mandarine

In response to Emily’s very true remark when linking to Mandarine from Cam’s roundtable that I do not write so much about books, I hereby solemnly promise more bookish posts.

Below is a shortlist of books I have read recently and on which I have something to share:

• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours (J. Verne)
• The Water-Babies (C. Kingsley)
• Something New (P.G Wodehouse)
• Northanger Abbey (J. Austen)
• Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë)
• A Tale of Two Cities (C. Dickens)
• Various short stories by Maupassant
• American Tabloid (J. Ellroy)
• The Great Influenza (non fiction, by J. M. Barry)
• Fausse Route (non fiction, by E. Badinter, which I’ll cross-post at What We Said)
• And just because Litlove listed Vian’s works amonst her worst reading experience, I’ll be re-reading l’Ecume des Jours and tell you whether she’s right.

About the picture: I just love poppies (coquelicots ‘coke-alee-koe’). I have collected a lot of seeds this summer from various places and intend to sow them in my lawn/prairie. Looking forward to July.

I am slowly but steadily becoming addicted to audiobooks. In the meantime, the supply of free, public domain or otherwise copyleft audiobooks is skyrocketing, and this certainly fuels my addiction beyond the reasonable.

In the recent weeks, I have been ‘reading’ (all from www.Librivox.org):

• Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter
• A Tales of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (that one at LoudLit.org)
• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours, by Jules Verne
• A truckload of short stories

As I was lying awake in the dark earlier tonight around midnight, [more]

Let’s face the bare truth: I did not enjoy reading Mrs Dalloway as much as I had hoped I would. It was my third attempt at reading something by Virginia Woolf, after two miserable failures with Jacob’s Room and Night and Day. This time, I had sworn to myself I’d finish the book, all the more so as it was recommended by Dorothy, Litlove, Kate and Bloglily.

Once again, I immediately felt drawn by Woolf’s prose: it feels like one of those crystal-clad chandeliers that send sparks and rainbows in all directions. But once again, the structure of the writing was too much for me.
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I have just finished ‘reading’ Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in three days, by way of an mp3 audio-book freely dowloaded from loudlit.org. I reckon I enjoyed it mightily good, I did. I was a little bothered at first with the southerner accent the narrator chose to use, and with the way he made the runaway slave Jim sound a bit like Jar-Jar Binks. But by and by I got used to it, and although I still suspect those accents were somewhat fake (like Glenn Close’s and Liv Tyler’s in Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune — which is one of my most favouritest movies), they blended in the landscape and contributed to the whole atmosphere. I am generally not a fan of linear scenarios, but in this case, the linear narration was perfectly suited to the linear flow of the Mississippi river.

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I am on vacation. This time I decided I would not take books along with me: just audio-books in my mp3 player. Although I had already relied on audio-books for my bicycle commuting time, I had never taken them seriously enough to bring them as my only holiday reading. This week, I have ‘read’ Michael Connelly’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer‘, which is a 21st century version of Roman Noir à la LA Confidential. Next week’s read: I am downloading Huckleberry Finn while I am writing this.

I will tell you more when I come back, but this one week was a revelation of sorts. Audio-books are a completely new reading experience:

• It is easier to enjoy the language
• The pace is much slower: it is like walking instead of flying
• I cannot read faster when there is more suspense
• I can read in many circumstances where a book is inappropriate: on a bus inching up its way up a mountain on a winding road, I can read without feeling nausea, and I can still watch the landscape; at night in a sleeping-car, I can read while lying awake, without bothering fellow travelers with the light; on a beach, when the sun makes it impossible to read from white paper, etc…
• I can still read while doing something else (something that does not require too much concentration): cooking, packing, waiting for other family members to be ready for whatever we will be doing today, …

Today, I found LibriVox, and I am really contemplating volunteering as a reader to contribute. If you know some French, you might be able to hear me read a book to you in a near future.

A small maths exercise: consider a world with p people, where people read and people write. On average, each person writes w pages and reads r pages a day. How many readers will each page have on average?
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Dorothy and Quilhill managed to make me one of their slaves. Apparently, to be a member of this sect, you have to vote for a book, read it, and then comment on it. The last read was Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Here is what I have to say about it. Warning — spoilers ahead.
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I have started reading Three Men in a Boat, enjoying it much more now than when I was ten. Adults often think that just because you can read and understand the words in a classic, you’ll understand and like the book — I think of Huckleberry Finn, of Le Grand Meaulnes, of Romeo and Juliet, of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea… Force one of the ‘easy’ classics onto the knees of your young readers and more often than not, you’ll know your defeat. Fortunately, everyone has a second chance — here ends my digression.
I was enjoying the wit and the story, when a short passage plucked my romantic fiber with Shakespearean acuity:

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.

From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear-guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.

But then it goes back to normal:

Harris said:
“How about when it rained?”
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris - no wild yearning for the unattainable.
[…]
Rainwater is the chief article of diet at supper. The bread is two-thirds rainwater, the beefsteak-pie is exceedingly rich in it, and the jam, and the butter, and the salt, and the coffee have all combined with it to make soup.

I am going to love this book.

Maybe you remember my Christmas e-book stack. After I had downloaded a whole shelf worth of e-books, representing the space of a USB stick, I wondered whether there was a thing I could do to contribute in return. Obviously, I could donate money to the Gutenberg project. But I found better: I found I could contribute by proofreading scanned pages so that they could be turned into free quality e-books.

The distributed proofreaders website organises the work of online volunteers who show up when they feel like proofreading a few pages. The unofficial target is one page a day — I prefer to do seven pages a week. I have found it a marvellous way to contribute, and a great way to get to know books in a totally new fashion. As I write this post, I am correcting OCR mistakes in Hector Berlioz’s Correspondance Inédite. It almost feels as if I am Berlioz’s editor, 138 years after his death.

You might want to give it a try if you feel you have the soul of an editor, if you believe classics are the property of all, if you like to discover new books at random, if you find some thrill in interacting with text, if you want to be part of a team and a project, if you wish to contribute to web 2.0 without being a geek, or if you just do not mind giving a hand to what I believe is a true literary wonder of the world.

After the roaring success of bloglily’s Christmas book stack, I wondered whether the concept could at all be translated into the digital world. A (fortunately fictional) illustration is worth a thousand pages of e-speech:

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