LOL! Boooooooks

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

"Today, Mama died."

All those publishers can feel free to pay me for solving this supposedly insoluble problem.

The ordering of words in Camus’s first sentence is no accident: today is interrupted by Maman’s death. The sentence, the one we have yet to see correctly rendered in an English translation of “L’Étranger,” should read: “Today, Maman died.”

lolsuite from Ryan Bloom incoming.

 

[Isabeau]

I agree. If it has to be completely translated to English, mama would be the better word. I do like it, though, with ‘maman’.

Sometimes I wonder what authors, or painters for that matter, think about when they see their work endlessly discussed in such minute detail.

I don’t know if I would have liked to be a translator. I would have wanted to explain each word I chose over an other, ha.

Nothing worse than a bad translator to ruin a book.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Almost like Isabeau's life in Quebec affords her a strong understanding of absurdity and French.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This looks interesting

As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own | Namina Forna

Author Namina Forna loved JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’ books as a child, but saw little that resembled the magic and rich mythology she saw in Africa

www.theguardian.com

in every Black book that won a medal, or every Black film that won an Oscar, there was always a Black person struggling against racial oppression. There are consequences to only lauding such portrayals. Perpetually tying the narrative of Black people and Blackness to slavery, colonisation and oppression meant that Black people – Black children especially – were denied the chance to see ourselves as heroes with agency over our worlds. And non-Black people were denied the chance to root for us, only feeling pity and, of course, relief that they were not Black.

This is the reason I became a writer. I wanted to create a fantasy world on par with the ones in my favourite books from childhood: The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. I wanted to put Black and brown people at the forefront of this world; and women, who have so often been pushed to the periphery of fantasy, at the very centre. In the tradition of my favourite Black female authors, such as Toni Morrison, Octavia E Butler and Zora Neale Hurston, I wanted to create spaces where I could hold up Black people, especially Black and brown women, to ensure that they too were seen through the lens of the fantastic, that they too could be fairies, mermaids or creatures of myth.

The Gilded Ones (The Gilded Ones, #1)

Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her vi...

www.goodreads.com

 

[Free]

What the...

This is both hilarious and horrible.

Narrators Are Falling Asleep Making Audiobooks For The Visually Impaired

An investigation in Sweden discovered low-quality audiobooks where narrators can be heard falling asleep and entire chapters of books are missing.

www.vice.com

Swedes expressed outrage online this week after an investigation revealed the often poor quality of audiobooks produced by the state-funded Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM) for people who are visually impaired or have reading disabilities.

In a short documentary uploaded to YouTube titled “Agency of Napping and Noise,” independent journalist Finn Hellman presents a collection of especially egregious examples from his six months of research. In one clip, the narrator of the novel It Would Be Night in Caracas can be heard literally sleeping for a couple of minutes before picking up again. In another, bizarre screeching noises can be heard in the background.

Hellman’s investigation also found that narrators repeated sentences sometimes multiple times and that in some cases entire chapters of books were missing. Common Swedish words were apparently consistently mispronounced by some narrators as well.

 

[Isabeau]

What the...

This is both hilarious and horrible.

Narrators Are Falling Asleep Making Audiobooks For The Visually Impaired

An investigation in Sweden discovered low-quality audiobooks where narrators can be heard falling asleep and entire chapters of books are missing.

www.vice.com

How frustrating, especially if they are at a pivotal part of the story. Still, haha.

I’ve had a taxi driver fall asleep at the wheel and I only noticed when I heard him snore. A little more dangerous, and I only laughed about it later when I was safe and sound - out of said taxi.

 

[Isabeau]

 

[Free]

So Nabokov was a DC fan?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Dr Seuss 'cancelled'? There’s nothing new about cutting racism from children’s books

Pundits up in arms about removing offensive tropes from his books forget this is part of a long tradition, from Mary Poppins to Nancy Drew

www.theguardian.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Evernote link because paywall

Most Challenged Books

Every year, the American Library Association compiles a list of the books most frequently targeted by censors based on reports from the field and media coverage.

www.ala.org

 

[Free]

Good...gods...

 

[bubblesort]

LOL, I don't care about Peterson, but I love this headline...

‘Aggressively, almost wantonly unreadable’—Richard Poplak reviews Jordan B Peterson’s new book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

While 12 Rules for Life was a snapshot of an intellectual moment, however paltry, Beyond Order is the literary equivalent of colonoscopy by cake shovel, writes Richard Poplak. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For LifeJordan B PetersonAllen Lane, 2021 What remains to be said about Jordan B Peterson...

johannesburgreviewofbooks.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Thread -- and there are some absolutely beautiful libraries and bookshops in there

 

[Free]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This is beyond wonderful -- John Steinbeck's lost werewolf novel.


That's the sort of weird alternative-world detail you see in Alan Moore graphic novels.

I've been re-reading Alan Moore's Providence, and really reading the journal entries at the end of each chapter for the first time, which has made me see the visual narrative in completely different way. It's a story that works on so many levels, and repays revisiting, I think, because there's always something new there I hadn't noticed or realised before -- often quite important things I'd missed.

Actually, considering how Providence ends, I'm starting to get nervous about how the last few years have gone.

Maybe the stars really are right at last!

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Thread


I would imagine he's come to realise he's bitten off more than he chew here because, while anyone knows what to expect if someone like Boris Johnson writes a biography of someone like Churchil, Shakespeare's a different kettle of fish, because he can't just phone it in as he did his Telegraph columns since
there's a whole army of professional literary and theatrical critics and historians out there waiting for him with mean glints in their eyes.