I may have to put The Name of the Rose higher up my reading list. I’m in the midst of re-reading Kristin Lavransdatter at the moment, a book made much better by having read it through once already… but it’s making me crave other well-executed medievalist pieces.
Hilary, I just discovered you on youtube today with your latest video, and wanted to say I'm very impressed so far. I'm looking forward to delving deeper into your writing and the rest of your videos.
By the way, there's a typo in the Laurus paragraph; "Russian" is missing its "sian". Keep on keeping on!
Thank you for being real about pevear volokhonsky…I’ve been afraid for so long that i was alone in throwing every one of their translations across the room 😂
Very glad to find I'm not the only one! I started stomping around my living room the other day when I realized that a beautiful new edition of Pushkin's prose and poetry was done by them.
My list is titled "Books I Refuse to Live Without" which I listed on Barnes and Noble until they wiped that feature right off their webside. Must have run to over 100 titles. I've been trying to reconstruct it on my discord server but I've been lax about it. OTOH, I just (re)purchased a copy of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy" because mine has gone all flappy—broken spine, loose pages and such.
I didn't know Barnes and Noble ever even had such a feature. I've been trying to keep track in a notebook for precisely that reason, but still I always forget to update it. I have a decent list of books I want to buy but then I forget to update it and can't remember what books I already own when I'm at the bookstore. Keeping track of one's books, I've come to realize, is hopeless.
They didn't have that "feature" per se. They did, however, have a chat very like this one and that's where I posted my list. It was a good list, though I didn't delve into the reasons why I liked each title. Mine was just a list.
I should have kept a copy of it. Mea culpa . . . .
Pity they dumped it. Lost marketing opportunity there. But then B&N lost its way after the 2008 financial crisis. Within 6 weeks after stocks tanked, they began picking their customers' pockets. It was heartbreaking.
Borges had a way of referring to forgotten or obscure authors, and interpolating them in his discussions. One such author comes to mind, now out of fashion with the bien pensant class, his name is Charles Dickens who invented the popular conception of the Victorian World. I mean Dicken's work in its entirety. Another author of wry withering brilliance is Yaroslav Hacek, whose masterpiece was unfinished and to be completed by us. Anyway, Hilary's list appears to be copied from my own, must look into it.
I own and read from the same edition of Borges you show here. It's a great translation. Borges is bottomless, I never get all of it, I keep going back to the stories and they seem new each time. For such a quiet, shy and scholarly man, he wrote with incredible understand of humanity in all its violent and manipulative forms. The Laurus book interests me. Name of the Rose is incredible. I read Foucault's Pendulum twice, and left unsatisfied with it each time. Hard to say why. I'm reading Moby Dick, and though Hawthorne's language is pre-modern and odd at times, the metaphysical essence of it is very deep and modern. I may skip some of the whaling chapters, as I did before.
If you liked Name of the Rose there's a decent chance you'll like Laurus. It is very much a Russian Name of the Rose, but it is also very Russian (in a good way, in my opinion). I suppose I've never really been able to give in to the modern idea that brevity and economy are the most important factors in prose. I pull Borges off the shelf and read a story at random now and then. He had an interesting interview in The Paris Review eons ago. He seems to come alive when you give him some room to open up about his passions.
I love the Silmarillion. I enjoyed all of Tolkien, but that one really sated my curiosity for how the world of Middle Earth came to be. We need more works that trigger the imagination rather than those that trigger outrage, or foster echo chambers with zero growth. Most of these books, I'm unfamiliar with. My interests have been spread between high fantasy novels, & science fiction. Sometimes the occasional mystery. The sad thing is science fiction can be too pretentious for it's own good at times. I can't remember the title of it, but there was a 70s novel that had so many strange new words coined by the author, that there was no way to truly understand what they meant, without finishing several chapters of drawn out exposition. It was like learning a new language. I vowed then to never write a book that didn't explain itself very well, and took too long to do it. There's world building, and then there's terminology that doesn't have any definition or real world analogue.
Just found your channel yesterday and have found your videos to be very interesting. I have some of your favourite books among my favourites as well. I will read Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. Never heard of it before but I have enjoyed all the Russian literature I have read so far.
I enjoyed your video on romantic-erotic literature, and I would love to hear your opinions on period romantic fiction (like Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters). I could never enjoy modern romance novels but always loved these period pieces.
I came here fearing terrible disappointment (I believe that books are a literal window into a person's soul) and happily my fears were dashed! I only say that as I've been disappointed by people on social media before, when you start to dig beneath the skin you just never know what you'll find.
As I'm Irish I would have to add Joyce, Beckett, Le Fanu and Stoker to that list.
You’re right! Constance Garnett’s translations are superior.
(Also Wordsworth classics does a cheap edition of the Garnett translation.)
I may have to put The Name of the Rose higher up my reading list. I’m in the midst of re-reading Kristin Lavransdatter at the moment, a book made much better by having read it through once already… but it’s making me crave other well-executed medievalist pieces.
It’s so wonderful to see Dunsany’s Pegana praised. Reading it felt like being in a trance.
Thanks for the recommendations
Hilary, I just discovered you on youtube today with your latest video, and wanted to say I'm very impressed so far. I'm looking forward to delving deeper into your writing and the rest of your videos.
By the way, there's a typo in the Laurus paragraph; "Russian" is missing its "sian". Keep on keeping on!
Thank you! I hope you enjoy both!
(That's intentional! Rus is a kind of old Medieval name for Russia. It was an early Slavic state.)
Ah! Learn something every day. Nevermind then, carry on. . . . ;)
Thank you for being real about pevear volokhonsky…I’ve been afraid for so long that i was alone in throwing every one of their translations across the room 😂
Very glad to find I'm not the only one! I started stomping around my living room the other day when I realized that a beautiful new edition of Pushkin's prose and poetry was done by them.
I saw that! Literally an atrocity 😅
My list is titled "Books I Refuse to Live Without" which I listed on Barnes and Noble until they wiped that feature right off their webside. Must have run to over 100 titles. I've been trying to reconstruct it on my discord server but I've been lax about it. OTOH, I just (re)purchased a copy of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy" because mine has gone all flappy—broken spine, loose pages and such.
I didn't know Barnes and Noble ever even had such a feature. I've been trying to keep track in a notebook for precisely that reason, but still I always forget to update it. I have a decent list of books I want to buy but then I forget to update it and can't remember what books I already own when I'm at the bookstore. Keeping track of one's books, I've come to realize, is hopeless.
They didn't have that "feature" per se. They did, however, have a chat very like this one and that's where I posted my list. It was a good list, though I didn't delve into the reasons why I liked each title. Mine was just a list.
I should have kept a copy of it. Mea culpa . . . .
Pity they dumped it. Lost marketing opportunity there. But then B&N lost its way after the 2008 financial crisis. Within 6 weeks after stocks tanked, they began picking their customers' pockets. It was heartbreaking.
Borges had a way of referring to forgotten or obscure authors, and interpolating them in his discussions. One such author comes to mind, now out of fashion with the bien pensant class, his name is Charles Dickens who invented the popular conception of the Victorian World. I mean Dicken's work in its entirety. Another author of wry withering brilliance is Yaroslav Hacek, whose masterpiece was unfinished and to be completed by us. Anyway, Hilary's list appears to be copied from my own, must look into it.
I own and read from the same edition of Borges you show here. It's a great translation. Borges is bottomless, I never get all of it, I keep going back to the stories and they seem new each time. For such a quiet, shy and scholarly man, he wrote with incredible understand of humanity in all its violent and manipulative forms. The Laurus book interests me. Name of the Rose is incredible. I read Foucault's Pendulum twice, and left unsatisfied with it each time. Hard to say why. I'm reading Moby Dick, and though Hawthorne's language is pre-modern and odd at times, the metaphysical essence of it is very deep and modern. I may skip some of the whaling chapters, as I did before.
If you liked Name of the Rose there's a decent chance you'll like Laurus. It is very much a Russian Name of the Rose, but it is also very Russian (in a good way, in my opinion). I suppose I've never really been able to give in to the modern idea that brevity and economy are the most important factors in prose. I pull Borges off the shelf and read a story at random now and then. He had an interesting interview in The Paris Review eons ago. He seems to come alive when you give him some room to open up about his passions.
Is it from the Faus-Dolos' translation effort of Ibn Fadlan's Viking report?
Indeed it is! ⭐
Great! My research skills still work. I was just skimming over the Faus-Dolos report; it is pretty neat to learn how life was so long ago!
You might truly LOVE The Stress of her Regard.
I love the Silmarillion. I enjoyed all of Tolkien, but that one really sated my curiosity for how the world of Middle Earth came to be. We need more works that trigger the imagination rather than those that trigger outrage, or foster echo chambers with zero growth. Most of these books, I'm unfamiliar with. My interests have been spread between high fantasy novels, & science fiction. Sometimes the occasional mystery. The sad thing is science fiction can be too pretentious for it's own good at times. I can't remember the title of it, but there was a 70s novel that had so many strange new words coined by the author, that there was no way to truly understand what they meant, without finishing several chapters of drawn out exposition. It was like learning a new language. I vowed then to never write a book that didn't explain itself very well, and took too long to do it. There's world building, and then there's terminology that doesn't have any definition or real world analogue.
Just found your channel yesterday and have found your videos to be very interesting. I have some of your favourite books among my favourites as well. I will read Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. Never heard of it before but I have enjoyed all the Russian literature I have read so far.
I enjoyed your video on romantic-erotic literature, and I would love to hear your opinions on period romantic fiction (like Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters). I could never enjoy modern romance novels but always loved these period pieces.
I came here fearing terrible disappointment (I believe that books are a literal window into a person's soul) and happily my fears were dashed! I only say that as I've been disappointed by people on social media before, when you start to dig beneath the skin you just never know what you'll find.
As I'm Irish I would have to add Joyce, Beckett, Le Fanu and Stoker to that list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Dark_Wood_Wandering is quite good.
I am not surprised that I’ve only not read one of these books… You are the person I wanted to be in high school. 🤗