![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowhereTrop Semblable à l'Éclair, Ada Palmer, translated Michelle Charrier. French translation of the first book of the Terra Ignota series, which I've read in its entirety (and previously posted about here) so I jumped at the chance to join an online group read of the translation. We'll be doing a few chapters a week over the coming months, so you'll see more mentions of this in future booklogs. (I'm also rereading the relevant chapters of the original before the translation.) A lot of the discussion so far has been on "how does the translator handle the pronouns", because these books are set in a future where public acknowledgment of gender is a taboo and so the standard personal pronouns are gender-neutral. But also it's in French, so one also has the fun of paying attention to formal/informal second person pronouns, which so far the book is not doing anything startling with.
The Bat, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Play readaloud. This is very much genre mystery, of the sort that could be a LARP, but an early example of the genre, dating to 1920! The protagonist, Cornelia van Gorder, an older woman, smarter than she looks, who is determined to get to the heart of the mystery of what is going on in her rental country house, is great. The rest of the cast range from supervillain pulling the strings through one-dimensional mystery characters to unfortunate racial stereotype butler. I generally enjoyed it for the plot, but it's nothing that special.
The Shadow Rising, Robert Jordan. Still reading this but not very much this week. Would be nice if Perrin and Faile's relationship involved less physical violence.
The Bat, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Play readaloud. This is very much genre mystery, of the sort that could be a LARP, but an early example of the genre, dating to 1920! The protagonist, Cornelia van Gorder, an older woman, smarter than she looks, who is determined to get to the heart of the mystery of what is going on in her rental country house, is great. The rest of the cast range from supervillain pulling the strings through one-dimensional mystery characters to unfortunate racial stereotype butler. I generally enjoyed it for the plot, but it's nothing that special.
The Shadow Rising, Robert Jordan. Still reading this but not very much this week. Would be nice if Perrin and Faile's relationship involved less physical violence.
no subject
Date: 17 Aug 2023 14:38 (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Aug 2023 22:38 (UTC)