Sunday Salon: Lost in Translation

Earlier this month, I was talking to one of my colleagues at the university where I teach, and he asked me if I could recommend any good English translations for some of the books we were discussing. “I always feel nervous, picking up translations, in case I don’t get the right one,” he said. “They [...]

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Love and Sleep

Whenever I read a book by John Crowley, I seem to have the same experience. I want to read it quickly to the end, to find out what will happen to these characters with whom I am so deeply engaged, and I also want to read it very, very slowly, so that I wring every [...]

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Return of the King (reread)

And so we come to the end. Like Bilbo in The Hobbit, the participants in the Lord of the Rings Readalong have gone there and back again. A few are still on the journey, but for me it’s done. Maree of Just Add Books is our readalong host this month, and she has provided some [...]

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Kim (audio)

Have you ever read a book and known, just known, that you should like it, but you just aren’t quite getting it? I’m not talking about those books we think we’re supposed to like because they’re highly acclaimed or popular; I’m talking about books that are doing everything right, that have qualities that you usually [...]

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The Flight of the Iguana

Back in 2005, I read David Quammen’s superb book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. It is to this day one of the best pieces of science writing I’ve ever had the luck to read. It’s a riveting, engaging, lively account of the way evolution works in quirky ways [...]

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The Lover (re-read)

When Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover (L’Amant) came out in 1984, it was instantly popular. It won the Prix Goncourt, it sold millions of copies, and it was translated into dozens of other languages. Of course readers praised Duras for her style and her language (more on which later), but the question everyone was asking [...]

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Sunday Salon: Just Long or a Big Slog?

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve gone radio silent here on Shelf Love this week, although Jenny’s been posting away and tempting me as always with her book choices. (One of the benefits of blogging with a friend is that if one person must be away for a while, the blog need not [...]

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Fragile Things (re-read)

I’ve been interested to notice in the book-blogging world that it seems to be a quirk to like short stories. I see a lot of people who read them but don’t get on with them, claiming that the form is too short and unsatisfying, that it doesn’t go anywhere, that it doesn’t offer what a novel offers. [...]

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A Woman’s Story (re-read)

Annie Ernaux’s book begins with the flat statement, “My mother died Monday the seventh of April at the retirement home of the Pontoise hospital where I had put her two years ago.” A Woman’s Story is not a novel, autobiographical or otherwise. In French, the title is Une femme, which could be translated A Woman [...]

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So Long a Letter (re-read)

This semester, I have the pleasure and honor of teaching a French Women Writers class. I’ve taught this class before, but this time I had two complications: first, I was gone to France for the first month of the class, and second, most of the students in the class are first-year students, who have little [...]

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