Books you've read in 2022

I'm still on the Queen Of Pop's The People In The Trees and it's just so engrossing. I will dovetail it with To Paradise, most likely. That being said, THE PROMISE has also arrived. :disco:
 
Beverley said:
You should read Normal People - which is, I think, her best.
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I might, but I find it hard to read something after I've already watched the show or movie version, and I watched Normal People the show last year
 
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Currently reading and enjoying this
 
1. Wizard & Glass (The Dark Tower #4) - Stephen King
2. Wolves Of The Calla (The Dark Tower #5) - Stephen King
3. Song Of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) - Stephen King
 
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Added ‘Sour Grapes’ by Dan Rhodes as currently reading on Goodreads, but yet to read a word.

Read ‘Watching Neighbours twice a day’ by Josh Widdicombe on Boxing Day which was ok for retro 90s flavour.
 
Books I read in 2021:
1. Lisa Taddeo - Three Women
2. Jenny Erpenbeck - Go, Went, Gone
3. Toni Morrison - Jazz
4. Adam Mars Jones - Box Hill
5. Kent Haruf - Plainsong
6. Niven Govinden - Diary of a Calm
7. Caleb Azumah Nelson - Open Water
8. Muriel Spark - The Finishing School
9. Didier Eribon - Returning to Reims
10. Jeremy Atherton Lin - Gay Bar
11. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
12. Kevin Barry - Night Boat to Tangier
13. Anne Enright - The Wig My Father Wore
14. Colm Toibin - The Heather Blazing
15. Colm Toibin - The Blackwater Lightship
16. Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life
17. Olivia Laing - Everybody
18. Tessa McWatt - Vital Signs
19. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - The Undocumented Americans
20. Anthony Veasna So - Afterparties
21. Brenda Navarro - Empty Houses
22. Jhumpa Lahiri - Whereabouts
23. Cesare Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
24. Adania Shibli - Minor Detail
25. Nina Bouraoui - All Men Want To Know
26. Colson Whitehead - The Nickel Boys
27. Amelia Cain - Indelicacy
28. Olivia Laing - The Lonely City
29. Florian Huber - Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself
30. David Diop - At Night All Blood Is Black
31. Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World
32. Anne Boyer - The Undying
33. Katharine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
34. Jamil Jan Kochai - 99 Nights in Logar
35. JM Coetzee - The Life and Times of Michael K
36. Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind
37. Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and The Sea
38. Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?
39. Abdulrazak Gurnah - Paradise
40. Tove Ditlevsen - Youth
41. Elizabeth Strout - Oh, William!
42. Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man
43. Tabitha Lasley - Sea State
44. Damon Galgut - The Promise
45. Joan Didion - A Year of Magical Thinking
46. John Yorke - Into The Woods
47. JM Coetzee - Dusklands
48. Ben Lerner - Leaving The Atocha Station
49. Ian McEwan - The Children Act
50. William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

That was a bitch to type out, so they're not totally in order. Will point out my faves tomorrow.
 
read my first book of the year front to back yesterday - I'm aiming for a minimum of 24 in '22.

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Memorial by Bryan Washington - the story of a relationship that's already on the rocks when Mike decides to fly to Japan to be with his dying father, leaving Ben to cohabit with Mike's mother Mitsuko, whom he doesn't know at all. it's divided into halves, first Ben's story in Houston and then Mike's in Osaka.

the prose is somewhat matter of fact, less of the description that I tend to enjoy, but it's actually really well written and I found myself pretty invested. it would make an excellent TV adaptation I reckon. a definite recommend. A-

next up: You People by Nikita Lalwani
 
amazing! (hope it's not Netflix though or it'll be so shiny)

to all the avid readers: which app or website do you use to track your reads? is there a visually pleasing alternative to Goodreads?
 
My goal for this year is to read less books, but read longer. Stuff that’s 400+ pages where the length usually puts me off. I’d like to be immersed in worlds for longer.
 
I've seen Memorial in a lot of lists with the best books of 2020 and would love to read it but it looks like it hasn't been given a translation yet.
Btw how do Jark and Bev feel about translations now that you've written your own books? Does it feel weird having someone else shaping up your ideas in another language?
I always feel that it's best if the translation is being done by a proper translator/author instead of just in my head.
 
Queen of the Bells 🔔 said:
I've seen Memorial in a lot of lists with the best books of 2020 and would love to read it but it looks like it hasn't been given a translation yet.
Btw how do Jark and Bev feel about translations now that you've written your own books? Does it feel weird having someone else shaping up your ideas in another language?
I always feel that it's best if the translation is being done by a proper translator/author instead of just in my head.
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I would love for my book to be translated! I read a lot of fiction in translation too, which I adore. I think one has to accept that a translation isn’t the same book, as you acknowledge, but a ‘remaking’ because every language is so different.

Also, what about reading Memorial in English?
 
Beverley said:
Also, what about reading Memorial in English?
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It's doable but it takes away a lot of the entertainment value cause it always feels like an exercise. For example think of a foreigner trying to read a Rosamunde Pilcher's novel and keep up with the vocabulary used upon detailed description of Cornwall's landscape. Btw I think your view about translations is very mature in a good way, i would be scanning and pasting every page my translator did on to googletranslate to check how it comes up.
 
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Suedey said:
www.theguardian.com

The 100 best books of the 21st century

Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Felt cute, thought might tackle this list in 2022. IDK. Might delete later.
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Only 2 (Coraline and Gone Girl), watching Persepolis doesn't count :tongue:
 
where are you from, @Queen of the Bells 🔔 ? if the book's written in English I'll read it in English, however if it's any other language I'll seek out the Danish translation. I agree that placing your trust in the hands of a competent translator can make for a much better experience. for example I'm reading Brothers Karamazov at the moment in a much lauded new translation - rather than older English/Danish translations that took a lot of liberty conforming its prose to another audience. I'll never understand why translators do that. the experience of reading foreign books are, well, their "foreigness" and how that foreigness still might convey something meaningful to you
 
Mats said:
where are you from, @Queen of the Bells 🔔 ? if the book's written in English I'll read it in English, however if it's any other language I'll seek out the Danish translation. I agree that placing your trust in the hands of a competent translator can make for a much better experience. for example I'm reading Brothers Karamazov at the moment in a much lauded new translation - rather than older English/Danish translations that took a lot of liberty conforming its prose to another audience. I'll never understand why translators do that. the experience of reading foreign books are, well, their "foreigness" and how that foreigness still might convey something meaningful to you
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From Greece, but having done translations myself in the past (not literature though) for much simpler texts, I understand that sometimes if you really insist on yourself to be as precise as possible to the original document, the outcome can be a little clinical and sterile, for example sometimes there can be two or three words that can be equivalent to a foreign word, and then you have to decide which one to use, and sometimes there are tons of phrases that have an exact meaning-wise correspondence to a local phrase that employs the use of totally or somewhat different words, and if you don't use that one instead the point of the author won't come across at all, or will come across in a way that feels off or slightly unnatural, so in a sense, I think translations are bound to be associated with some decision making upon someone else's original work. I hope what I wrote makes sense. If not let's say for example "knock on wood", if i keep "on" in the translation, the reader will think WTF cause the phrase here is "knock wood". Or if someone says "I will cut you!", I can't translate this word to word either cause there's a similar expression that fits perfectly if I add another word on the mix and make it "I'll skin-cut you!".
I probably didn't use the best examples, I'll add another one, ie if you have to translate "don't cry over spilled milk" it will make people cringe if I do that, cause they know that it's a english saying and am just translating word by word, but if I use the corresponding phrase which is "what happened, happened", they won't.
 
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I think translating word by word is not what most translators do (I think) but a good translator can really elevate a book if they really bring it into the reality of the language they translate it into and not try to be very literal about each and every word in the book. Of course, I would expect that the authors or whoever controls their estate after they leave this life should have a certain set of guidelines/rules/dos/donts as to how their books should be handled, so the translators would know how many liberties they can take working on the original text.

But I prefer reading books in their original language (if of course I am fluent at it) as careless translations really get my goat.

The first book of 2022 was a translation in Portuguese of a book in Greek and the translation (by a Brazilian no less) was really bad in places and completely distracted me from the flow of the story.
 
Agree but maybe the expectation that you and me share that a good translation will "really bring it into the reality of the language they translate it into" perhaps is uncommon elsewhere. Mats said it were only the older danish translations that were doing this. Anyway this is an entirely different topic that what the thread is about, so apologies for being off topic.
 
It’s not off topic, it’s an interesting discussion.

I read almost everything in English; in Swedish if the original language is Scandinavian. I’m going to be basic here and say that I started reading books in English because the covers/format were nicer but over the years as my English got better, it felt unecessary to read translations from English to Swedish. Reading translations from other languages I doubt it would differ much between English or Swedish.
 
RaspberrySwirl said:
Reading translations from other languages I doubt it would differ much between English or Swedish.
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When I don't speak the language the book was originally written in, I always try to find its English version, as I trust that its translation would be trustworthy.
 
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Queen of the Bells 🔔 said:
Agree but maybe the expectation that you and me share that a good translation will "really bring it into the reality of the language they translate it into" perhaps is uncommon elsewhere. Mats said it were only the older danish translations that were doing this. Anyway this is an entirely different topic that what the thread is about, so apologies for being off topic.
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some current translators might do it too -- it was just much more common back in the day (in any language) to "wash out" foreign concepts that they decided would be too difficult for the audience to understand, or to alter or simplify the prose itself. apparently the old Danish translation of Brothers Karamazov is much more flowery than how Dostojevskij actually writes. I've also compared older Japanese books with their American translations of their time and you quickly notice how the translator/editor has left out sentences, words, meanings

regarding your reply above I 100% agree that you should translate idioms and sayings to fit whatever is the equivalent in the target language -- that's a given. I don't necessarily want whole concepts translated though, or particular words or cultural traits explained in whole sentences as you sometimes see. I don't want the translation to become an anthropological study. a translation should fit a linguistic context, not a cultural context other than its own. I don't want to feel like Brothers Karamazov was written in Danish, I just want it told in Danish if that makes any sense. either way it's impossible for a translator to be completely invisible but the ultimate goal must be to not feel present. God you can really tell if it's a lousy translator, especially if it's a translator who doesn't even grasp their own language!
 
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