Oh, and also...

[dream_labyrinth]

I finally watched The Dark Crystal, and quite liked it. It lacks Bowie some of the tension and character depth of Labyrinth, but it was nice.

And as I believe I haven't talked about it yet, I listened to the Wuthering Heights talking book a while ago. So cool! Though I have to say I couldn't see Heathcliff as evil. Actually what made the story so cool was that evil or not didn't really seem to be the question, or rather, not the solution.
With many stories, once you pinpoint who the evil guy is, the plot unravels and everything is plain and simple. But not in this case, and that was really cool. (I know, I'm repeating myself.)

After that, I listened to Jane Eyre. And I must say I don't think the style did the plt justice. There would have been more room for the characters to develop, to flesh out, IMHO. (Yeah, this is me, criticising world literature...) But the POV made that difficult, especially if you didn't want to end up with a novel of Dickens size.

Next on my list of things I must read is Dostoyevsky. I started with the Russians a while ago, reading all our Tolstoys, but I really need to continue. And then I should put in some French authors. It's been ages since I read Camus, and I've never read Stendhal, and that really can't be.
I could read Dostoyevsky in English, somebody donated three books to the library, but if I read a translation in the first place, I might as well stick to German.

I wonder whether I should read the French in original. I started reading Merimée in French a while ago and it was not as difficult as I had expected, but I'm not sure whether I really would understand enough in a novel.

Comments

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Have you managed to read any, say, George R.R. Martin yet?

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

How did I know you'd ask that?

Not yet. But it's next on my to-read pile (next, that is, in the "not world literature" section of my to-read pile...)

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

So basically never, if Dostoyevsky is next on your list ;)

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Oh no! Dostoyevsky is on the list of books I'll read when I want to feel like an educated being. Martin will be read for fun. (I hope... :-P)

[jonthedull.livejournal.com]

There was a Russian person who worked in the library for a while. When it came to Russian literature he would read it in the original Russian if he could easialy get it from the library or if he couldn't he'd choose the French translation over English because he said the translations were better.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Well, considering about half of Tolstoy's War and Peace is French in original, as at that time the Russian nobility communicated almost exclusively in French, it would make sense that the French works better for a Russian. Many loan words in Russian come from the French, I think.

[jonthedull.livejournal.com]

I knew there was close ties between Russia and France with regard to culture at that time but I never knew War and Peace was half in French.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe not quite half. But all the letters characters write to each other are in French.

Actually, when I was trying to learn Russian, I kept getting the words confused with French, which was really annoying.