User Profile

@Flauschbuch@bookrastinating.com I can imagine! My German is too limited for me to really see for myself whether the translation gets it right, but I can certainly tell you that the older translation feels much more like a distinctive authorial voice. So far that voice is my favourite thing about the book.

@Paranoid-Fish@bookwyrm.social I think I got used to liking newer translations better for really old literature (Beowulf, ancient Greek), because those inherently have to do some updating (translating Homer in Old English isn't really going to help me), so bringing it all the way to modern English seems like it leaves less friction. But this book's only 100 years old, and I routinely read work written in the English of that time, so translating it to the same seems to work better.

To my surprise, I like the older translation better. The newer one feels a bit bland, and over-explainy (e.g. I don't actually need to know the specific phonology of the "Hamburg accent" Mann refers to, and describing that doesn't make much sense when I'm not reading the dialogue in German). I should probably add the other translation as its own book and switch over to it.

Meanwhile, I was very amused yesterday to learn that this story of a man who thinks he's going to a sanatorium for three weeks and ends up there for seven years was originally conceived as a novella, and in the end it took Mann 12 years to write the 750-page doorstopper. Life imitating art imitating life and so on.

@picklish@books.theunseen.city oh! This is a good idea.

Hey you! (Yes, you!) If you're seeing this, then you probably have an adjacent taste in books, so this could likely be of interest to you.

We're reading The King Must Die during this February for #SFFBookClub.

SFFBookClub is an asynchronous fediverse book club. There's no meeting or commitment. If this book looks interesting to you, then you can join in by reading it during February and posting on the hash tag #SFFBookClub with any feelings or thoughts or reviews or quotes.

More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

For the first chapter or two I'm reading this and the older translation that Standard Ebooks has and then I'll decide which to finish.

When I heard of this book--a generation ship novel entirely in verse--I was excited and felt some trepidation, because it can be easy for a technical feat like that to overshadow the story. Once I had it in hand and flicked through, I felt both of those things more intensely, because parts of the book employ the sort of creative layouts I associate more with zines than novels.

It turns out that all of that drives the story and characterisation with a singular focus. Even the wackiest-looking page layouts are a guide for pacing and mood, and work fantastically well. I am unusually tempted to just go back to the beginning and read the whole thing through again.

It is also an interesting story, and the three main characters are compelling. It made sense to mostly focus on them at the expense of the ship's crew, but at the end I was left a little frustrated that one question was never addressed: what would have motivated rank-and-file members of the first generation crew to sign up?

It is also a deeply Christian story, enough so that I feel like that needs to be a potential CW. But this is handled in a very interesting way that worked for me as a non-Christian reader.

#SFFBookClub

This is one of those books that's a deceptively easy read while full of heavy themes: war, hate, difficult parent-child relationships, adolescence. Some chapters were just plain fairy-tale fun, while others were quite grim, and it's all pulled together cohesively.

The last few chapters are a gut-punch, and the one sour note for me is that the twist towards the end makes some of the earlier parts of the book feel like a con.

About half a chapter in, and I can already tell this is going to be gloriously batshit. I think I mean that as unqualified praise, ask me again after a couple of chapters. #SFFBookClub

Lent by a friend. I'm about halfway through already. So far it's very good, but also kind of painfully on the nose to be reading while Russia tries to annex Ukraine and the US threatens everywhere.