that I’ve read. Big brother Lawrence was the family novelist, and has left his tracks in British literary history. Gerald will be remembered for his autobiographical naturalist/travel books, and it remains to be seen which brother will be the more enduring author.
Gerald Durrell: Beasts in my Belfry (reread) -Wonderful account of Gerald Durrell’s early years as student keeper at Whipsnade Zoo.
Dorothy Gilman: Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (my 6th Mrs. Pollifax book) -There’s something quite endearing about Mrs. Pollifax. It’s fun to read the books and reflect on how the political situation in the world has changed since the early ones were written.
Year published: 1958 Pages: 180 Genre: Animals and animal collecting Sub-genre(s): Memoirs Where got: Bought it somewhere
This is a collection of essays about animals that naturalist Gerald Durrell recorded for the BBC in the 1950’s. Some of the essays are original material, and some are about animals he had written about before in his books, so this will be partly a new reading experience for me and partly a return visit to old friends (I've read about 90% of Durrell's non-fiction books). Part of the book is about animal habitat and animals in general, part is about specific animal characters (some or all of which he has written about in his other books), and part is about interesting people.
This is a collection of folk-tales and legends from all over India. Although the stories are meant for children, they are readable for persons of any age who like folk-tales and adventure stories. The folk-tales are mostly about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and the legends are about the gods, demons and heroes of India’s ancient literature, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas.
The stories are written in a simple and readable style that suits the subject of the folk-tales. Some are funny, others fantastic, and some have some kind of moral. The legends don’t quite fit in with the folk-tales – the themes are so different and when the folk-tales end and the legends begin the reader is all of a sudden not sitting by the fire in the village square any more and listening to a master storyteller, but instead has been transported to the palace of a king to enjoy a reading from books about gods, kings and heroes. It doesn’t quite fit, and I think the two story collection should have been published as two separate books.
Rating: A collection of stories that are fun to read and will give fans of folk-tales an opportunity to compare Indian folk-tales with those of other cultures.
I bought this book during my stay in India in 1996. For some reason, I only ever read the first few stories, and when I got back home I put it on a shelf and promptly forgot about it. It came to light again recently when I was culling my books, and I decided to finally finish reading it. Like most of the locally published books I bought in India, it is printed on cheap paper that is already yellowing, and the glued binding is coming apart, even though the book has rarely been opened.
As you can see, the cover is very funny – I believe that’s supposed to be a demon.
Contents: In this book, Eco discusses translation as a kind of negotiation: between translator and author, between languages, and so on. He mostly discusses what is known as translation proper, i.e. the translation from one language (source) into another (target). He also mentions other kinds of translations, like intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which is the translation from one form of art into another, e.g. a novel into a film or a poem into a painting, and intralinguistic translation or rewording, but the main focus is on translation proper. Many of his examples are taken from his own books, and from books he has translated, so he has a unique insight into the problems he discusses. Eco discusses his own work in some detail, and gives some insights into why he loads his novels so much with allusions and quotations from other literary works, and discusses the problems translators have run into when attempting to make translations that have the same effect on readers in other languages as they do in the original Italian. In the first chapter, in an attempt to explain a particular translation problem, he takes some rather funny examples of machine translation that anyone can repeat with similar results by running a text through any of the translation machines available on the Web (see footnote). He goes on from there to discuss translation of poetry (meter and rhyme vs. accuracy), modernization of old texts, effect vs. exact meaning, and several other things that need to be taken into consideration in literary translations, and ends with the problem of accurately translating colour terms.
Technique: I must say that Eco’s non-fiction is rather easier to read than his fiction. The ideas he expresses are put forward in a readable style and while a linguist or translation theorist will undoubtedly have a deeper understanding of the text - if only because they’re likelier to be familiar with certain theories he mentions without further explanation - it is clear enough for an interested non-linguist to understand. He uses numerous examples in several languages, and while it isn’t absolutely necessary, it helps to know some Italian, French and German in order to better appreciate the examples, but it is quite possible to get along without knowing any of those languages, because he explains the pertinent parts in English as well. I for example, have learned both French and German (4 years of each), and can not say I understood much in the examples he used in those languages, because much of it is in highly literary, poetic or archaic versions of those languages.
Rating: An interesting insight into some of the problems translators meet with in translating literature and poetry. 4 stars.
Footnote: Here’s an example, this paragraph run through Bablefish, English to German to French, and back to English. You can still get the sense of what I’m saying, but it looks like it was written by someone who doesn’t know any English and constructed the sentence using a dictionary. "Towards first chapter certain translation problem to explain (that of l'équivalence), it has to take some examples rather merry that of machine translation which can repeat all the world with similar results, while making run a text by translation the apparatuses which exist on the network."
If you want to have some fun, here’s a link to Babelfish
I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but whenever I try to use the Beta posting engine to edit an existing post, the text disappears, just as the introduction to Mouse or Rat? did here. Fortunately, the review was posted separately.
According to Bibliophil (the website where I keep my list of read/TBR books) I’ve read or listened to 189 books during the year. This blog and my reading log added an additional 5 to the list that I was unable to enter into Bibliophil because they are not available on Amazon. I know there are a few I missed, because I didn’t put everything in the blog or in Bibliophil, and I only started the reading log in July. 194 is the official number, but it’s probably 200 to 210.
Genre breakdown: Action: 3 Biography: 5 Books written for teens and children: 11 Christmas books: 2 (1 novel and 5 short stories in one book) Cookery: 1 (that’s unusually few) Crime fiction (mostly murder mysteries): 64 Dictionaries/glossaries: 2 Fantasy/adventure: 11 Film theory: 2 General, unclassifiable fiction: 17 General short story collections: 2 Guidebook: 1 Historical novels (including romance): 44 History: 7 Horror: 5 Humour: 5 Inspirational: 1 Literary theory: 3 Parody: 2 Poetry: 2 Popular science: 1 Romance/chick lit: 36 (that’s more than in the preceding 20 years put together!) Satire: 2 Science fiction: 2 Travel: 10 True crime: 2
In English: 188 -translated: 2 In Icelandic: 6 –translated: 1
Fiction: 160 Non-fiction: 34
Analysing this, I see that because of the blog being in English, I have read far fewer Icelandic books this year than I usually do (and they’re all crime novels). My new year’s reading resolution is to read more in Icelandic. That includes books written in Icelandic, and also translated material, especially classics written in languages other than English (I will review some of those). My other new year’s resolution is to read more of my own books. My TBR shelf is groaning under the weight of books I’ve accumulated in the last two years and never read.
I participate in link exchanges, but only with book and reading websites. Requests for link exchanges can be posted in Comments. I DO NOT exchange links with commercial websites, so don’t ask.
About me
What this blog is about:
Reading and books.
If you’re wondering about the name 52 books, it stems from a book-a-week reading challenge I set myself. The challenge is over, but I'm still reading, and will continue to blog about the books I read and my reading experiences, and other stuff connected with books and reading.
I rate the books (if I feel like it), giving them stars ranging from zero to 5.
Books I have already read (sporadically updated):Cover gallery
Note: Some of the entries are linked to the months the reviews appeared in, because I made several entries for each book. I have marked those reviews with an asterix (*). If you want to read the whole review from beginning to end, you must scroll down and read from the bottom up (but you probably already knew that ;-) >
