First up Down and Out in Paris and London, one of the entries on my Classics Club list. It's not really a classic, but I used a fairly fast-and-loose measure for classic when compiling that. I bought a paperback instead of the cheaper kindle, in part because reviews indicated the electronic version was a mess. I believe them, because...
..my second purchase was The Discovery of India, which I purchased because my university library copy turned out to be like Schrodinger's Cat: they both have and do not have it. It is in the catalog, but not in its proper place. It could be there, it could be not. We won't know until a century or so hence, when a student worker taking down the last shelves to install more of the day's electronics, discovers it misfiled in the Romanian Literature section. Unfortunately, when I pulled the book out of its sheath, I discovered it was a fraud.
A fraud? Yep. The book is an inferior electronic version that has been reprinted with a "8th grader using Wordpad" cover, and not edited to repair OCR mistakes. Consequently, proper formatting is out the window, and I'm sure there's loads of transcription errors. Because I effectively got it for free thanks to the gift card, and because the 'real' versions of the book are much more expensive, I may just try it. We'll see.
Another arrival in the post was a version of Sophie Scholl: Die Letzen Tagen, about the martyred founder of the White Rose movement in Germany. Sophie was a young woman who, with her brother, were arrested for spreading anti-Hitler leaflets on German campuses. I received the German version by accident a few weeks back. Unfortunately, the disk would only play on European/region 2 players, and it had no English subtitles. I've seen the movie and could follow along, but I'd rather have the subtitles. My college Deutsch isn't what it used to be, especially now that I'm trying to revive my high school Spanish.
Also, last night, after my worst game of bowling ever, I poked my head inside a discount store and saw two books, each for a dollar: The Tyranny of Email, as well as And Then There's This, about the rapid bubble-like nature of viral news stories.
This week, though, I am concentrating on reading The Age of Napoleon, with two reviews pending. The Wonder That Was India will follow.
you have a Romanian lit section? i'm impressed... the rest sounds rather complicated for a single tasker...
ReplyDeleteWell, a book on Romanian cinema and one on Romanian grammar, at the very least!
ReplyDeleteOddly I picked up a copy of 'Down and Out in Paris and London' just last week..... [lol]
ReplyDeleteOur record of reading the same subjects but different books is finally tested!
DeleteI want to see Sophie Scholl. A few months ago I read A Noble Treason by Richard Hanser about The White Rose Rebellion and I found it excellent. Thier rebellion was a very important and moving historical event.
ReplyDeleteI remember your post. It is a good story to remember...human dignity can persist even under a totalitarian state.
DeleteAs a fan of Orwell I'm intrigued by your acquisition of Down and Out in Paris and London. I have British Penguin edition staring at me from my TBR pile so now might be time to move it up a bit.
ReplyDeleteAs for classics, I once belonged to a reading group at our local branch library that used a rule of fifty years (or more) since the death of the author as the cut off for classic status. As far as quality was concerned, we deferred to the librarian who led the group.
Well, Orwell definitely gets in on that measure. My feeling is that a piece of literature has to have something eternally truthful about it -- something that speaks to the very essence of being human -- but such a gut feeling doesn't lend itself towards being metered.
DeleteI think there are Classic books and Classic authors. Orwell is a Classic author like HG Wells & some others..
DeleteMaybe we could all read/review it at the same time(ish). I think that might be fun/interesting!
Deletei read it once... there's a lot of dishwashing in it...
Delete@Cyberkitten: I'm all for that if we can fix a date!
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