Whatever is missing in translation from Proust was not enough to deprive me of by far the most exciting and gripping reading experience of my life. Nothing even came close. I read it all in about three months, on buses and subways and wherever I found myself, and when I wasn't reading it I was constantly boring my wife about how wonderful it was. Words cannot describe how totally transfixing and wonderful the experience was and how much about life it taught me (I was about 30 at the time). If it is appreciably better in French, I probably couldn't have taken it. Among the many things that reading Proust in English taught me is the utter nonsense of supposing that a work of genius cannot be effectively translated, or that all the "poetry" is lost in translation, since Montcrieff and Kilmarten are not, to my knowledge, literary geniuses, but the book they served up clearly embodied genius that bowled me over for three amazing months.

Meanwhile THERE IS THIS FILM. JOHN MALKOVICH IS WONDERFUL despite his mechanical French ;)

Until you read the book.

I will now. I WILL!!

I should have said that I won't read books that are over-promoted. When the radio and newspapers are full of chat about a book I usually avoid the book.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 29, 2008).]

Ah, Janet. How nice to find another Rushdie fan!

I've read most of his novels as well, and love them all. I just finished Fury three weeks ago.

My favorite period of literature in general is the first half of the 20th Century. I've read most Steinbeck and Orwell novels (the latter's Keep The Aspidistra Flying is one of my all time faves...I like it even more than his more famous pair). I've read lots of Hemingway, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Huxley, Graves and the like...but there are some authors I just can't get into at ALL. I loathe Joyce. I've tried hard, too. I can't stand Faulkner. I made it through Hardy's Jude The Obscure...barely. It's harder to list the things one hasn't read than what one has. One classic I mean to read some day is Moby Dick. I enjoy Melville's novellas and short stories, but I haven't tackled the whale as yet. Most of what I DO read these days is fairly literary, and not a lot of contemporary stuff other than Rushdie, but there are more great books out there (classics and otherwise) than I have time to read. I think that will hold true for most folks.

David,
In Australia it would be easier ;)

Actually there are some good bookshops in Sydney and I'm sure in the other major cities.

My struggle in the place where I now live is to find a book I would ever have wanted to read.
Janet

I once read 'The Naked and the Dead'. Apart from the curious and much reiterated word 'fug' I remember nothing about it at all except that it effectively stopped me reading anything else by that particular nasty-minded, self-important windbag.

I never read 'Dracula'. I genuinely regret that though obviusly not quite enough.

[This message has been edited by John Whitworth (edited July 29, 2008).]

John,
Dracula is very good. I first read it when I lived in an upstairs room overlooking a foggy park. Also as a child I was terrorised by "The Green Eyes of Bast" by the same author.

Alan and I memorized the Lord of the Rings as boys. Came in handy when we translated Beowulf for Longman. Only novels other than Patrick O'Brian's and the Latin American Supernatural Realists that either of us ever read. We read poetry, lots of it. No wait, Slipp! I was FORCED to read Clarissa. Only the 1200 page Abridged Version. No wonder I don't read novels.

The important thing is: read what you want to read, and never feel obligated to finish a book just because you've started it! What a liberating feeling -- tossing aside that book you just can't get into!

Shhh...... don't say that loud enough for my kids to hear. They are bored with their required summer reading. I'm currently on their cases to <u>JUST READ IT!</u> Because summer is drawing to a close.

But thank you for removing that burden from me, for all the books I've only partially read! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Anne, a liberated woman, aahhh......

[This message has been edited by Anne Bryant-Hamon (edited July 30, 2008).]

Summer drawing to a close? Schools only got out last week here. They have six weeks ahead of them.

I started Proust, Roger, and had much the same experience as you, during the bit that I read. I just never get a chance to read that much, and my eyes can't take too much book prose. I do want to read more, much more.

Haven't read:
anything by George Eliot except Middlemarch
the second half of The Golden Bowl, even though I loved it
David Copperfield
Paradise Lost, through
Ulysses, through
Baudelaire, enough; many of the French
Goethe; Heine
Balzac
Victor Hugo
Brothers Karamazov, though once again was amazed by the beginning
Turgenev
Pushkin
War & Peace, though once AGAIN...
Robinson Crusoe
Byron's Don Juan, through
Canterbury Tales
Musil, Mann, The Radetzky March, The Leopard, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Pope
enough Henry James, my hero


Terrible admissions!


Don't want to read:
any more Rushdie
any more Ian McEwen
Ayn Rand
any more Lawrence
Trollope, Disraeli
any more Kundera
any more Roth, Updike, Bellow, Amis
Margaret Atwood
Jeanette Winterson
any more Virginia Woolf


Have read:
Fanny Burney's novels, plus much of her journals and letters
all of Austen, several times
Keats' letters
The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner
Candide
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
Moll Flanders
Vanity Fair, one of my favourite books ever
Hardy's novels
Josef Skvorecky's novels


I've pretty much given up on novels though - except for the few I really want to read or have some reason to read. Eyes and time. I've also pretty much given up feeling sheepish for anything I haven't read. So what. I've read more than most people. And I don't consider anything wasted!