Like a time machine, it's TWIB #41
Aug. 28th, 2007 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanDuring the week of July 7-22, I read four books.
1) Poems Of The Masters - Red Pine
This excellent book contains Red Pine (Bill Porter)'s translation of a Tang- and Song-era poetry anthology. I can't read enough Chinese to comment intelligently on his skill as a translator (understatement of the year!), but the poems do read fluidly and seem to possess something of the...ahem...poetry of the original. Plus, Porter has avoided the (alas, far-too-common) urge to render his translation in rhyming verse. Best of all is the care given to each individual poem, which is first presented in the original Chinese characters, in Porter's translation on the facing page, and with notes on the author of each poem and the circumstances surrounding its composition on the bottom of the page. I am obviously most impressed by the author's decision to include the original; it is a rare translator who feels confident enough in his work that he allows similarly qualified people to look at exactly how he has chosen to render each word and phrase. For less qualified people (like me) the inclusion of hanzi allows the reader to pick up the meanings of unknown characters and to see how an expert has chosen to translate various phrases. My only complaint is that Porter does not get into the technical aspects of the genre: couplets, mirroring, and the like. That said, this is a great work for any enthusiast of Chinese poetry and is well worth having in one's collection.
2) The Big Show - Keith Olbermann & Dan Patrick
I acquired this book for two reasons: one, because it was the only potentially appealing book which I could receive in a trade at the local used bookstore; and two, because I was interested to see how much sportswriter Olbermann compared to (self-styled) Messaiah Of Liberal Television News Olbermann. (My interest in sports is minimal unless I am actually physically at the game in question; I have better things to do with my time than watch a bunch of overpaid athletes exercise in public. But I digress.)
To return to my original question, unfortunately, rather a lot. Olbermann has been recycling many of the same quotes and quips for well over a decade now, and his "chatty" segments in the book often mirror his increasingly unlikeable frat boy persona on Countdown. There are some unintended ironies as well, as when Olbermann decries the loss of privacy and exposure to extreme public scrutiny thanks to his SportsCenter fame; all of which is very ironic given the fact that he now devotes upwards of 30 minutes of his program to purient gossip about various "media personalities," which he does with great relish. Dan Patrick I know less about, but his personality rather recedes behind Olbermann's bombast, so I can only gather that it's much more even-keeled.
The half of the book not composed of the two authors "bantering" back and forth (this may have been novel when it was written, but reads like a boring Internet chatroom transcript today) is composed of hard core sports infobytes, which might really appeal to sports fans, or might not, given that they're close to 20 years out of date. And unless you are a hard core sports fan, I'd recommend leaving this one alone. It won't do much for you.
3) Half-Blood Prince - JK Rowling
The third book out of the nintey-one I've read in the past 9.5 months that is a reread. It's now officially the least-bloated, best-written book in the series. Which doesn't actually mean that it's inherently good, just that it fails less hard than the other six.
4) Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
I've ranted at length elsewhere about why this book is so shitty, so I won't waste time doing it again here. Suffice to say that I was wrong, and JKR really wasn't going anywhere with those intriguing storylines about redemption and learning not to rely on one's preconceptions. She really is just a mediocre author with a mediocre imagination.
SBS: No idea, as all this reading occurred over 1.5 months ago.
That will be all.
1) Poems Of The Masters - Red Pine
This excellent book contains Red Pine (Bill Porter)'s translation of a Tang- and Song-era poetry anthology. I can't read enough Chinese to comment intelligently on his skill as a translator (understatement of the year!), but the poems do read fluidly and seem to possess something of the...ahem...poetry of the original. Plus, Porter has avoided the (alas, far-too-common) urge to render his translation in rhyming verse. Best of all is the care given to each individual poem, which is first presented in the original Chinese characters, in Porter's translation on the facing page, and with notes on the author of each poem and the circumstances surrounding its composition on the bottom of the page. I am obviously most impressed by the author's decision to include the original; it is a rare translator who feels confident enough in his work that he allows similarly qualified people to look at exactly how he has chosen to render each word and phrase. For less qualified people (like me) the inclusion of hanzi allows the reader to pick up the meanings of unknown characters and to see how an expert has chosen to translate various phrases. My only complaint is that Porter does not get into the technical aspects of the genre: couplets, mirroring, and the like. That said, this is a great work for any enthusiast of Chinese poetry and is well worth having in one's collection.
2) The Big Show - Keith Olbermann & Dan Patrick
I acquired this book for two reasons: one, because it was the only potentially appealing book which I could receive in a trade at the local used bookstore; and two, because I was interested to see how much sportswriter Olbermann compared to (self-styled) Messaiah Of Liberal Television News Olbermann. (My interest in sports is minimal unless I am actually physically at the game in question; I have better things to do with my time than watch a bunch of overpaid athletes exercise in public. But I digress.)
To return to my original question, unfortunately, rather a lot. Olbermann has been recycling many of the same quotes and quips for well over a decade now, and his "chatty" segments in the book often mirror his increasingly unlikeable frat boy persona on Countdown. There are some unintended ironies as well, as when Olbermann decries the loss of privacy and exposure to extreme public scrutiny thanks to his SportsCenter fame; all of which is very ironic given the fact that he now devotes upwards of 30 minutes of his program to purient gossip about various "media personalities," which he does with great relish. Dan Patrick I know less about, but his personality rather recedes behind Olbermann's bombast, so I can only gather that it's much more even-keeled.
The half of the book not composed of the two authors "bantering" back and forth (this may have been novel when it was written, but reads like a boring Internet chatroom transcript today) is composed of hard core sports infobytes, which might really appeal to sports fans, or might not, given that they're close to 20 years out of date. And unless you are a hard core sports fan, I'd recommend leaving this one alone. It won't do much for you.
3) Half-Blood Prince - JK Rowling
The third book out of the nintey-one I've read in the past 9.5 months that is a reread. It's now officially the least-bloated, best-written book in the series. Which doesn't actually mean that it's inherently good, just that it fails less hard than the other six.
4) Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
I've ranted at length elsewhere about why this book is so shitty, so I won't waste time doing it again here. Suffice to say that I was wrong, and JKR really wasn't going anywhere with those intriguing storylines about redemption and learning not to rely on one's preconceptions. She really is just a mediocre author with a mediocre imagination.
SBS: No idea, as all this reading occurred over 1.5 months ago.
That will be all.
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on 2007-08-29 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-06 03:48 pm (UTC)Also, please tell me I'm not the only one who noticed the EXTREME unintended irony of the epilogue--decades later what do we have? Rampant, unfounded animosity and prejudice based on what house someone (might) be sorted into, and a child orphaned by the battle between dark vs. light magic. In other words, thousands of pages that got us...right back where we were in the beginning. What a load.