QUESTIONS FOR THE AVID READER - 2022, PART 4

QUESTION 17: FICTION: READING THE FUTURE

Most science fiction, including its sub-generes: dystopias, utopias and post-apocalyptic literature, all deal with the future….but in different ways. Turns out though, most of the time, human behavior is much the same whether you are on a space ship orbiting Mars or wandering and scrabbling for food in the wasteland that was once the US. Technology may enhance our lives, or the lack there of might bring out parts of ourselves we rarely see.

Do you read FICTION about the future? If so, do you read it for just entertainment, or what it might offer in the way if clever or thoughtful ideas? Or are you just attracted to other worlds, other possibilities? Will you only read stories of a future where technology has failed but not stories where technology helps or saves us? Why? Did you once read these kind of books but no longer read them? Why? What kind of these futuristic tales do you like best? Do you have favorite books….favorite authors? Would you recommend a few?

*Let’s generally keep fantasy, fairy tales and magic…etc for another time, please.

I like dystopias, especially those that deal with social manipulation through information/media OR those that deal with class exploitation. I dislike dystopians in which a hero pulls everything out of the crapper at the last minute. Nobody's coming to save us. If there is a Resistance, it's us beat-down little people.

I stumble across this stuff, but just by happenstance. Two from last year’s Booker longlist have sci-fi elements - Klara and the Sun and Bewilderment. But they work on having a feel very much of the present, just with some specific slightly advanced technologies. Both came across as pretty bleak to me, with dark views of this contemporary world.

Coming from this perspective, I get the sense that all scifi work has a bleak element to it. That there isn’t a whole lot of appreciation either of the current world or the ones these technologies will generate.

been in love with sci fi since forever. Ive read lots dystopic, or apocolyptic but tire of it, and try to stay away from it right now. I prefer my sci fi that looks at human nature no matter how far in the future it goes: books and short storys by authors like N.K Jemisin, bradbury ,elizabeth moon ,vonnegut ,arthur c clark, nancy kress,work best for me.

I had to think about these questions. I read sci-fi sporadically now, I think I used to read it more. I have a stack of Orson Scott Card from days gone by. In the more recent past, I read John Scalzi and Neal Stephenson. Most recently Andy Weir. I like books like The Sparrow and Old Man's War for the ideas, The Ice Trilogy and Project Hail Mary for the story.

On the Beach scared me silly as a teen in the 80s. Other favorite post-apocalyptic books are The Chrysalids, The Road, and most recently Octavia Butler's Parable books and Moon of the Crusted Snow. Why do I read them? I think for the same reason others read horror. To scare myself.

I've read a fair number of dystopian books, including a slew of YA ones, but one I will mention that may not be familiar to everyone here is the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove. I read the first five books and could not continue, they were so incredibly depressing. They have remained more vivid in my mind than many of this ilk. They take place in 2190 in China.

I have to meter my intake of dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels as they are usually incredibly bleak.

I read SF (and F) primarily - I'll try to keep fantasy out, but it's hard, I don't separate them as a class. Individual books, mostly yes, but I like speculative fiction.

Yes, there are a _lot_ of dystopias/bleak futures - and I try to avoid them. I like ones about people dealing with things - the tech is as visible and invisible as tech today (I occasionally marvel at the computer in my pocket, but mostly I just use my phone...). The other thing I really like is culture clashes - between human groups, or between humans and aliens (if the aliens are well done, not just cardboard quirk collections). James White's Sector General stories are both, and very well done (though I prefer the earlier ones). Janet Kagen, Elizabeth Moon, Arthur C. Clarke (though his can get a bit depressing), David Weber if you can get by the overly-detailed space battles (every b***dy missile's vector...),...Oh, M.C.A. Hogarth! Her Pelted Universe is _amazing_ - and some of the stories are extremely joyful, some are extremely harsh, but they always end with hope. Also lots of both - the culture clashes are complex and beautifully done. Hal Clement does amazing aliens, and Lee Correy does amazing near-futures - he posits one change (or none - one is about the Shuttle having to land on Easter Island and deal with then-current tech to get it off) and explores how the characters deal with it.

Well, I could go on (and on and on) but I'll stop there.

Q17 I don’t, on the whole. Not really sure why, it’s just never been something with a strong attraction. I think most of the handful of books I’ve read that were set in the future at the time of writing are such classics that their nominal “future” date has long since moved into the past.

>2 nohrt4me2: Don't sell yourself short O' queen of the Dystopia grounp :-) When it was active, of course.

>6 jjmcgaffey: Sorry, I know it's tough to separate SF and the F, so much blending. I have to attempt to separate within my own reading...

>8 avaland: And then there's the books that are absolutely both. Blue Adept being the flagship - alternate chapters of SF and F...Pern, which is obviously F (dragons!) until it's revealed to be SF, along with The Steerswoman and The Ship Errant and so many more (where someone took Clarke's adage to its logical conclusion - sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic).

I had to skip some of my favorite authors because what they write is fantasy, though it's exactly the same ideas - people dealing with situations using what they have available, and culture clashes. It is a different flavor (usually) though, when what they have is magic.

My history with SF began with reading my older brothers' Tom Swift books. I thought Tom very creative in whatever situation he was in. We shared that :-)

I started to read SF more regularly in the mid-80s when my kiddos were small. A workmate gave me a list of titles to start with. I found a lot of science fiction was entertaining and many came with a clever idea or thought (a little nugget one might chew on...the ol' "what if?") and I was really drawn to ideas and questions around cultural and social issues or sometimes how tech affected that (or did it?). I've always been attracted to dystopias and post-apocalyptic stories (surprising, as I tend to be more of an optimist) but according to my library I haven't read one for two years (the most recent was Gish Jen's The Resisters in 2020...can that be true?!)

A few good dystopias
Handmaids Tale, Children of Men, The Book of Joan, The Little Red Chairs, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Parable of the Sower, The Amateurs ....

I'd recommend anything by Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler. Other authors I'd recommend based on the one or two books of theirs I've read: John Crowley, Iain Banks, Suzy McGee Charnas, Sheri Tepper....

Other books ...
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
A Canticle of Lebowitz by Walter Miller
Player of Game by Iain Banks
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

These days, beyond the dystopias, I will read living SF authors Gwyneth Jones, Paul McAuley, and Adam Roberts (Roberts can be quite smart and funny), otherwise I read more dark fantasy/fairy tales (my queen = Angela Carter) BUT THAT IS ANOTHER TOPIC!

>9 jjmcgaffey: Yeah, sorry, but I think trying to do everything in one question is just too much. I read a lot of dark fantasy, and crossovers like Mieville and VanderMeer, so I understand.

Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood are both excellent. MaddAddam was kind of a letdown in Atwood's dystopian trilogy.

"I started to read SF more regularly in the mid-80s when my kiddos were small." Me, too! Raising small humans is a bit like dealing with alien life forms ...

Equilateral is a fun sci fi novel by Ken Kalfus.

A Canticle of Lebowitz by Walter Miller and On The Beach were the earlist apocoplyse books I read and were so good that I sometimes will use them as a measure of how good much more recent ones are. They often win

I read science fiction and like dystopian novels. I had a class at Drexel night school in dystopian literature and couldn’t believe they’d give me college credits for reading those books.

>13 nohrt4me2: ha!
>15 cindydavid4: Those were good, too.

I think I'm more on the social sf bench. I don't mind a little hard science thrown in, as long as there's a strong component of personal or civic what-if. As a teen and in my 20s I was more into the world-building aspect—how a writer put it all together and made it work fascinated me—but these days I don't need such a big context. The human mind is world enough to imagine, I guess.

I like dystopia a lot, always have. I think that combination of the awfulness of the world magnified and played out, combined with (to whatever extent the author wants to play it up) the indomitability of human spirit always gets me. I have the beginnings of a story up in a box in the attic somewhere, started when I was 19, about post apocalypse NYC (which was a lot easier to imagine in 1982) and drugs and a plucky punk rock teenage heroine... I wonder what ever happened to that.

>16 dianeham: In HS one of the AP english classes was entitled 'utopias and dysutopias' Read classics like 1984, but also unusual ones like green child We always had great discussions, and like you I was amazed i was getting credit for reading such great books!

Mostly these day, like Dan, I read SF and/or dystopian fiction when I happen to stumble upon it relatively randomly. Or if my reading group makes me (Ministry for the Future). A dystopian novel that I read relatively recently (I'm old enough that 2019 can be counted as "relatively recently") and thought very highly of was an English novel called Arkady by Patrick Langley.

When I was younger (junior high school days) I devoured science fiction. I was a devotee, in particular, of Robert A. Heinlein. I read everything by him up through Stranger in a Strange Land and loved it, although the novels after that one just seemed silly to me. That would have been both a change in the books themselves and also in my own perspectives as a got older. Anyway, I was an SF devotee until one day in 9th grade, and it's funny what you remember, I was in home room with a science fiction novel from the school library sitting on my desk when a classmate said to me, contemptuously, "Are you still on that science fiction jag?" I recall looking down at the book and thinking, "Well, am I?" I began broadening my reading after that. Thank you, Robert.

I agree with those who have mentioned A Canticle for Leibowitz. That was a highly influential book for me and very enjoyable.

I'll be finally reading A Handmaid's Tale sometime in the next year, I think. It's on my planned reading stack.

Of course, while I know it's not the theme of this thread, there is plenty of dystopian non-fiction to read these days.

>20 rocketjk: oh my I was a fan of Robert A. Heinlein too. Probably very dated today, but still love door into summer one of my fav time travel books of all time. i still laugh at the title, in his book the cat is going door to door to fine the one that opens to summer. My cats are the opposite; when its summer here (often 40 c +) they beg to go outside, and in about two minutes beg to come back in. Anyway he was a fun author to read at the time

So, I was specifically told to come over here and answer this question! And thanks to Lois for the nudge, or it would probably have been ages before I even saw it. I've been making a point of keeping up with my own thread, and looking for replies there, but I've been falling further and further behind on keeping up with the rest of the group.

Maybe I'll try to make up for having missed the last however many questions with a longish answer this time.

I've been a reader of science fiction since before I even knew the words "science fiction" -- as a little kid, I just knew that those books in the library with the rocketship stickers on them meant that what was inside was the good stuff -- although I do read less of it these days than I used to, having increasingly branched out into other genres as well.

I've also gotten a bit pickier about it, perhaps. I've lost much taste for the brand of hard SF with clunky prose and cardboard characters that spends pages and pages giving me long lectures about how starship engines work. I love good science in SF, and authors getting enthused about their science can be wonderful -- I, too, enjoy Andy Weir -- but these days poor writing and poor characterization do really bother me, and I feel like if the intent is solely to give me a science lecture, I'd usually rather just go read a science lecture.

But, of course, that's a very small subset of science fiction. Something that's always frustrated me is how little people who are entirely outside the genre seem to understand just how incredibly diverse it is. When I was young, I think the perception was that it was all silly formulaic action-adventure "Buck Rogers stuff." (And I actually did have a high school English teacher call it that while talking to me once, while expressing deep-seated confusion about how an intelligent reader like me could possibly be interested in it.) These days, maybe the stereotype is more YA dystopia, I'm not sure.

But science fiction is nearly as diverse as fiction as a whole, serving all kinds of purposes for all kinds of audiences. Action romps, wacky comedy, pointed social commentary, beautifully written reflections on the human condition, imaginative explorations of invented worlds... You name it. It's an amazingly wide range of stuff to include under one genre umbrella.

One thing that is increasingly clear to me about a fair subset of that SF, by the way, is that while it's a mistake to imagine its purpose is to predict the future -- an inherently impossible task, anyway, and often much less the point than commenting on the present -- it can do a great deal to prepare us for the future. Climate change, the current state of US politics, ethical debates over subjects like genetic engineering and human cloning, changing norms of gender and sexuality, the pandemic... All of this, and many other now-established or still-developing aspects of the modern world, are things that felt familiar to me when they got here, because I'd been reading science fiction exploring the possibilities of it all for decades. Indeed, I sometimes find myself wishing that certain people had read more SF in their youth, because maybe they'd find it a little easier to wrap their brains around the future we're currently living in.

Anyway. SF is fascinating, immensely varied, and even genuinely important. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

And having rambled that much, I will, perhaps, crawl back under my rock again now. :)

Geez, I never thought SF or dystopian fiction was supposed to predict the future as much as to critique the present. Klara and the Sun, for instance, isn't about the role AI robots will play in the future, but about (among other things) the widening chasm between socio-economic classes and the way we subordinate the lives of the server class to the whims of the moneyed.

>23 nohrt4me2: same theme as The Remains of the Day?

same thing perhaps as never let you go And I agree, while some sci fi was certainly looking forward, much esp these days are centered on critiques of the way we live now. Not new of course,fahrenheit 451 was totally prescient whehtre he ment tobe or not. What I like is when authors are critiquing the now, but who understand human nature with a wink and a nod. I think of Douglas Adams; as sharp as his barbs are, you sorta have to laugh.

>24 dianeham: More like Never Let Me Go, his earlier dystopian.

>26 nohrt4me2: I thought the main character in Remains of the day subordinated his life as part of the server class to the "whims of the moneyed." No?

QUESTION 17: FICTION: READING THE FUTURE

Most of the fiction I read is SF, and has been since childhood. Not that I won't read something else, but after 6 decades of book buying, there's always a tempting SF book nearby.

What I mainly look for is how things - the world, society, people - might be different, somehow, from how we know them. The future particularly leaves lots of room for change in whatever we might mistakenly believe is fixed by nature. I think critics have argued that SF as a field couldn't progress very far until the industrial revolution made technical progress fast enough for someone to observe in a single lifetime.

I also have a certain taste for dark themes. So, apocalypse stories of course, but also stories about fundamental flaws in humans or the world. Examples: Peter Watts's stories featuring how the cognitive biases of our minds lead us into error, or James Tiptree, Jr.'s tales of creatures doomed by their biology.

Many exceptions: Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson are often more optimistic, for example

And well-told adventures are fine, though again I don't want yet another story of brave spacefarers pulling through routine menaces.

>6 jjmcgaffey: I understand that that Lee Corey book, Shuttle Down, actually led to an agreement between the US and Chile over emergency landing rights on Easter Island, although in the end no shuttle ever launched out of Vanderberg.

>22 bragan: Hmm, would a series of talks by LTers be best called "TIM Talks"?

>27 dianeham: Yah, sure. That's one of the big overarching themes in all his books, though I have no idea what the heck his fantasy, The Buried Giant, was about.

Yes I call it SF which I believe annoys the hell out of some readers, perhaps someone could tell me why people object to the initialisation.

Like many young readers (when I was young it was mainly male readers). I gobbled up SF. The books were fairly easy to read and many of them were adventure stories where the authors could create scenarios that were different from the everyday world in which I lived. The well known critical guide to science fiction edited by Neil Barron; titled his book Anatomy of Wonder and the idea of a "sense of wonder" has remained with me ever since. A good science fiction novel should at least create that feeling of wonder. Many good SF novels create much more and many make the reader think about the world in which he lives and how it could be different.

I get the point in the question which suggests that human behaviour is much the same in whatever environment it might find itself and this was particularly true of many of the stories coming out of the golden age of science fiction and on into the 1950's. However by creating strange, perhaps horrific worlds or situations it could put characters in very unfamiliar situations, it could re-examine how people might act, feel and react. An extreme example might be when faced with the survival of the human race itself. I have lost count of the number of SF novels that claim on the front cover that the very existence of the human race is in doubt.

Reading science fiction from the 1950's one would be amazed at how optimistic the authors were about technological developments. Many thought that by 2021 space travel would be in full swing and the solar system would be thoroughly explored. Few predicted that we would only get as far as the moon and then actively stop all manned planet exploration in 1972. Thats 50 years ago, who would have thought that that would be the case.
SF from the past that appears more relevant to todays world, unfortunately is books describing some sort of dystopia. The mad, insane president who might start a nuclear war, or the huge commercial conglomerates who would suck the earth dry of resources leading to a desolate uninhabitable earth.

I still read SF for that sense of wonder that gripped me as a young reader. I am currently revisiting those authors from the 1950's that I enjoyed so much. I am not convinced by some generalist authors who stray into science fiction like Kazuo Ishiguro or Margaret Atwood; who take out and dust down old science fiction tropes and market them as best sellers. To me however well written they are, they lack that essential sense of wonder. The only generalist writer that I have read that did do the business in SF is Doris Lessing and so a recommendation for you Shikasta. My favourite authors from the past are Olaf Stapledon, J G Ballard, John Wyndham Arthur C Clarke Richard Matheson Hal Clement and Philip Wylie

This is only a snapshot of thoughts that cover this huge genre and so on to my next SF read which will be A canticle for Leibowitz which is very highly rated I believe.

>31 nohrt4me2: me either.

>32 baswood: oh i wish I was reading that for the first time. It blew me away, and reread it many times since

Wylie is possibly the worst misogynistic turd ever and that's in company pullulating with the sort. Truly vile.

ETA: several posts on Wylie's Generation of vipers begin with this one:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/138771#5223533

And a post on Gladiator from the representation-in-sf threads:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/221092#5809796

>29 dukedom_enough: Really? Cool! I wonder if they took any steps to deal with the problems Correy pointed out (dealing with the leftover fuel, insufficient runway for takeoff, etc).

>32 baswood: I've never seen an objection to SF. Sci-fi, yes, mostly because of who coined the word (I forget his name, one of the big magazine publishers in the 40s or 50s). That's generally used as a label for the much-objected-to (here and elsewhere) Heroic Spacemen Conquering Aliens/Alien Planets style of SF, in a dismissive tone. Sciffy!

I would say I read a fair amount of SF, but not as a deliberate choice. I pick books that sound interesting to me and about 10%-!5% turn out to be SF.
I began reading SF in my teens, in the 1960's at the height of the Cold War, and I was obsessed with books about nuclear war and what might come afterwards. I believed every word and was mostly terrified and anxious by what I read. Some of these books included On the Beach, Alas Babylon, Earth Abides, Fail Safe, and many others. I called these "end of the world" books. Others of their ilk I have read and "enjoyed" later in life have included The Last Ship, The Road, A Gift Upon the Shore, The Postman, The Slynx, Malevil, and many others.
In my 30's/40's I read and enjoyed quite a bit of SF by women, including Patricia Anthony, Sheri Tepper, Elizabeth Moon. Some of the male SF writers I enjoyed at this time included David Brin, Greg Bear and Robert Charles Wilson.
As to SF set in space, I definitely do not like the "space wars" type of story, and I lean more toward "first contact" or alien culture type of stories. I was enthralled by the Rama series when I read it. Another recent novel largely set in space that I loved (no aliens though, and a lot about the end of the world) was Seveneves. I also enjoyed The Three Body Problem series before it began to focus on space wars. (And for some reason, despite multiple attempts I have never been able to sit through a Star Wars movie).
The only other SF I definitely avoid are novels about zombies. Recently I have read several apocalyptic novels involving things like plagues/pandemics and climate change, and even one where a financial collapse causes the apocalypse.

>35 LolaWalser: speaking of misogynists john campbell was so bad that last year the award in his name was changed. Analog Science Fiction and Fact said it was changing the prize’s name from the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

ETA I had not heard about Wylie till I saw your post; yikes, seems like there are way too many people who agree with him

>36 jjmcgaffey: oh Id been told several times by adults that girls dont read sci fi. A lot of the same people objected to comics. Fortunately most of us ignored them.

>37 arubabookwoman: The only other SF I definitely avoid are novels about zombies.

yup. never understood the attraction. tho I admit to loving michael jacksons thriller but thats as far as it goes

>35 LolaWalser: enjoyed walking through that old thread of yours.

I went through a period of reading lots of SF. I read all of Marian Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series and the Dragonriders of Pern series, and others. I have reread Lois Lowry's The Giver many times, and my middle school students often recommended reading choices for me. My reading tastes sort of ebb and flow though.

>1 avaland: Q17

But but but "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." :) OK, ok... I will play nice.

I grew up on a somewhat broken country. We did not get into a civil war (thankfully) but this did not make us less of a broken country. Science Fiction (and the rest of the speculative genres) offered a view of the world that could be (not much point reading about the contemporary state of another country when you are stuck somewhere -- or that was at least part of why I gravitated towards SF). Plus the speculative genres were conspicuously missing from my parents' library - they were considered children's only books at home. So there was also a part of the teenage rebellion into the whole situation.

I grew up with Jules Verne, Alexander Belyaev and Yan Bibiyan (if you never heard of him, he is a 10 years boy who meets the devil Fyut (about the same age as him) and goes on to have adventures -- meeting witches and wizards and going to the Moon at one point (where Verne comes into play). I loved Verne and Belyaev (even if both of them were probably way over my head). And I could not see why they are not suitable for an adult...

So when I was in my early teens, I was looking for the speculative genres. But what really clinched it were the views to the future. Some of them were bizarre, some were very familiar but they were not here and there and one could dream that they may happen. Foundation, Dune, Gateway, Hyperion, Eon, Startide Rising, The Snow Queen, The Vor Game, Helliconia Spring, Red Mars, The Uplift War, The Engines of God, Hospital Station (to name a few - and most of these start series - and I will skip the list of fantasies which got me that part of the genres at the same time) - they got either published for the first time or got republished around the time when I was reaching towards the genre.

Add all the Eastern European authors (Bulgarian (Svetoslav Minkov, Lyuben Dilov, Lyubomir Nikolov, Russian (Strugatskys, Ivan Yefremov, Kir Bulychev and so on), Polish (Lem for example)) that were already published and available in the library and for a couple of years I went on a very serious SF diet. It still is "my" genre.

I vastly prefer the "Galactic empire" subgenre -- not the military SF part of it (which I do not dislike but it is not what I usually seek) - those tales set so far down the road, when humanity had left Earth in one way or another, and had made a life across the stars. Most of the books above fit into this (so does Alliance-Union Universe which was almost killed for me by an idiotic translation). Which is a whole different ball of game - I am aware of some Spanish and French genre authors (and quite a lot of the Eastern and Central European ones) but I keep finding new authors (Angélica Gorodischer for example - I need to get back to her) which I had never heard of because I had not seen a translation.

I read dystopias (and the other -topias) because you just cannot escape them lately but they rarely resonate in the same way as the far futures. I like the ones which find a way to show you how different people are at the end... and how similar at the same time. Octavia Butler comes to mind (and not just for her dystopias). Or the old classics of the genre.

But I am also drawn to time travel and alternate history tales - they allow a different type of looking into the future (or the past sometimes but even that is in a way a future that never was).

So what do all of these have in common? They are showing humanity at its best and worst and in a good author's hands, they tell us more about today than about the future. Which is why I ended up staying with SF for so long -- some see the rockets, some realize that these are tales of us - despite being set somewhere else. But if one skips all SF just because it is SF, they are missing a lot. :)

And I will stop rambling.

>39 baswood:

Cool. Do you consider Wylie still a favourite?

>38 cindydavid4:

My impression is that it was Campbell's overall rightwingery rather than his misogyny per se that made associating his name with a prize less and less palatable. That and his sympathy for kookery à la Ron Hubbard. Like today's "rational" techbros, the anoraks of yesteryear didn't mind any insult to women nearly as much as falling away from their collective self-image as science-minded.

>35 LolaWalser: I read Generation of Vipers in my mid-teens. I lacked life experience or education to evaluate it, and found it very depressing. Enjoyed your takedown in the older thread. Just think, the year is 1942 and this is what he wants to publish? Like, there are some other events going on in the world? Also: "...the woman who cannot reason logically, the bridge fiend..." women can't be logical but they can play a difficult card game?

>36 jjmcgaffey: Don't know. Think I may have got that from Corey (G. Harry Stine), so can't vouch for accuracy.

Another SF reader here and I've never really considered why I like it. If I had to have a stab at it I'd say I think it's because the writers create a world that doesn't exist, so different to my own to be almost (but not quite) unimaginable.

So hard to pick favourites or make recommendations because I would be here all night going through my library, but a couple of things that came to mind are:
The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my all time favourite series
The Expanse by James S A Corey is a lot of fun.
Blindsight by Peter Watts almost literally blew my mind.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Semiosis by Sue Burke are a couple of good examples of familiar but different sentience (hard to describe what I like about them without spoilers).
The Earth Trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix was one of the first series that made me expand my idea of what being human could be.

I shall stop now because it is past my bedtime :-).

I have a yen to go back and read some of those pulp SF writers whose books I used to get at the drug store: Algis Budrys, Piers Anthony, and Jack Vance. John Varley wrote some books in the 1970s featuring Cirocco Jones, a black woman space captain. Next year's reading theme??

oh my I loved Piers Anthony in college, thought he was so fun and clever. Tried to read him again a few years back - um just no. However ymmv

>48 cindydavid4: YMMV? Your mileage may vary? You make me vomit? No idea.

heh, your mileage may vary. You may have a completely different take on his writing than I did. its all good.

Follow-up: Does anyone have any comments on the television/cinema dramatization of any of one's favorite science fiction books/stories?

>51 avaland: Anathema! :)

I am still gathering courage to see what they did to the Foundation (even though I am aware that this series has as much to do with the novels as a donkey with a thoroughbred but still). And I still had not seen the new Dune (even though I hear it is not too bad). I don't like watching interpretations of books I love :( I tend to get disappointed.

In a less "I hate them all" note - I look at these as "what if" stories (to borrow a line from comics) - they happen in a universe which is somewhat different and tilted so instead of trying to find what is different and complain about it, I tend to look at it as a possibility to see someone else's reading of the story novel. I enjoyed the Altered Carbon series for example despite it missing a lot of what made the novels so much fun. I liked Blade Runner (mainly because of how different it was from the source). I liked Arrival. I tend to like movies based on stories and series based on single novels more than I like movies based on novels - that allows enough space for both the story I like and for the new and different. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is in a class of its own because of its history of course.

But there is also the older SF style vs newer SF style phenomenon (note that I am talking style and not just when and who wrote a book). A lot of the new authors had been born and/or lived the majority of their lives in the world of reprints and movies and TV industry that seems to expand every second. The modern stories are almost written ready for filming (some even had swung so far on the other side that they read like movies). That makes Hunger Games (for example or Harry Potter if we allow for fantasy just to add to the argument) a lot easier to make (even if both missed a lot from their source) than trying to film some of the older series. The more action-based the source material is, the easier it is to see it filmed. Which is why I doubt we will see a lot of Gene Wolfe's work filmed for example. But then so I thought about the Foundation (I really need to see what they did one of these days).

well to start with Games of Thrones series was great till the author stopped writing new books so the last few seasons bombed, badly. Ah well it was good while it lasted

I find most adaptations of sci fi are best done as a series: Dune (and the new movie is actually pretty good), Station Eleven, Hitchikers Guide, the Expanse.....They have more time give us the full picture of the world as opposed to a movie that takes the parts they want to show.

>51 avaland: Blade Runner - the best

>44 dukedom_enough:

Yeah, imagine going on TV and saying yes, I defend calling women "hammerhead sharks" and "domestic monkeys" and whatnot...

But what is even more depressing, what triggers me, is that his arguments are practically verbatim repeated today by the alt-right manosphere, incels and MRAs etc. Not that I mean he's the original source, we all know misogyny's ancient and forever, but those intermediaries MATTER. Wylie was by no means an ordinary "golden age" sexist sf writer, he was a propagandist, a preacher of misogyny. Where others were simply stereotypical in their sexism, passively going along with the normalized prejudices, he actively CHAMPIONED it. He actively made lives of who knows how many women that more miserable, and not a few men either (beginning with, as he says, the "nances".)

And today, at this moment when women are again suffering such severe backlashes from Afghanistan to the US, when white male supremacists are massacring women and PoC, with the manifestos ranting about women in those same words, making those same arguments... I just can't take it. No one should.

Films based on science fiction novels (wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_based_on_science_fiction_novels

Remember, to discuss the film, you have to have read the book....

I've liked the "Handmaid's Tale" with Elisabeth Moss. It's not the book, of course, but it's a way to reach a broader audience.

>52 AnnieMod: I get the disappointment thing. I like "Foundation" but it's been so long since I read the books I don't remember quite a lot, just the basics. I rely on my other half who has all this stuff in his head to tell me. Not sure Jared Harris is what I had in my head for Hari Seldon, but one gets used to it/him.

Is that donkey reference a sly nod to "The Mule"? LOL

>53 cindydavid4: Game of Thrones is clearly fantasy not SF....

>56 avaland: Don’t see Blade Runner on that list.

I don't like watching sci fi adaptations because they all seem geared for 14 year old boys--more abt special effects and/or girls in slinky outfits than the story. (Oops, did we decide not to call it "sci fi"? Sorry, age and my low-rent proclivities are showing.)

Did I read there was a film version of A Wrinkle in Time? Not a book I enjoyed, but I can see the cinematic possibilities. Would at least be free of slink.

Oh, yes, just looked it up, and there was a movie version in 2003. Late to that party.

Does the loose adaptation of I Am Legend, "The Omega Man" count? I liked that movie. Before Charlton Heston became a shill for the NRA he was pretty good in a few science fiction movies--"Planet of the (goddam them all to hell!) Apes" and "Soylent Green."

I have a soft spot for Heston. After he made one of his first movies, he was sent back to his home town of Lake St Helena for a "candid" photo shoot on a nearby ski slope. Some handsome tall local boys were rounded up to be his "friends," and my dad was one of them. He said Heston was very shy, disliked the phoniness of the shoot, but was appreciative to all the guys who participated. Dad said it was fun bc they all got free sweaters.

Wow, have I never seen a film based on a sf book I've read? On a quick scan of that list, I guess not. That's weird. And I'm not a TV person so all of those adaptations are out. Well, carry on.

>57 avaland: Well, I was looking for a relevant comparison and that one wrote itself. Kinda. :) I’d probably go ahead and watch it at some point and just keep in mind my “different universe, what if” mantra in mind but Foundation had been my book for as long as I remember so I am pickier than usual.

>58 dianeham: It is here though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick

2001: A Space Odyssey is an excellent movie, though, like a lot of people, I guess, I have to say that I saw the movie before reading the book. Arthur C. Clarke came and gave a talk at my junior high school soon after the movie was released. He was quite gracious. During the Q&A, one of the students asked him how he liked the movie version of his book. He said, "Well, I wrote the screenplay, so I wouldn't have any cause for complaint."

Does "The Day of the Triffids" count as science fiction? That movie scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid.

>57 avaland: oh right never mind....

>63 AnnieMod: Annie, that’s great tysm.
>64 rocketjk: I dropped acid when I saw 2001.

QUESTION 15: LIST 5:: IN TRANSLATION
(note: question # is wrong, but I'm leaving it and will correct it with the next question)
While an earlier list asked you to name books you had read SET in various countries, this list is asking you to name books you can recommend (with or without comment), that you read IN TRANSLATION.

As usual, copy and paste the list below and offer a translated book for as many lines as you care to fill in. Take your time.

1. French (France):
2. Arabic:
3. French (anywhere except France):
4. Icelandic:
5. German:
6. Finnish:
7. Norwegian:
8. Russian:
9. Spanish
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi)
11. Japanese:
12. Korean:
13. Italian:
14. Chinese:
15. Hebrew:
16. Portuguese:
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans
18. Your choice
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene)
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian)
---------------------------------------------

Note: An internet search can be helpful. Even GoodReads seems to have lists of "translated from the...".

(next question will be in June)

Q15: translations

1. French (France): Asterix in Britain by René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo (tr. Anthea Bell)
2. Arabic: The travels of Ibn Battutah;
3. French (anywhere except France): An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (Togo); Poems of a Black Orpheus by Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal)
4. Icelandic: Tómas Jónsson : bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson
5. German:
6. Finnish: Un Homme Heureux by Arto Paasilinna (read in French)
7. Norwegian: "Farthest North" by Fridtjof Nansen
8. Russian: A sportsman's notebook by Ivan Turgenev
9. Spanish: Your face tomorrow by Javier Marías
10. Any Indian language: The quilt and other stories by Ismat Chughtai (Urdu)
11. Japanese: The Makioka sisters by Junʾichirō Tanizaki
12. Korean: Human acts by Han Kang
13. Italian: Christ stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi; Discovery of the world : a political awakening in the shadow of Mussolini by Luciana Castellina
14. Chinese: Love in a fallen city by Eileen Chang
15. Hebrew: A tale of love and darkness by Amos Oz
16. Portuguese: The history of the siege of Lisbon by José Saramago
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic (Croatian); Christ recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek);
18. Any indigenous African language : The black people and whence they came : a Zulu view by M M Fuze (first original book published in Zulu); Mr. Myombekere and his wife Bugonoka, their son Ntulanalwo and daughter Bulihwali : the story of an ancient African community by Aniceti Kitereza (Kikerewe, via Swahili)
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language: Notebooks from New Guinea : reflections on life, nature, and science from the depths of the rainforest by Vojtech Novotny (Czech); The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish)
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian)

---

This was harder than I thought, because I tend to focus on languages I can read in the original, so there are shamefully few books in my catalogue for some quite major languages I can't read, such as Chinese and Arabic. Also, I couldn't make a recommendation for German, as there are only about ten translations among the 285 German books I have classified, and they are all more or less accidents. French was easier, since Anthea Bell's legendary Asterix translations were making me laugh long before I ever started reading French independently. In Spanish, discovering Javier Marías was one of the triggers that got me to make the effort to learn to read it properly.

Where I did have some choice, I've tried to name less obvious books that I enjoyed.

Other languages where I seem to have clusters of translations not covered by the question: Swedish, Yiddish, Turkish (or do we count it as Balkan?), Hungarian, Danish. Dutch and Afrikaans are also outside the scope of the question, but I have hardly any translated books from those languages.

BTW: Easy way to find books is to search for "English" as Language in your catalogue and then sort by Original Language. In my case this led me to make a few dozen corrections of data that had obviously got messed up at some point by careless use of Bulk Edit...

OK, I did this. I admit that it i's NOT easy BUT it's interesting. I used my tags quite a lot but also searched the internet in various ways for authors (i.e. Chinese authors, Portuguese authors...etc). The long and the short of it was that tooling around on the web I found more interesting books...that I might NEED, ha ha. Dates are the translation. All of these books were given 4 - 5 stars when I read them.

1. French (France): I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, 1995, science fiction)

2. Arabic: Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan Al-Shayk, 1992 (Lebanese)

3. French (anywhere except France): Waiting for Tomorrow: A Novel by Nathacha Appanah, 2014 (Mauritius)

4. Icelandic: Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason (original title of Jar City trans, 2004 My first of many Icelandic reads!

5. German: The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, 1998 .

6. Finnish: When the Doves Disappeared by Sofi Oksanen, 2012.

7. Norwegian: Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoli, 2014 . I’m begging someone to translate more! Also loved Anne Holt’s crime series.

8. Russian: I had a hang-up on Pasternak in my youth, but I'll offer a book more contemporary, like A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories by Viktor Pelevin, 2003

9. Spanish: Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile, edited by Marjorie Agosin, 1991.

10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi) --------------

11. Japanese: The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki, 1990.

12. Korean: ———

13. Italian: My favorite would probably be The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, 1983

14. Chinese: "Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China by Lijia Zhang (2008)

15. Hebrew: I read all of the Bible in the 70s, cover to cover, so some of those books should cover this :-)

16. Portuguese: ——

17. Any of the languages of the Balkans :The Country Where No One Ever Dies by Ornela Vorpsi (Albania), 2009.

18. Your Choice: DUTCH: Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst, 2010.

19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene)
Sweet Darusya: A Tale Of Two Villages by Maria Matios, 2019, Ukrainian

20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian) In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Šlepikas (2019)

I think the grass is dry now and I have seedlings to put in the ground. Have fun and I promise the next "list" will be a bit lighter!

>68 thorold: I've got to be really fast to get ahead of you, Mark! I'm very impressed with your list. My categories have no real science to them, I grouped some regionally to make a selection easier.

It did really bug me that I couldn't fill all 20!

And I did change No. 18 to "your choice" after I discovered what I was asking was nearly impossible.

>70 avaland: Yes, indigenous African languages are tricky: the few people who write in those languages often choose to do so specifically because they don’t think what they have to say can or should be expressed in the languages of colonialism. Even the very conservative Aniceti Kitereza held out against translation (even into Swahili) until nearly the end of his life.

Q15 Translations
Here's my attempt:

1. French (France): the Vernon Subutex trilogy by Virginie Despentes, for a picture of contemporary France
2. Arabic: La bibliothèque enchantée (there’s got to be an English translation in the works!) by Mohammad Rabie, better read after Hayy bin Yaqzân by Ibn Tufayl – otherwise, anything by Naguib Mahfouz
3. French (anywhere except France): Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba by Mongo Beti – for people who get irony
4. Icelandic: Place of the Heart by Steinunn Sigurdardottir
5. German: Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić
6. Finnish: The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo
7. Norwegian: Pass! It looks like I’ve never given over 3,5 stars to the books written in Norwegian I’ve read. In Danish: Pelle the Conqueror by Martin Andersen Nexø. In Swedish: The Forest of Hours by Kerstin Ekman
8. Russian: Unna by Youri Rytkheou
9. Spanish: The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán, which by the way wasn’t my first choice, but it looks like neither Eugenia Almeida nor most of Ana María Matute have been translated into English. What’s the matter with you, English-language readers?
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi): The Legends of Khasak written in Malayalam by O. V. Vijayan
11. Japanese: Haikus by Basho
12. Korean: I was going to write A Greater Music by Bae Suah, but as it’s nearly all set in Germany, I went for Kim Jiyoung by Nam-Joo Cho instead
13. Italian: Accabadora by Michela Murgia
14. Chinese: the Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao
15. Hebrew: Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz
16. Portuguese: Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: once you’ve removed Slavic languages, there is Albanian: Broken April by Ismail Kadare; the poems of Kavafy, and I have nothing outstanding for Romanian so far in my reading journey
18.a Any indigenous African language: Chaka, written in Sotho by Thomas Mofolo
18.b Hungarian: The Door by Magda Szabó
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): This is tricky: I’ve read Ukrainian and Belorussian authors, but they wrote in Russian… Polish: the poems of Wisława Szymborska; Serbo-Croat (I’m not going to differentiate between the languages: I’m not qualified and that’s a linguistic/political can of worms): The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić, The Book of Blam by Aleksandar Tišma
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian): Estonia: The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk; Lithuanian: Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, nothing outstanding in Latvian so far in my reading journey

Heh. The only things I know I've read in translation are comics/graphic novels - Asterisk (I've read most/all of them in English, a few in Portuguese and Spanish...), and Yoko Tsuno, both from French. Oh, and some Russian novels, for school - I can't remember which ones I actually read, though, so I'm not counting them.

Oh! I can actually do one that's an African language (sort of) - Krio, from Sierra Leone. My mom worked there (embassy), and a friend sent her a children's book called How Baboon Got A Shiny Rump. It's written in English and Krio on opposite pages (with lots of pictures). Krio is an English-based creole. And the book is not cataloged on LT (I'd have to go find it to get publication data - I read it standing up at Mom's house, so I never cataloged it) nor is it, as far as I can see, on Amazon. There's a YouTube book trailer and that's it.

1. French (France): Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier
2. Arabic:none
3. French (anywhere except France): no idea
4. Icelandic: Jar City
5. German:Duino Elegies
6. Finnish: The Man Who Died (I only gave this 3 stars but it’s the only Finnish book I finished)
7. Norwegian: Kristin Lavransdatter
8. Russian:none
9. Spanish: Elena Knows
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi)
11. Japanese: Heaven
12. Korean:none
13. Italian: Reality is not what it seems : the elementary structure of things
14. Chinese: The Invisible Valley
15. Hebrew: The Memory Monster
16. Portuguese:none
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: none
18.Catalan: Death in Spring
19. Ukrainian: Dancing in Odessa

Ooh, this list is right up my alley! I challenged myself to include as many female authors as possible (except France, I had to give a shoutout to Philippe Claudel, one of my favorite authors). Sadly I was unable to list a book translated from an Indian language.

1. French (France): Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel
2. Arabic: The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
3. French (anywhere except France): Em by Kim Thúy
4. Icelandic: Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristin Omarsdottir
5. German: My Grandmother's Braid by Alina Bronsky
6. Finnish: Purge by Sofi Oksanen
7. Norwegian: Love by Hanne Ørstavik
8. Russian: Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmila Ulitskaya
9. Spanish: Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi)
11. Japanese: The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami
12. Korean: Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim
13. Italian: From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus
14. Chinese: Garlic Ballads by Yan Mo
15. Hebrew: A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev
16. Portuguese: The Elephant's Journey by Jose Saramago
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: The silent escape : three thousand days in Romanian prisons by Lena Constante (memoir, Romanian)
18. Your choice: Burned Child Seeks the Fire by Cordelia Edvardson (memoir, Swedish)
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): In red by Magdalena Tulli (Polish)
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian): Graves without Crosses by Arved Viirlaid (Estonian)

QUESTION 15: LIST 5:: IN TRANSLATION

1. French (France):
2. Arabic:
3. French (anywhere except France):
4. Icelandic:
5. German:
6. Finnish:
7. Norwegian:
8. Russian:
9. Spanish
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi)
11. Japanese: The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
12. Korean:
13. Italian:
14. Chinese:
15. Hebrew: Bethlehem Road Murder by Batya Gur, Literary Murder: A Critical Case by Batya Gur,
16. Portuguese:
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans
18. Your choice: A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (the treasury itself is not translated, but many of the tales in it are translated from the Yiddish)
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): The Last Wish and Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian)

Well. List below reveals my not-very-adventurous Eurocentricity.

1. French (France): The Plague. Maybe belongs in #3

2. Arabic: An Unnecessary Woman

3. French (anywhere except France): NONE

4. Icelandic: Paradise Reclaimed

5. German: Go, Went, Gone

6. Finnish: NONE

7. Norwegian: Ibsen, Ibsen Ibsen

8. Russian: Anna Karenina (not a fan of Constance Garnett)

9a. Spanish: The Shadow of the Wind

9b. Spanish outside of Spain: Marquez and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi): NONE, though have read Indian/Pakistani writers who write in English

11. Japanese: The Diary of Lady Murasaki

12. Korean: NONE

13. Italian: several by Grazia Deladda

14. Chinese: NONE

15. Hebrew: NONE

16. Portuguese: Blindness

17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: NONE

18. Your choice:

19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): Museum of Abandoned Secrets

20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian): NONE

Why are lists so much fun?

1. French (France): Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
2. Arabic:
3. French (anywhere except France): This Blinding Absence of Light - Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco)
4. Icelandic: Outrage - Arnaldur Indridason
5. German: Heidi - Johanna Spyri
6. Finnish Swedish: The Laughing Policeman - Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo
7. Norwegian: Kristin Lavransdatter: The Bridal Wreath - Sigrid Undset
8. Russian:
9. Spanish: The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi)
11. Japanese: All She Was Worth- Miyuki Miyabe
12. Korean:
13. Italian: The Dance of the Seagull - Andrea Camilleri (all the Montalbano books are fun)
14. Chinese: Red Mandarin Dress - Xiaolong qiu
15. Hebrew:
16. Portuguese:
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans Turkish: Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk
18. Your choice French Canadian: Nikolski - Nicolas Dickner
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene) Ignorance - Milan Kundera (Czech)
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian)

1. French (France): The Balcony by Jean Genet
2. Arabic: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
3. French (anywhere except France): The First Garden by Anne Hébert or In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo
4. Icelandic: the inevitable Independent People by Halldór Laxness (I don't read many mysteries, so this is probably always going to be my Iceland pick)
5. German: Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson
6. Finnish: The Manila Rope by Veijo Meri
7. Norwegian: The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
8. Russian: Buddha's Little Finger by Viktor Pelevin
9. Spanish: Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer (Thabkfully, someone has already posted another favorite -- Your Face Tomorrow)
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi) Basti by Intizar Husain
11. Japanese: The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada
12. Korean: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah
13. Italian: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
14. Chinese: Snow and Shadow by Dorothy Tse
15. Hebrew: Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
16. Portuguese: The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš
18. Your choice Catalan Solitude by Víctor Català and Hungarian Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene) A Ballad for Georg Henig by Victor Paskow, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian) -- only one Estonian novel that I won't recommend.

>79 ELiz_M: There are some non-crime-novel authors in Iceland beyond Laxness and there are more showing up all the time! I'm reading an interesting collection of very short stories titled Stone Tree by Gyrdir Eliasson currently. Then there is the prolific Sjon, of course, and the ex-pat Olaf Olafsson (Of the top of my head, I think his The Journey Home is his most "Icelandic". I gave five stars to Hallgrimur Helgason's Woman at 1,000 Degrees. But yes, Arnaldur Indridason, a crime novelist, was my first Icelandic author, read in 2005. When I was there in 2012(?) I hoped to find more in translation, but the very nice bookstore in the old part of Reykjavik was selling mostly books in Icelandic (and so they should).

>67 avaland: What great reading lists this is generating!
My choices are all fiction:

1. French (France): The Count of Monte Cristo because there's nothing like a good adventure story really well written, and to update things The Seventh Function of Language

2. Arabic: seems to be missing from my reading

3. French (anywhere except France): from Canada Pélagie which now that I think of it might fit the current Reading Globally quarter of Outcasts and Castaways

4. Icelandic: Hotel Silence seemed like a simple book, but lingers in the mind

5. German: All for Nothing my favourite fiction of 2021

6. Finnish: Unknown Soldiers

7. Norwegian: Kristin Lavransdatter the whole trilogy, to be read again and again

8. Russian: The Golovlyov Family about as bleak as it comes, but an excellent portrayal

9. Spanish: Mazurka for Two Dead Men by Camilo José Cela, this needs to be read in big chunks to make any sense of it, but it will definitely reward you

9b. Adding a category for Spanish (anywhere except Spain) Triste's History (Argentina)

10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi) The Crows of Deliverance (Hindi) actually still reading this

11. Japanese: The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

12. Korean: don't think I have read a book translated from Korean

13. Italian: History: A Novel by Elena Morante

14. Chinese: Beijing Coma - so many from which to choose here, but that would be today's pick
>75 labfs39: Loved The Garlic Ballads ditto >68 thorold: Love in a Fallen City

15. Hebrew: To Know a Woman by Amos Oz

16. Portuguese: All the Names by Jose Saramago

16b. Portuguese (anywhere but Portugal) Barren Lives from Brazil, more bleakness

17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: Albanian The Concert by the incomparable Ismail Kadare

18. Your choice: going with Romanian here - October Eight O'Clock by Norman Manea
also noting there isn't really a category for Hungarian

19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene) not sure this language description is correct, but Serbo-Croatian: Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan by Ivo Andric

20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian) Estonian - The Czar's Madman
---------------------------------------------

Now I know I need to read translations from Korean and Arabic - wondering how I missed Arabic

Hm, let's try.
* is added for books I had read in Bulgarian (so pre-2010 for the most part).
When not sure which to chose between multiple books, the latest one I read from the category wins...

QUESTION 15: LIST 5:: IN TRANSLATION

1. French (France): At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
2. Arabic: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
3. French (anywhere except France): Brotherhood by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Senegal)
4. Icelandic: Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson - although a few more would have worked here...
5. German: Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson
6. Finnish: *The Egyptian by Mika Waltari - while I had read some other Finnish books, this is the book that I read as a teen and stayed with me.
7. Norwegian: A Doll's House / Hedda Gabler / The Master-Builder / The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen
8. Russian: *The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (I've also read it in Russian but I got introduced to to it in Bulgarian so it qualifies).
9. Spanish: Outlaws by Javier Cercas
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi): Pyre by Perumal Murugan (Tamil) - slim pickings in my readings but that one is not bad and I liked it so might as well mention it.
11. Japanese: Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
12. Korean: Hm...
13. Italian: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
14. Chinese: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (although this is bound to change because of my current Chinese reading going on).
15. Hebrew: *Black Box by Amos Oz
16. Portuguese: *The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans: *The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
18. Your choice: *Solaris by Stanisław Lem
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): *The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian): *Three Jolly Fellows by Eno Raud - Estonian Children author anyone of my generation in Bulgaria grew up with.

1. French (France):autumn rounds
2. Arabic:the wrong end of the telescope
3. French (anywhere except France):
4. Icelandic:njals saga (late registration meant the only english class left was Scandinavian. Ended up being one of my fav classes ever
5. German:the reader
6. Finnish:Tales from Moominvalley
7. Norwegian:sovietistan
8. Russian:memories from moscow to the black sea
9. Spanish Eva Luna
10. Any Indian language in an antique land
11. Japanese:The Tale of Genji
12. Korean:Pachinko
13. Italian:the name of the rose
14. Chinese:wild swan
15. Hebrew:touch the water touch the wind
16. Portuguese:the gospel according to Jesus Christ
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans
18. Yiddish: Favorite Tales of Sholom Aleichem
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene)Czech Travels with Herodotus
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian)
-----------------------------------

I apparently don't know any books from the Baltics or Balkans in translation. For shame! Must see what th rest of you guys picked!

>83 cindydavid4: I was just asking myself why I didn’t list Tove Jansson under Finnish too, but of course it’s because she was Finnish but wrote in Swedish…

>81 SassyLassy: You remind me that I still have Pélagie on the TBR, I ought to try to get to it. It probably won’t be in Q2 now, though.

>85 thorold: loved those books as a kid; didn''t realize it either; I looked up Finnish books in translaion and that one popped up!

>82 AnnieMod: I hadn't hear of that Shibli book...must look into it.

>87 avaland: One of the two outstanding books I started my reading 2021 with (the other one made the list as well for Japanese). My review is as non-spoilery as possible if you want to look at it. :)

>88 AnnieMod: Thanks for adding another title to my Amazon book wish list! I read through a few of the reviews for the book (great review, btw).

Oh, I was just reminded about another "other reading (Q16)" I do quite a lot of - online comics. Sometimes it's the same strips you can get in the newspaper, many of which are gag-a-day strips, but some of them - both the syndicated strips and the webcomics - are real stories. Reading a page a day (or two or three a week, for many) it doesn't feel like reading - but I'm currently binging on a few. Some are completed, and I wanted to reread; some are just years-long stories and I wanted to start at the beginning again and immerse myself in the story.

Currently reading Gourmet Hound (fantastic story, completed). This will be my third read-through and second binge.

Just finished reading White Noise - not completed, but I wanted a review of what had been going on because it's getting to a crisis point.

I also read and reread Girl Genius, Questionable Content, Freefall...just reread for the first time Hubris Comics, which has just passed an inflection point, no idea where it's going now... So many good stories out there! Some of them come out as books, and I catalog them when I read them upon getting them - but I read them online too (Girl Genius again, Widdershins...).

>82 AnnieMod: I don't think of my reading as often overlapping with yours, but I am pleased to see we chose the same books for Arabic and German. I do love Ibsen and your choice for the Balkans is another favorite.

>90 jjmcgaffey: Have you read Drive (still going) or Freakangels (completed)? It appears Freakangels is no longer available online. I read it online and then bought the entire series. Loved Freakangels and love Drive, though they are completely different.

>92 robertwmartin: You are mean and nasty and I'm not going to get enough sleep tonight...(five minutes past midnight, now).

I'd bookmarked Drive but hadn't started (more than the first few pages, anyway). I'm now up to Act II.

I'll keep an eye out for the Freakangels books.

(thank you, great story!)

10. Any Indian language — for those who didn’t have anything to list (and for the rest of us), it might be interesting to know that Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, has just won the International Booker prize.

>94 thorold: Hopefully, a reprint is in the works, because there aren't many copies available at the moment.

Q17: I would much rather go backwards in time than forwards. I can probably count on my one hand (well, plus a few fingers) the sci-fi that I've read. Of course I have read The Handmaid's Tale and 1984 (BEFORE the year 1984), and I was the Graduate Teaching Assistant for the big sci-fi guy at University of Michigan, so I know I read a half dozen more that I can't remember the titles of.

Q15 Translations. This will take some effort
1. French (France): Classic—Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; Contemporary—Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
2. Arabic: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswani
3. French (anywhere except France): A bit of a cheat here—The Lover by Marguerite Duras. She is French but born and raised in French Indochine (Vietnam), where the book is set. I’m sure I’ve also read novels by Canadians and Haitians translated from the French but couldn’t come up with any offhand.
4. Icelandic:
5. German: Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
6. Finnish: The True Deceiver by Tove Janssen
7. Norwegian: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (and all of Henrik Ibsen’s plays)
8. Russian: Many classics—Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago, etc.
9. Spanish: Classic--Don Quixote. Contemporary—Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (who is Mexican).
10. Any Indian language (i.e. Bengali, Hindi): I read a LOT of books by ethnic Indian writers, but many of them write in English. Classic—Tagore’s poems. Contemporary--Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag.
11. Japanese: The Housekeeper and the Professor by {Yoko Ogawa
12. Korean: Human Acts by Han Kang (who also wrote The Vegetarian).
13. Italian: Classic—Orlando Furioso, The Decameron, The Divine Comedy, The Book of the Courtier. Contemporary—Dead end here. I’ve never read anything by Eco, Calvino, or Ferrante.
14. Chinese: The Vagrants by Yiyun Li. I’ve loved all of her novels.
15. Hebrew: Poems by Yehuda Amichai.
16. Portuguese: Another dead end for me. Samargo seems to dominate lists, but I’ve never read him or Coelho (a Brazilian writing in Portuguese).
17. Any of the languages of the Balkans:
18. Your Choice: Oddly, this was tough. I read so many Pakistani authors, but nearly all of them are "hyphenateds" (Pakistani-British, Pakistani-American, etc.) and write in English. I found the same thing with Vietnamese and Cambodian writers. So I'll go with DUTCH, too. Simone van der Vlugt has written mainly crime novels, but I enjoyed her historical novel Midnight Blue.
19. Ukrainian or any other Slavic language (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene): The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (Czech).
20. The Baltics (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian): Estonia: Purge by Sofi Oksanen.

>96 Cariola: Oksanen is Finnish though - even if she writes about Estonia. :)

Did she write in Finnish or in Estonian? It's the language that's the question...

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky probably is 'classic' since that is where she lived her adult life. She was a very successful writer for many years before being sent to the camps....

"I read a LOT of books by ethnic Indian writers, but many of them write in English." many of them may have written firstin theid language and it got translated to English?

>98 jjmcgaffey: Finnish.

>99 cindydavid4: Believe me, I checked a ton of them. Almost all are either British, American or Canadian citizens of Indian descent or Indians who moved to these same countries as children or young adults and stayed there prior to publishing. Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslan, Arundhati Roy, Rupa Bajwa, Rohinton Mistry, Hari Kunzru, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Bannerjee, Anita Rau Badami, Bharti Kirschner, Salman Rushdie, Barhati Mukherjee, Thrity Umrigar, Indu Sundaresan, Manil Suri, Chitra Divakaruni, Kiran Desai, Hanif Kureshi, Moshin Hamid, Aravind Adiga, Vikas Swarup, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manu Joseph, Nikita Lalwani, Kamila Shamsie--all writing in English. Several of them have won the Booker Prize, which specifies that it is for books written in English, not translated.

>101 Cariola: I think it's a similar problem to African languages, although not quite as extreme, because at least some Indian languages have a long tradition of written literature. But most people in the subcontinent or in the diaspora who have the sort of background and education that makes them think about writing novels have also had heavy exposure to English, and they are likely to choose to use English to get access to the widest possible readership, unless they have a very specific reason not to, e.g. because they are addressing readers in one community, or because they want to do things with language that don't translate well. In either of those cases, they are relatively unlikely to be translated and marketed abroad.

>101 Cariola: >102 thorold: I had the same problem when it came to books from the subcontinent or Africa; so many were written in English, for all the reasons you mention. Some from Africa have been written first in other colonial languages too, thinking here specifically of By Night the Mountain Burns, which was a book I considered for the written in Spanish category, but there are many others.

>101 Cariola: oh i believe you. interesting; then not sure what we will be reading for our challenge this next month.Does Paul post over here? if not I might send him a message for clarification.

QUESTION 19: READING YOUR ANCESTRY

Many members of Club Read have been interested in their ancestry on some level or another. Perhaps you have talked to relatives, explored your family tree, or taken one of the DNA tests and found some interesting surprises. Perhaps you have little or no interest in this….

BUT, if you do, as prolific readers, it would be natural for us to seek out and read books which can help us understand who we are and where we come from. Certainly we would seek out various non-fiction literature and papers, but one might also reach for fiction to bring an era or culture to life.

Are you interested in your ancestry? Is it a strong or light interest? Have you explored this through literary resources? Would you share the titles of books, papers, articles that you found helpful or interesting?

Note: thanks to CindyDavid4 for the nudge on this question.
Note: the # of the previous question(translation list) should have been 18, correction has been made with this current question.

Thanks for this avaland! Edited first paragraph coz I reallize it wasn't what we ar talking about

I am much more interested in my ancestory as I have gotten older; way too late to connect with any of my aunts and uncles who had already passed*, after my mother passed, I contacted my oldest cousin (me being the youngest ) to ask her questions about our family. We ended up with quite the family tree which goes back to my great grandparents in a village near Lviv (so depending on the year we are either polish or ukranian jews) We used the Jewish Gen website, and in 2000 attended its annual convention in SCL where I discovered lots of information about both sides of my family. We discovered a cousin we didn't know we had; his grandfather and aunt were able to escape from the Nazis killing spree in 1941 and eventually made it to America. Ive slowed down a bit in the last few years but now and then another cousin will pop up with more information to add.

some books we used were: the world of our fathers, the livinf lens and how we lived Also went to Ellis Island in NYC and the Eastside Tenement, both have incredibly good resources and books to us that are more up to date.

*it wasn't until last year that I heard about one of my aunts who had just passed at the age of 104! How we did not realize this is beyond me, tho she was in a senior community for 20 years. I so wish I knew, and could have asked her questions; from all accounts she was quite spry and active through her life.

Q19: Reading ancestry

I’m not really a genealogist myself, but others in the family have done some work on it, so I have a reasonably clear idea “where I come from”, even if in most branches it doesn’t go back much more than 150 years or so. Being mostly working-class and prone to frequent migration, they didn’t always leave much trace. My nephew organised some DNA tests recently, but they didn’t show anything unexpected.

It’s maybe not something I go out looking for in my reading, but I do find it an additional reason to read something if there’s going to be an obvious overlap with the places people in my family came from, the things they lived through, or the sort of work they did, for instance.

It’s hard to think of specific examples, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book and thought “those are my great-grandparents”; it’s more like “the world must have looked rather like that to them from where they were.” Some of the most obvious:

— Siegfried Lenz’s books about Masuria (when it was part of East Prussia). My grandmother told me the village in So zärtlich war Suleyken was very like the one where her grandparents lived, which she remembered visiting before WW1. I was struck by Heimatmuseum (The Heritage) as well.
— Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s novels about industrial Lancashire in the late 19th century: not very good novels, but authentic. Also usual suspects like Hard times, Shirley and North and South.
— Germinal and Sons and lovers — geographically way off the scale, but probably about as close as you can get to imagining what it might have been like to be a miner from the comfort of your own armchair.

Thanks for this avaland! Edited first paragraph coz it wasn't part of the question

I am much more interested in my ancestory as I have gotten older;started after my mom passed, with a little knowlege of our relatives but wanted more in the way of stories of how they lived; way too late to connect with any of my aunts and uncles who had already passed*, I contacted my oldest cousin (me being the youngest ) to ask her questions about our family. We ended up with quite the family tree which goes back to my great grandparents in a village near Lviv (so depending on the year we are either polish or ukranian jews) We used the Jewish Gen website, and in 2000 attended its annual convention in SCL where I discovered lots of information about both sides of my family. We discovered a cousin we didn't know we had; his grandfather and aunt were able to escape from the Nazis killing spree in 1941 and eventually made it to America. Ive slowed down a bit in the last few years but now and then another cousin will pop up with more information to add.

We also went to Ellis Island and Eastside Tenement Museum in NYC for general history and to use their resources and other books that were very helpful

Some books we used were the world of our fathers how they lived and the living lens

*it wasn't until last year that I heard about one of my aunts who had just passed at the age of 104! How we did not realize this is beyond me, tho she was in a senior community for 20 years. I so wish I knew, and could have asked her questions; from all accounts she was quite spry and active through her life.

Another Ashkenazi Jew, here. On my father's side originally from what is now Belarus. On my mother's side it's not so clear. Poland most likely. I didn't get interested much in these things until it was too late to ask. Same old story, right? I did begin a bit of an Ancestry.com search and found out my father's father (who died of a heart attack well before I was born) left Kishinev just two years before the infamous pogrom there. I have a copy of his naturalization papers that list him as a former subject of the Czar of Russia. We only learned much later that he had siblings who went to Toronto. My grandfather was the only one who ended up in Newark, NJ. We learned this because one of the Toronto cousins who was a genealogist did some research and "found" us, the long lost sibling's family. I was around 14 when this occurred. Strangely, the two branches of the family never kept contact after that. I've never been moved to go to Belarus and hunt around for traces of the family tree. Between Nazis and local partisans and Stalin, to me, for Jews, places like Belarus are places of death. I've been to Europe several times, and looked into the Jewish history of every place I've been, but I've never gone further east than Croatia and the Czech Republic.

My wife, who is also an Ashkenazi Jew, has had more success, possibly because members of her family stayed in Europe longer, and many got out ahead of the death camps. She has cousins in Australia and in Israel that she's in touch with, and even knows the story of a cousin who worked as a nurse in Auschwitz and survived, they think, essentially because she had blue eyes.

As far as reading goes, many of the works of Elie Wiesel and Bernard Malamud describe a life that would have been familiar to my ancestors, I'm sure. I've always loved the short stories of Isaac Balshevis Singer for that reason, as well, and I've just started exploring his novels. I should mention that his memoir of his childhood, In My Father's Court, about growing up in a small Polish town and then in the overcrowded Jewish section of Warsaw, is very good.

I recently came upon an article in The NY Times describing relatively recent attempts to find and translate books written by female Yiddish writers from the early part of the 20th century, and from that article was inspired to order a novel called Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love by a woman named Miriam Karpilove about a young immigrant woman in New York, originally published in Yiddish in 1918. I'll be reading that next and I'm very much looking forward to it.

QUESTION 15 IN TRANSLATION

Been away from LT for awhile so I decided to jump in and answer this before trying to update my neglected thread. I read a lot of translated fiction, and like quite a bit of what I've read. I've perused my library, and will try to list some of my favorites here.

ETA: I don't know why I put Tarjei Vesaas under Finnish #5. He belongs in # 6 Norwegian.

1 French--Two of my favorites translated from French: Life: A Users Manual by Georges Perec and Manon of the Spring/Jean de Florette by Marcel Pagnol. And last year I discovered a new to me French crime writer, Michel Bussi. I especially liked his The Double Mother. And there's always Zola

2. Arabic--Cities of Salt Trilogy by Abdelrahman Munif. I especially liked the one (I think it was the middle volume) about the effect the coming of foreign oil companies had on the nomadic desert tribes.

3. French not from France--Had a hard time finding one in my library because I wasn't sure how to search for this, but finally discovered This Blinding Absence of Light by Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun, which I loved, was written in French.

4. German--Absolute favorite, desert-island book is Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. I also loved The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. And a crime novel I greatly enjoyed written in German is Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar

5. Finnish--Absolute favorite is Tarjei Vesaas and my favorite of his is probably The Ice Palace. Two other good ones were Troll by Johanna Sinisalo and The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilnna, both enjoyably weird. Not sure if Tove Janson wrote in Finnish or Swedish, but I gave The True Deceiver 5 stars.

6. Norwegian--One of the first books I read this year The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen was wonderful. It's the first volume of a trilogy, and I've now read the second, which is almost as good, but have yet to read the third. And of course there's Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose books I love. I've read all but volume 6 of My Struggle (highly recommended), and earlier this year I read and loved The Morning Star. An older Norwegian book I loved is Dina's Book by Herbjorg Wassmo, and who could not love Kristen Lavransdatter?

7. Russian--Some books translated from Russian that I've read and loved: Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov; Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman; Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg; and The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Shchedrin.

8. Spanish--I had a hard time finding a book I loved from Spain, but from South America I found A World for Julius by Bryce Echenique from Peru (fiction) and the Memory of Fire trilogy but Eduardo Galeano from Uruguay (nonfiction).

9. India--As noted, many Indian writers nowadays write in English. But a few years ago I read Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Banerji, written in Hindi I believe. I absolutely loved this coming of age story of a young Brahmin boy. The book was the basis for the famous movie of the same name.

10. Japanese--Many many come to mind. I loved Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi, and Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse. For crime I loved Out by Natsuo Kirino, and the crime novels of Keigo Higashio.

11. Korea--I didn't find much for Korea, but I've enjoyed the crime novels of You-Jeong Jeong (The Good Son and Seven Years of Darkness).

12. Italian--I very much liked I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti, another coming of age novel. For crime, Death's Dark Abyss by Massimo Carlott.

13. Chinese--a great favorite of mine is Camel Xiangzi by Lao She. A more recent book translated from Chinese that I loved is Brothers by Yu Hua. And The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is great Chinese SF.

14. Hebrew--Two books I read and enjoyed recently that were translated from Hebrew were The Way to the Cats by Yehoshua Kenaz and The Tunnel by A.B. Yehoshua.

15. Portuguese--Favorite read from Portugal: The Maias by Jose Maria Eca de Queiros.

16. Balkans--I loved Broken April by Kadare. Would like to read more by him.

17. My Choice--The Netherlands--The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch

18. Ukraine--Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, written in Ukrainian I believe. Written in Polish about the "Polish" part of Ukraine, Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories by Henryk Grynberg, and written in Russian, Babi Yar by Anatoli Kuznetsov. I have recently bought several books by Ukrainian authors, but haven't gotten to them yet.

19. Baltic--The only one I could come up with was Purge by Sofi Oksanon for Estonia, but then I read she wrote in Finnish. I do have two books by Estonian author Jan Kross on the shelf, but haven't read them yet.

Whew! That was fun. Now to peruse everyone else's lists more closely to get some more books for my WL, which I desperately need. (NOT).

Interest in ancestry started with finding my dad's biological father. Certainly underscored for me the idea that genetics is not destiny, thank you, God, and I have DNA Is Not Destiny on my tbr pile.

I have a pretty WASPy background that extends back to the American colonies and to English Puritanism through my grandmother. This is intercut with a bunch of wild-ass illegal Irish and Welsh immigrants with loopy opinions and drinking problems, and just about the saddest Dutch immigration story you can imagine that involves a cholera ship and burial at sea. A few northern Germans and Danes are mixed up in there, too.

I like reading about the Hanseatic League and the Beguines movement (Cities of Ladies). The Edge of the World is a good history of ancient and medieval northern Europe.

I became interested in the godawful story of the Salem witch trials when I learned one of my ancestors, George Jacobs, was hanged in that debacle. Jacobs was not liked by many of his neighbors, and some historians suggest that the men accused in the trials were child molesters. Hmm. An 80 year old man who was so crippled by arthritis that he walked with two canes and needed help to climb the gallows? I guess anything is possible, but it's more likely that, like most of my colonial ancestors, Jacobs was a hard-nosed SOB and he pissed off the wrong people. Histories of the trials are interesting, though Arthur Miller's McCarthy-era allegory, The Crucible, has muddied history, for as much as I admire the play. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History is a pretty accessible book, and it explains how the trials affected US evidentiary standards.

Just about every branch of my family was involved in sheep farming or textile production in some way. I like reading about the history of textiles, from the jacquard tapestries of Wales to the fisherman knitting patterns of Dutch sweaters (yes, a whole tradition different from the Irish fisherman knits) to the nalbinding of the Scandinavians.

Q19.

Nope, never. I was going to just sit this one out completely but thought I should explain why.

My parents are from the same village. All 4 of my grandparents are from the same village - never left it for more than a few days except both grandfathers for military service. If you go one step back to my great-grand parents, 6 are from the same village and the other 2 are from a nearby village. Get 2 or 3 more generations back (the generations get a bit muddled sometimes due to age differences) and you are at the founding of the village in the early to mid 1800s (not a unusual story in the area- rural region, big families -- so younger siblings will move away and found a new village close by. Then other people will also move and you have a new village where there was none. The exact story of this one village is lost but it was a repeated story - and today the history of that is all over the place - the plain and the hills of that part of Northern Bulgaria is dotted by villages). Get the records from the other villages and you can get much further back in a lot of cases (I never bothered - I know enough generations from my family to never care about any more of them).

I grew up with 2 of my great-grand parents (both died when I was in my early teens) and I knew all of my grandparents' siblings and first cousins. Consanguinity rules for marriages and the local practice to marry off widows and widowers with children* had made tracing the ancestry of the children kinda important - Bulgaria did not have a civil marriage until 1945 so all records were kept by the local church and those records still exist (not that anyone needed them - unless you moved in the village yesterday, you learned who is who while learning to talk for the most part). Not that there was no cheating and some children's parentage was not a bit confused and there were always foundlings (which apparently was the way to abandon an unwanted child before state orphanages). There may be an interesting story about the sister of a great-grandparent or something or their offspring but these are so far removed that I was never interested.

Now - it is a big village (~500 households is how it is usually counted) but still... it is a lot of relatives so most people could tell you what kind of cousin everyone was and recite everyone's ancestry tree (forget about places where everyone knows your name... it was a place everyone knew your grandmother's grandmother's name and still had a story about her, passed down from their grandmother).

*My paternal grandmother was the youngest of 6 (her oldest sister was 25 years older than her - I don't think anyone expected my grandmother to be born considering the age of both her parents -- in their 40s, one of them on marriage #4, the other on #3 - if you had young children at home, you basically got another husband/wife if one was available nearby). None of her 5 brothers or sisters were full siblings to Grandma. Only 3 really shared any blood with her - the other 2 came as spouse's children into an earlier marriage (one on each side) and after their second blood parent died, they just stayed with the step-parent - as was the practice back then in the area. They all 6 counted as the children of both of my great-grand parents but everyone knew who their "other people" were as well. 3 of the 6 remained in the village (including grandma), the other 3 got married elsewhere but the family was tight so I met them all the time. On the other hand, my other 3 grandparents are almost boring - the other grandmother was 1 of 3 (all 3 remained in the village and had their families in the village); my paternal grandfather had a single brother and both of them lived in the village their whole lives and the other grandfather was an only child (well, the only one who survived into adulthood anyway).

When you do not have much migration in and out of the region (until after WWII anyway - these days it is very very different), the relationships and knowledge never got lost (even now when I get there, someone would usually introduce themselves or explain who someone else is by finding the closest relation between them and me and get from there).

Rural England may be interesting and books about it may have been read by the whole world by now but an obscure village in rural Bulgaria? Not really - not that part of it anyway - the village somehow managed to stay away from all the history happening in the neighborhood (and there was a lot of it 15-100 miles away but literally none in it). There are a lot of historical books and novels about the past of Bulgaria but they are for the parts where something did happen... Actually there was a book about the village - an encyclopaedia of a type. It is somewhere in Mom's house - my grandfather made sure I got a copy.

OK - that ended up longer than I thought it will be. :) Sorry.

I know my ancestry - Mom's in more detail than Dad's, but in both cases back to great-grandparents (one great-grandfather lived to hold me as a baby, but died shortly after that).

Dad's family came from Canada...sometime before that generation (I've seen documented research placing that immigration anywhere from early 1800s to early 1900s), and "the McGaffey" came over from Ireland in about 1630. Aside from one possible story (on the internet, didn't follow it up), every McGaffey we've ever found (multiple genealogical researchers in the family) has been descended from this guy, so he probably changed his name or had it changed on arrival in Nova Scotia. Again family stories - the claim is that we're pure Irish. I doubt this _very_ much - in all those years and generations, every chosen spouse was Irish? Phooey. But there are no details (that I'm aware of) of the McGaffeys in Canada.

Mom's grandparents were all immigrants, coming into the US in the early 1900s. One Russian (ethnic Russian, apparently living in Ukraine), one Slovak (she came from the next village over from her husband, but they never met until they came to the US), one Irish, one Hollander (don't say Dutch, and certainly not Netherlander!). The last, at least, had his name changed on arrival, though we know what it was before - he got to Ellis Island as Tunis Baklaar from Barkalow, and left it with all his papers in the name of Tunis Barkalow (still the family name).

I've got some interest in Irish literature, but I'm not sure how much of it is linked to my Irish ancestry and how much just because there are a lot of great stories there. I believe I read a version of the story about the boy who stuck his finger in a dike, and finally understood the Hollander bit - but that was as a kid, so it may have been a retro-memory. Other than that, not really.

Forgot another source in SLC I learned that most of the Jewish villages towns and cities had a Yizkor Memory book. These were made by the survivors and Jewish aid organiations. Included info on the community; how they lived, as well as photos. I was able to find the one that included our village,that had photos,names and ages of all were killed. It was a shock to read, to say the least. Many of these books are in Yiddish but they have been translated into English through the Jewish gen Yizkor Project.

>115 jjmcgaffey: Don't say Dutch? How come? Nobody in Michigan says "Hollanders," not even on the west side where they grow the tulips.

>115 jjmcgaffey: I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere in the Netherlands called Barkelow. Might it have been Borculo, in Gelderland, that he came from?

Feel free to name titles of some of the books that you have read, especially if you can recommend them.

>117 nohrt4me2: No idea, that was what Tunis was reported to say. Apparently it means he was from near Amsterdam, and I can see why he'd make the distinction from Netherlands, but I don't know why he would object to Dutch.

>118 thorold: Huh. I had never checked that. I seem to recall having been shown a facsimile of his form, with the name...but I don't know where it might be. Where is Gelderland? (Ah, looked it up...maybe?) My sister's family tree mentions a village called Barcolo, just south of Amsterdam (North Holland or Utrecht, that looks like), that Dutch friends have said was probably where he was from. I don't see it on any map I have quick access to...on the other hand, it may well have been swallowed up since the 1800s.

Heh, and I said I knew my mom's family in better detail than Dad's - but it seems what I know is just as much family legend there.

Well in that case

as a child my sister would read to me from the golden bible illustrated by feodor rojankovsky . I can close my eyes and stil see the images of those pictures. Also read a one of a kind family series, and diary of a young girl When I was older i was reading tales of solom alechem So many other titles that will come to me by reading other responses.

In college the jewish catalogue (wrong touchstone) edited by Chaim Potok "A key theme throughout the series has been an earnest desire for "cultural authenticity" that rejects both consumeristic values of the dominant gentile culture but also rejects the values of the mainstream mid-century Jewish establishment,with a special focus on the concept of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world)." I remember having three of these in college, at the time I was very active in the hillel union, and we used different parts of it for different events' Loved the Challa recipe!

also Kavalier and Clay, in the image and world to come by Dara Horn,same author of people love dead jews, all the lights we cannot see, Night Suite Francaise

need to check my shelves for more. stay tuned

Re those of us with Puritan heritage, I remember reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond several times as a kid and finding it interesting.

Americans have a fraught, mostly negative, sense about Puritans, as if all the bad things in our culture derived from them. It was useful to have students read John Winthrop's aspirational "A Model of Christian Charity" (aka "The City on a Hill") in American lit to help them sort out their thinking.

Also interesting that American Unitarianism descended from Puritanism. A good example of American Unitarianism is embedded in Little Women. I was raised a Unitarian and still appreciate its tradition of freethinking and sense of personal responsibility to one's neighbors.

The Puritans also gave us a longstanding commitment to free and mandatory public education. We can argue a lot about the state of public education today, but the Puritan were devoted to the notion that good and decent governance depended on basic literacy and numeracy.

As a quick add-on to my post above at >111 rocketjk:, it turns out that Diary of a Lonely Girl is part of what looks like a fascinating series of publications from the Syracuse University Press called Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. There are 8 pages of books listed, fiction, poetry, history and literary criticism having to do with Yiddish culture, either in Europe or the U.S., and most originally written in Yiddish.

Here's the website: https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/judaic-traditions-in-literature-music-a...

Q19 Ancestry & Books

My ancestry is 402 years here in America, specifically in area of three states: Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire. And except for a year in California, I personally have lived fairly equally in those same three states (scary, isn’t it? Thankfully, I reproduced outside the same gene pool!) According to my DNA I hail from the UK, the Nordic countries and Belgium*. My first immigrant ancestors were the “Pilgrims” a sect of the Puritans who arrived in 1620, and my last immigrant to arrive was a Scot named John Douglas, who on his own hopped a ship at the age of twelve in 1707.

While having all your immigrant ancestors arrive within a hundred year span (and most were in the first 20 years during “The Great Migration”) can be rather claustrophobic, having several hundred years of ancestry in a small geographic area can make the research much easier. And it means, especially in earlier days, there is a reasonable chance family is represented at all the big events** (I have a spreadsheet for the Salem Witchcraft trials, for example). And you can even visit towns, historical sites and graves.

As a avid reader, I have read many, many books related to the history of northern New England, most I think would be classified cultural histories. I also have a special interest in women’s lives. Anyone can look at my library under the tag “New England History” (Salem has it’s own tag)
Sooooo many books, but here are a few faves….

Wendy Warren’s New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (2016) I learned a lot from this book including that my 9th great grandparents Simon Bradstreet & wife Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet: “America’s First Poet” were slave holders. Simon apparently left money in his will for their two long-time domestic slaves.

Mary Beth Norton In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, 2002 (or any other of Norton’s histories) This is my favorite Salem book. But Marilynne Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege has a different approach in the telling. And while I don’t think Stacy Schiff The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem adds anything new… but she does make the reader feel they are there….

Michael Winship The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided,(Landmark Law Cases and American Society), 2005

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750,1991 orThe Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove, 2002 (really, any books by Ulrich or Norton....)

If anyone wants a specific topic within my purview, hop over on my reading thread and inquire.
————————————————————————————-

*There is this interesting mystery of having 1% Basque DNA, which showed up in Ancestry’s most recent DNA re-calibrating. When that showed up I started READING and I have a theory!. France owns these two little islands not far from Newfoundland, and one of the islands had a large Basque community. My theory is that some of those Basques, along with other French soldiers, came down through Maine to support the Continental Army….what do you think?

** Examples: 20 direct connection to Mayflower passengers, 7 signers of the Mayflower Compact; 3 direct connections to accused witches in Salem and two in Gloucester, 25 Revolutionary War soldiers…etc.

>123 rocketjk: wow what a treasure trove! Also looked up diary of a lonely girl and found a website from Jewish Women's archive that tells more about the author. Fascinating stuff, thanks for that

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/karpilove-miriam

ETA wow, some of these aren't cheap. wonder if they are available on line?

>122 nohrt4me2: Also interesting that American Unitarianism descended from Puritanism. A good example of American Unitarianism is embedded in Little Women. I was raised a Unitarian and still appreciate its tradition of freethinking and sense of personal responsibility to one's neighbors.

wow, i had no idea. I have become very interesd in UU the last few decades and find that it appeals to me a great deal. Is there a book or a site that relates to this connection?

>124 avaland: this is fascinating!

>125 cindydavid4: Thanks for that link. I will, indeed, give it a read. FYI, here is The NY Times article that first alerted me to the existence of Diary of a Lonely Girl:

How Yiddish Scholars Are Rescuing Women’s Novels From Obscurity
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/books/yiddish-women-novels-fiction.html

Re the online question, I only took a first cursory scroll through the pages of the website. I did note at least a couple that seemed to have online versions, but wasn't I really looking out for that.

oh I remember reading that; need to look some of those up. so glad to see so many being translated now

>121 cindydavid4: We also loved the Golden Bible illustrated when we were kids.

>114 AnnieMod: That really is fascinating history.

My mother's side of the family is all Norwegian and I have relatives still living in Skien who my mom is in touch with. We went to visit them when I was 18 and they've been here a few times too. We'll take a family trip to Norway in the summer of 2024.

I do love reading Scandinavian fiction. I've never bothered to get super specific with location within Norway. I have tagged 42 fiction book Scandinavian lit and 9 Scandinavian history. Some of my favorites are:

Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Ice Palace by Targei Vesaas
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
Constance Ring by Amalie Skram
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

>132 japaul22: I'd like to think my Northern roots (as according to my DNA) have something to do with my reading in that area (Iceland, Sweden, Norway...etc) but that doesn't explain the Africa thing....

The Ice Palace looks interesting....

QUESTION 20; LIST 6: AUTHOR AS PROFESSIONAL

Most authors are career professionals beyond being an author/writer. Thinking about your reading, please give us an author who fulfills the professional category on each line below, and then note a non-fiction or fiction book you have read of theirs (and can hopefully recommend; if not leave a note why). Feel free to leave some lines empty, if needed. Aim for at least 12 lines?

Example: #9 Comedian: Tina Fey, Bossypants or #3 Journalist: Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men

(author, book you read, and any comments).

1. Politician:
2. Doctor or medical specialist:
3. Journalist:
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind:
5. Musician:
6. Scientist:
7. Historian:
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer:
9. Comedian:
10. Professor or teacher:
11. Lawyer or Police:
12. Religious Professional:
13. Military on any level:
14. Business professional:
15. Former or current sports star:

Ok, I admit this one is tough. Take your time. Google is your friend.

I was going to post my list, which was 12 of the 15, as an example...But I just accidentally closed the document (and of course it wasn't saved).

Q20

1. Politician: Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices

2. Doctor or medical specialist: Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

3. Journalist: Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: Kaffe Fassett: Dreaming in Color, an Autobiography

5. Musician: -----------

6. Scientist: Sue Black, All that Remains

7. Historian: Mary Beth Norton. Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society

8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life

9. Comedian: Sarah Vowell. Wordy Shipmates

10. Professor or teacher: Kate Douglass Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

11. Lawyer or Police: Ann Holt, any of her crime novels!(she was a lawyer and a former Minister of Justice in Norway)

12. Religious Professional: Harold Kusher, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

13. Military on any level: Herman Wouk (served in WWII) The Winds of War

14. Business professional: ---
15. Former or current sports star:---

Q20: Author as professional

1. Politician: If you exclude books directly linked to their day-jobs and bad novels, it’s hard to think of anything by a politician I’ve really enjoyed. A look around my shelves only came up with Michael Foot’s study of Swift as a political satirist, The pen and the sword.
2. Doctor or medical specialist: Lots to choose from, I think I’d go for the poets William Carlos Williams and Dannie Abse. Or, for someone less obvious, how about historical novelist Mary Renault, who was a trained hospital nurse. Purposes of love is one of her early novels where she writes about nursing.
3. Journalist: Boring. Almost every writer has done some sort of journalism somewhere along the way.
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: There are lots of novelists who painted a bit, or vice-versa. Two that spring to mind right away are Thackeray, who trained as an artist and drifted from illustration into writing, and Günter Grass, who trained as a monumental mason, then studied sculpture before becoming a writer. Stonework is an important theme in several of his books, including The tin drum.
5. Musician: The combination of writer and musician isn’t that common, but I’m reading a novel by the Dutch writer Anna Enquist at the moment: she trained as a concert pianist and is also a practicing psychologist (2). Counterpoint is her best-known novel available in translation, I’m reading Sloop at the moment.
6. Scientist: scientists who write fiction tend to write science-fiction, which I don’t read much. I suppose there is the well-known Russian lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov as the exception that proves the rule
7. Historian:
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: how about They came to Baghdad, by part-time archaeologist (and former VAD nurse, (2)) Agatha Christie?
9. Comedian: the only thing I could spot on my shelves is Sandi Toksvig’s Flying under bridges — it’s so long since I read it that I can’t remember much about it, but I expect I liked it, as it’s still there…
10. Professor or teacher: Iris Murdoch taught philosophy. I think The bell and The black prince are my favourites, but I reserve my right to contradict that.
11. Lawyer or Police: plenty of lawyer-novelists. One of my favourites is the late John Mortimer, especially for his Rumpole stories.
12. Religious Professional: That would have to be John Donne or George Herbert…
13. Military on any level: I have a weakness for the very disreputable Simon Raven, an army officer who was made to resign from the service because of “financial irregularities”. The feathers of death was part of his revenge for this.
14. Business professional: Henry Green was an industrialist — he ran a firm that made bottling machinery. Loving is a great introduction to his work. Poet Stevie Smith was secretary to a businessman for most of her working life.
15. Former or current sports star: I didn’t know this, and wouldn’t have guessed, but Google tells me that Samuel Beckett was the only Nobel laureate in literature to have played first-class cricket. The Marxist historian C L R James, author of The black jacobins, was another cricketer of course.

Edit: added entries for (8) and (9)

>136 avaland: 11. — your mention of Ann Holt makes me remember the novelist Unity Dow, formerly a judge (11), and then a government minister (1) in Botswana (foreign minister until a couple of years ago).

Lots of holes here, but here's my list.

1. Politician: The President Is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. Meh. Bill wisely avoided any plotlines having to do with White House interns.

2. Doctor or medical specialist:

3. Journalist: Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz. One of the best books I ever read about how wrong-headed industrialized nations can be when they try to be the Great White Hope of poor brown nations.

4. Visual or performance artist of any kind:

5. Musician:

6. Scientist: There was a book by a physicist about the fact that the Titanic sank because the integrity of the steel was not tested in ice-cold water conditions. I forget the name of the book and the author because I gave the book to my nephew, but it was interesting.

7. Historian:

8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: Captain Scott's Last Expedition. You know how it's going to end, but somehow reading it all in Scott's own words makes it more harrowing.

9. Comedian: Harpo Speaks! A really interesting book by Harpo Marx, who even acted as a courier for secret US intelligence one time on a cultural visit to the USSR.

10. Professor or teacher: I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had. Actually, this is on my TBR pile, but actor Tony Danza goes off to teach high school--how hard can THAT be--and gets humbled by the experience.

11. Lawyer or Police:

12. Religious Professional: The Catholic Imagination by Fr. Andrew Greeley. He's right: Catholics don't really agonize a whole lot over what they're supposed to believe. They tend to dip into Catholic tradition and pull out of it what they want or need. Along the way they make and pass along an appreciation for artistic creation.

13. Military on any level:

14. Business professional: Diary of a Bookseller. Pretty much what it says. A year in the life of a Scottish bookseller who rants about Amazon, get irritated by his customers, and loses his cat for about two weeks (cat is fine, all OK). It's pleasant enough.

15. Former or current sports star:

1. Politician: Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, former president of Czechoslovakia then the Czech Republic
2. Doctor or medical specialist: Khassan Baiev, The Oath: A Surgeon under Fire, the memoir of a Chechen doctor who operated on patients regardless of which side they were fighting on
3. Journalist: Joe Sacco, Palestine, a graphic documentary journalist
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: Peter Sis, The Conference of Birds
5. Musician: Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist, a Jewish pianist and classical composer's memoir of surviving the Holocaust
6. Scientist: Frances E. Jensen, The teenage brain : a neuroscientist's survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults, professor and chair of neurology at UPenn, formerly professor at Harvard Med School, and parent
7. Historian: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House books, because I read them many times as a kid
9. Comedian: Tan France, Naturally Tan, member of Queer Eye
10. Professor or teacher: Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, my former professor at Indiana University
11. Lawyer or Police: Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: From Prison to Peace Prize: One Woman's Struggle at the Crossroads of History, lawyer and former judge, founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran
12. Religious Professional: Karen Armstrong, A History of God and others, including a memoir about her battle with depression, Catholic nun for seven years
13. Military on any level: Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn, a lieutenant in the marines during Vietnam
14. Business professional:
15. Former or current sports star: Peter Heller, Dog Stars, kayaker

1. Politician:Al FrankenAl Franken Giant of the Senate
2. Doctor or medical specialist:Abraham VergheseCutting for Stone
3. Journalist:Tony Horowitz Baghdad Without a Map
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind:
5. Musician:Alice Cooper Alice cooper golf Monster I actually didn't read it, but he is from my hometown so natch!
6. Scientist:Rachel Carson Silent Spring
7. Historian: Robert Massie Nicolas and Alexandra
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer:Margaret Mead Coming of Age in Samoa
9. Comedian:Stephen Colbert I am America and so Can You
10. Professor or teacher:Bel Kaufman Up the downstair Case
11. Lawyer or Police:Joseph Waumbard The Onion Field
12. Religious Professional:Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospel*
13. Military on any level:
14. Business professional:
15. Former or current sports star:

*Karen Armstrong mentioned above reminded me that as much I liked her work,I really learned more from Pagels. Opened up a whole new world to me

>140 labfs39: good catch on peter heller.Love his books, had no idea!

1. Politician: State of Terror by Louise Penny & Hillary Rodham Clinton - fiction.

2. Doctor or medical specialist: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese - fiction

3. Journalist: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson - nonfiction

4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: Unprotected: a Memoir by Billy Porter - Nonfiction

5. Musician:The Lyrics of Tom Waits 1971-1982: The Early Years by Tom Waits

6. Scientist: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind nonfiction

7. Historian: Atlas of Irish History by Sean Duffy nonfiction

8. Archaeologist: Newgrange by Geraldine Stout nonfiction

9. Comedian:Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard

10. Professor or teacher: The Orphan Master’s Son (Pulitzer) by Adam Johnson - fiction

11. Lawyer or Police: When a Killer Calls: A Haunting Story of Murder, Criminal Profiling, and Justice in a Small Town (Cases of the FBI's Original Mindhunter, 2) by John E. Douglas - nonfiction

12. Religious Professional: The Mantram Handbook: Formulas for Transformation by Eknath Easwaran - nonfiction

13. Military on any level:

14. Business professional:

15. Former or current sports star: The Yogi Book: "I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said by Yogi Berra nonfiction

(edited to include #9)

>143 dianeham: I'm waiting for Tom Waits to win the Nobel Prize for literature. If Bob Dylan could win it, seems like Tom has a shot.

>144 nohrt4me2: definitely!

OK, here's what I came up with. Possibly a bit of fudging here and there . . .

1. Politician: In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, former Mayor of New Orleans
2. Doctor or medical specialist: Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson
3. Journalist: One Very Hot Day, David Halberstam’s novel about the Vietnam War
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: Speak to Me, Dance with Me, dancer/choreographer Agnes De Mille’s fascinating memoir about the early stages of her career
5. Musician: Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography
6. Scientist: Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall: I was just about able to understand this supposed “layperson’s” explanation of string theory, so I count that as a win for Randall and for me, as I was very curious about what it was all about. I don't feel that I penetrated into the subject very deeply, but just getting a basic handle on the ideas was helpful. Not an easy read, though.
7. Historian: Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion by Charles Townshend
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: Labrador by Choice: A Labrador Trapper's Autobiography by Benjamin Powell, Sr.
9. Comedian: Still Talking, Joan River’s very well written and often compelling autobiography
10. Professor or teacher: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley
11. Lawyer or Police: Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice by David Feige
12. Religious Professional: Shamrocks and Salsa, a memoir by Gerald Cox, who was a Catholic Monsegnor who left the church to marry. He was an amazing man, a personal friend of my wife’s and mine here in Mendocino County, CA, and his widow is a neighbor and one of our best friends.
13. Military on any level: Guerilla Days in Ireland: a First-Hand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919-1921) by Tom Barry
14. Business professional: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris (lawyer and banker)
15. Former or current sports star: Bronx Zoo by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock

>137 thorold: Very interesting about Gunter Grass!
re: scientists .. no nonfiction to report?

>140 labfs39: Re: The Teenage Brain. I might have liked such a book back in the 90s.

>143 dianeham: My next book!

>146 rocketjk: Labrador...I'm going to jot that down....

1. Politicain: The Jefferson Bible by Thomas Jefferson
2. Doctor: I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish
3. Journalist: Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports by Ken Bensinger
4. Visual Artist (Actress/Model): Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki
5. Musician: Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong
6. Geologist: Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains by Keith Heyer Meldahl
7. Historian: Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard
8. Archaeologist: ---
9. Comedian: Yes Please by Amy Poehler
10. Professor of Economics: The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson
11. Lawyer: Quiet by Susan Cain
12. Humanist Chaplian Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg Epstein
13. Military: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
14. Business: ---
15. Former Athlete: Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho (Former Linebacker of the NFL)

>147 avaland: which is your next book?

>148 stretch: Loved I Shall Not Hate, Quiet, and The Things They Carried

>149 dianeham: Sorry, your #1. The Clinton/Penny BUT I spent some time with it the other day and had difficultly getting into it. Might be the way it's written or maybe not the best timing what with the Jan 6th hearings.....

>151 avaland: Save it for another time.

>124 avaland: *There is this interesting mystery of having 1% Basque DNA, which showed up in Ancestry’s most recent DNA re-calibrating.

The Basques also had a significant presence in Newfoundland and Labrador. Take Port aux Basques for start, the whaling station at Red Bay in Labrador, and the current discoveries in Placentia.
Given the salt cod trade and whaling expeditions, with all their links between Newfoundland and New England, maybe that 1% had its origins here? Could that be the link to Michael Crummey?!

>153 SassyLassy: Thanks for the info. Yes, I thought about the Crummey connection, ha ha.

Q20

1. Politician: Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
2. Doctor or medical specialist: Irrungen Wirrungen by Theodor Fontane (apothecary)
3. Journalist: The Blackhouse by Peter May
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: There and Back Again by Sean Astin (who played “Sam” in “The Lord of the Rings” – the book is interesting but only if you really love the films!)
5. Musician: Hysterie des Körpers by Joey Kelly (member of “The Kelly Family”, an Irish-American band that was immensely popular in Germany in the 1990s – the book is not particularly interesting, though)
6. Scientist: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (biologist)
7. Historian: Aboriginal Australians by Richard Broome
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer: Unterwegs in Übersee by Hugo Schauinsland (he was a German museum director who traveled to several continents between 1896 and 1926, the book contains extracts of his diaries)
9. Comedian: Ich bin dann mal weg by Hape Kerkeling
10. Professor or teacher: The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
11. Lawyer or Police: The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris
12. Religious Professional: Der Islam by Hans Küng (Catholic priest)
13. Military on any level: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (Lieutenant in World War One)
14. Business professional:
15. Former or current sports star:

>155 MissBrangwen: Huh. I had no idea Gabaldon was a biologist. Maybe that's why Claire is a nurse/doctor? I watched one season, but the S&M scenes were interminable. Just wasn't my cuppa tea. Wondered if the books were like that.

>156 nohrt4me2: "Maybe that's why Claire is a nurse/doctor?" Could be, although as far as I know she specialized in marine biology.
There are a lot of sex scenes in the books and I don't really care for them, but I enjoy the rest of the story so much and I simply love the characters, so it is still one of my favourite book series ever.

>157 MissBrangwen: Sex scenes I don't mind, but the tv show has violent and graphic scenes of rape.

>156 nohrt4me2: I didn't know that either. Couldnt make it through one of her books, which is strange becaus it has time travel, scotland, history but just, no. I thought at the tme she should keep her day job but Im in the minority, others love her writing which is fine (and um S&M scenes? does that mean over there what it means over here?)

>155 MissBrangwen: Love the Outlander books! Yes, Diana Gabaldon has a MA in marine biology and a PhD in behavioral ecology. She worked for many years as a professor of scientific computation, as well as being the founding editor of Science Software Quarterly. Her books are genre-defying and hard to describe. Yes, there is rape by a sadist (at the end of book 1 of 9), and although it is important plot-wise, it is hardly the point of the story. One of the things I like about the series is that it is not a boy-meets-girl-fall-in-love-live-happily-ever-after. It starts with a marriage and goes on from there. I also appreciate the historical detail.

Q20

1. Politician: Technically not a politician, but I'm counting Becoming by Michelle Obama. If that won't do, Unthinkable: Truth, Trauma, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin, or see #9.
2. Doctor or medical specialist: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
3. Journalist: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
4. Visual or performance artist of any kind: Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming
5. Musician: Can I count Stephen King here?? :)
6. Scientist:
7. Historian: Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore. Could also count in #10.
8. Archaeologist, Explorer or Pioneer:
9. Comedian: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken (Could also fit politician.)
10. Professor or teacher: Well, I could count Jamie Raskin here and also in #11, as well as in #1. He is a Congressman from Maryland, a lawyer and Constitutional expert, and a law professor. But I'll go with Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. So many to choose from!
11. Lawyer or Police: Another semi-cheat here. A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, former Director of the FBI.
12. Religious Professional: Three Treatises by Martin Luther
13. Military on any level: Here, Right Matters by Alexander Vindman
14. Business professional: Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Worked as a schoolteacher, a banker, and a publishing house director.
15. Former or current sports star:

QUESTION 21: Adolescent Required Reading

I think it is safe to assume that all of us here on Club Read were once adolescents! Sooo, let’s talk about our school "required reading" during that formative time, roughly ages 13-18. Where were you then( geographically)? Can you remember those assigned books, roughly when you read them, and do you remember at all what you thought of the books back then?

And looking back, what do you think of them now?

If you are willing, could you note the years you were 12/13 to 18 — this will make it easier to compare and contrast in discussion (example: I started jr. high in ’67 and graduated from high school in ’74).

And for those here who have children going through or already past this formative time, do you have any comments about what they were required to read?

1967, age 12; 1968, age 13: Vague memory of The Old Man and the Sea. I sure did not get the old man's determination or stubbornness then. I'm almost 70, and I get it now.

1969, age 14: Great Expectations and The Pearl. Found both dull, and Expectations fairly sadistic. I think there were some short stories in there. I remember having fun writing a paper about The Jabberwocky.

1970, age 15: The Pentateuch, Lord of the Flies, The Odyssey, The Castle of Otranto. I liked LotF. It explained a lot about boys. I'd already seen similar things with girls at sleep away camp.

1971, age 16: Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, short stories by Poe. Huckleberry Finn might have been in there. Assorted poetry. The teacher was just dreadful, so I goofed off and read all this stuff later, except for Poe, which I scarfed up at age 10. I still hate The Scarlet Letter.

1972, age 17: The Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, An Enemy of the People, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Heart of Darkness. Modern poetry and other stuff. I read a lot of outside reading that the teacher gave me, so hard to remember all the general assignments.

eta: I add to the list as others post and I remember more things.

Ages 13-17, 2004 - 2008, in Northern California for most of it and Southern Indiana at the tale end for location, what books I read and when is all muddled together, our history classes and English classes were coordinated, so we read books in English that closely related to the time period we were reading about in history, so things jumped back and forth quite a bit:

Romeo Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Cesar, Much Ado about Nothing -- Too much Shakespeare can't keep Hamlet and Macbeth strainght to this day

The Picture Bride, The Jungle, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, All Quiet on the western Front, Catch-22, Farewell to Arms, A small select of Poe Short Stories, The Lottery, The Canterbury Tales, Beowolf, Of Mice and Men, Tuesdays with Morrie, Ordinary People, The Scarlett Letter, The Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, The Lord of the Flies The red Badge of Courage. -- Quite a few of these are Favorites, but I can't remember a single book from the 12th grade in Southern Indiana, I know we read some, just can't remember what they were. They significantly easier to read works than the ones from California and far less challenging. I went to an Academic High School where we were reading at least a book a week at minimum, so there are tons of books/excerpts/stories missing from the list, but I didn't keep any kind of record of required vs personal reading, so things get muddled together and only the ones I liked are at the top of this list.

Q21 Required Reading

I was at school in England in the mid-70s. As we discussed last time we had a question about school books, our system didn’t seem to involve many “required” books, except the ones we were reading specifically for an exam — Far from the madding crowd, Death of a salesman, and an anthology of early 20th century poetry for the Eng Lit exam I took at 16.

Otherwise, I remember reading Lord of the flies at some point, and A kestrel for a knave and Billy Liar, and we read and acted out quite a few plays at various times, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, The dumb waiter, The importance of being Earnest and A man for all seasons. Maybe some Ibsen? Lots of scenes from Shakespeare, but I don’t remember doing a whole play. Oddly I don’t remember any Liverpool Poets (our younger teachers would have been the age for that), it was more Betjeman, Hardy, the WWI poets and the obligatory Romantics. Bleeding chunks of Beowulf and Chaucer, but I don’t think we ever read anything like that in full.

We did go on a lot of theatre trips — although I don’t remember now which ones were “official” class trips and which were just for fun. We saw lots of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov on those, as well as things like Hobson’s choice (never out of the repertoire in the north of England) and Under Milk Wood.

What I remember more than the books we read in class is the scheme we had to buy paperbacks through the teachers — I think there was some kind of discount involved, or perhaps a kickback from the distributors to the school. Some of our English teachers were promoting some very odd things, presumably either because it was their own taste or because they thought that’s what teenage boys would go for. One was certainly an Erich Von Däniken enthusiast (which ought to be enough to disqualify anyone from teaching, but I didn’t know that when I was 12…); others came with piles of WWII thrillers or Ian Fleming. I don’t think I bought much from them except P G Wodehouse.

I graduated from a private high school in 1971, located in northern Indiana. We mostly read from anthologies of literature (American, English, World Lit) in my English classes. I did take a drama class as a senior in high school and we read plays aloud, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, Hedda Gabler, and Blithe Spirit. We had a very dynamic teacher, so it was one of my best classes ever.

I remember reading Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, The Scarlet Letter, 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Pearl, Red Badge of Courage and lots of Shakespeare.

I was in junior high and high school in northern New Jersey, starting junior high in 1967 and graduating high school in 1973.

Junior High: South Orange Junior High School (now known as South Orange Middle School), South Orange, NJ
Age 12 (7th grade): I can only specifically recall reading Treasure Island, Lorna Doone and The Jungle Book. The teacher was Mr. Johanssen.

Age 13 (8th grade): I can specifically remember reading My Antonia and As You Like It. We had to memorize the "All the World's a Stage" monologue and recite it in front of the class. We also had to memorize Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem, "How Do I Love Thee?" The teacher was Mrs. Whitcomb.

Age 14 (9th grade): Oddly, I can't recall a thing we read. The teacher was Mrs. Merrill, a very conservative woman who was very proud to have attended Allegheny College. It's funny the things you remember. Although, obviously, my inability to remember any of the books we read that year doesn't speak well for her teaching skills, Mrs. Merrill did drill us on diagramming sentences, a skill that I have always found extremely useful, so thanks to her for that. On the down side, at one point we were sent to the junior high school library to find a novel of our own choosing to read and write a book report on. The next day we were given a day of silent reading in class so that we could make a good start on our books. I had chosen Catcher in the Rye. When Mrs. Merrill saw what I was reading, she said "Jerry, get that book out of my class. Take it back to the library and find another." I obediently did so (I have no memory of what I chose instead), but over the years I have regretted not marching directly to the principal's office, telling the story, and asking, "This book is in our school library. Am I allowed to read it or not?"

High School: Columbia High School in Maplewood, NJ
Age 15 (10th grade): The only two works I can recall specifically from that year are A Tale of Two Cities and Julius Caesar. The teachers was Mrs. Rosenberg. I remember her as well meaning but not particularly inspirational.

Age 16 (11th grade) Mr. Krasner, one of the best teachers I ever had at any level. The books that I recall that we had to read included Catcher in the Rye (!), Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, and MacBeth.

Age 17 (12th grade) My high school was pretty progressive and this year they went to an electives system. Literature classes of all sorts were offered. Some lasting a quarter of the school year, some half a year, and one I recall (I didn't take it but a buddy of mine did) was a full year's class on Moby Dick. Anyway, no required reading per se that year. I don't know how long they carried on with this program. Not very long, I'd guess.

A note that, of the books I can recall, all were written by white males except My Antonia.

ETA: Looking over some of the lists posted above, I can now say that I definitely read To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984 and Brave New World as assigned reading somewhere along the line, but I don't recall the specific year for any of these. As others post books that ring a bell, I'll add them here.

Q21

I went to a German "Gymnasium" from 1997 to 2006. As my birthday is in early September I was usually the oldest in class, but my parents decided to keep me in kindergarten one year longer because I only started kindergarten at age 5 as I didn't get a place earlier.

1997/98 - age 11:
Ben liebt Anna by Peter Härtling
1998/99 - age 12:
Das Schiff Esperanza by Fred Hoerschelmann
Es geschah im Nachbarhaus by Willi Fährmann
1999/2000 - age 13 to 2002/03 - age 16:
Frühlings Erwachen by Frank Wedekind
Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm
Wilhelm Tell by Friedrich Schiller
Short stories and poems that I don't particularly remember
2003/04 - age 17 to 2005/06 - age 19:
German:
Die Physiker by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Die Verwandlung by Franz Kafka
Jakob der Lügner by Jurek Becker
Woyzeck by Georg Büchner
Poems from the Baroque age
Medieval poems
More poems that I don't remember
English:
Eldorado by Doris Lessing
The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Long Christmas Dinner by Thornton Wilder
Poems from World War One
More poems and short stories that I don't remember
French:
Antigone by Jean Anouilh
A novella that I don't remember

This is always a sad exercise for me, because I went to a horrible rural high school in Maine (graduated in 1986) and was bored silly. I can't remember an entire book that I read for school, but I do remember Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The former because I can still remember lines I memorized and the latter because I was ostracized for arguing that Lady Macbeth should be the protagonist, because without her Macbeth was nothing. The only other book I remember in high school is Anna Karenina, because I was reading it surreptitiously in history class, where we were watching another interminable filmstrip. I told the teacher that when my grades slipped below 104 he could tell me not to read, but until then... I was sent to the principal's office for that one. I took junior English twice, as I had nothing else to do and it was being taught by a different teacher. I never had to write a paper in high school. We had no drama program and never did field trips.

The only positive is that I read voraciously on my own, and one of my college admissions recruiters told me that I was the most well read student he had ever interviewed. Take that Massabesic High School!

oh im so sorry! hate to hear experiences like that. Glad y ou were able to find books on your own and are now a life time reader.

I graduated HS in 1974, and honestlly cant come up with a list of books, because I cant keep track of what was required and what was my own choice in reading I do remember an AP (advanced placement) class in English calledn"utopias and dysutopias) among the books I read were the green child, 1984 ,utopia, Animal Farm, The Island of Dr Moreau the time machine

Also remember another AP class semantics and logic where we read Language in thought and action My teacher was not a big fan of the authors politics,but he was so good teaching about the concepts he wrote about; words and language and the many ways they are used to influence people..

also in english a modest proposal gulliver's travels lots of short pieces from various authors like Poe, Milton, Dante,Proust, as well as poetry that I cant remember (again, I was reading my sisters HS anthology of poems starting with Robert Stevenson and his poor lil mousie so have no idea what I read from that or from school)

My sister was our drama instructor and read many plays i remember the grass harp, the crucible imaginary invalid, Loves Labours Lost,Bad seed the little foxes Tell Tale Heart

I also worked in the schools library and got to pick and choose what to read. Heaven!

I went to junior high in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1979-80, at 12. This was my first year living in the States since I was 6 (though we'd had a few summer visits).
High school, a magnet school (H.B. Woodlawn) in Arlington VA until 1985. It was a college prep school; required courses for the first half of the year and electives for the second (with requirements).

I have zero clue what we had to read. I know I was forced to read Tess of the d'Urbervilles because I _hated_ it. Ditto Catcher in the Rye, though I remember even less of the story there. There was some Dickens in there, and some Shakespeare, and one of my electives had a lot of poetry (but I'm not sure even what the class actually was - what I remember is that I learned Masefield's Sea Fever by having my sister set it to music, and then presumably sang it to the class). During that time I read a lot of SF and classics, but I have no idea what was required and what I read for myself. I did _not_ read Lord of the Flies; I have a copy and keep thinking I should read it, but then I remember what it's about and am completely uninterested in immersing myself in that world. Oh, and I read The Yearling and watched Old Yeller, and recovered by reading a lot of Terhune and Marguerite Henry. And I had to read Gulliver's Travels, but was very annoyed because the school book only had Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and I found Laputa and the Houyhnhnms much more interesting (and had read the whole thing on my own several years previously).

Looking through previous lists - 1984 and Animal Farm were _probably_ school books. And at least one Russian book...Crime and Punishment? Or Anna Karenina? Something like that. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn - again, no idea if it was on my own or for a class. Ditto Treasure Island. I don't recall...well, yes, there was one class where I had to do a paper* on an author, and I chose Rudyard Kipling, so I certainly read some of his in that class - but I'd read just about all of them long before, poetry and prose. No idea if I ever got one of his books assigned. Catch-22 and The Red Badge of Courage, The Old Man and the Sea, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist and a couple other Dickenses...probably at least some of these were assigned. And I think we also got an abridgement of 1001 Nights assigned, and again I was annoyed because it skipped most of my favorite stories from my unabridged (and unexpurgated) copy (which I believe was titled A Thousand Nights and a Night) that I'd read years before.

*That paper was the worst thing I had to do in that school. My thesis was that Kipling's stories were accurate representations of the people and thinking of the British Raj. I got permission to access the Library of Congress, and found a lot of first-person tales written by people who had lived in and during the Raj - and the stories they told (their reporting of what happened to them) were very much the same style as Kipling's stories. So I used a lot of quotes and comparisons and wrote up my paper...and got it returned, because what the teacher wanted was whether _critics_ thought that Kipling was writing true to the times. Not my opinion, based on primary sources. GRRRRR! I rewrote it, which was blindingly easy because I'd used the critics to help aim me at the primary sources, but she pissed me off so bad...I can remember what she looked like (she was also the teacher for the poetry class, and a couple others) but can't remember her name.

>169 labfs39: I had a similar experience in a Catholic Girls hs in Philly. Only the top 50 students had advanced english classes. I was in the 50 - 99 range - out of like 800 girls. Never learned to write a paper and dropped out of college in my freshman year.

Question 21
>169 labfs39: Those are sad memories. I often marvel at the things teachers could (and can, I suppose) say to kids. And I taught in elementary schools for thirty years, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.

>171 jjmcgaffey: Your mention of Terhune and Marguerite Henry brought back pleasant memories from later childhood, maybe ages 10 and 11. Not required reading, but well-loved.

Age 13: We did mostly independent reading, with class assignments coming from anthologies. I know we read Poe and Robert Frost and quite a bit of other American poetry, but individual titles escape me now. Also, like >171 jjmcgaffey:, I read some book or other and had my own opinions. I was instructed to use critics’ opinions instead. Even at 13, I thought that was incredibly dumb on the part of my teacher who was otherwise a pretty good guy. Oh, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a book from that year. I’d already read it a couple of times, so…

Age 14: The Merchant of Venice and, of all things, The Lady of the Lake, which I loved, are what stand out for me.

Age 15: Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and A Tale of Two Cities. Why AToTC is assigned is beyond me, since it’s not really representative of most of Dickens’ work. Perhaps the powers that be think that the romance will appeal, and that there are “wholesome moral lessons” to be learned.

Age 16: Macbeth, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Age 17: King Lear, Paradise Lost, The Glass Menagerie, and a lot of independent reading.

We had the great good fortune of having a wonderful community theater in our area; by some magical feat of coordination, the Shakespeare plays we read each year were features of theater and the field trips to see them performed were true highlights of our high school years. The theater company had a sure income, and the students had marvelous experiences.

The only book I fudged on was Moby Dick. I read the first five chapters, five more in the middle of the book, and three at the end. I’ve made up for that since though, having read it four times, getting different things from it every time, as an adult.

I’m amazed how many people can remember so clearly what you read each year!

Q21

I graduated from high school in Central California in 1989.

I attended 9th grade in Kansas. The only things I really remember reading in that class were The Outsiders by SE Hinton, and 2 Faulkner short stories: That Evening Sun and A Rose for Emily. I'm always surprised to think about the fact that we read those.

10th grade, regular English class: The Grapes of Wrath, Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye
11th grade, honors English class: Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, King Lear (the 2nd half of the year I dropped out and went to a regular English class but I can't remember offhand what we read aside from Lord of the Flies)
12th grade, AP English class: Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno, The Iliad, Beowulf (and Gardner's Grendel), Hamlet, Heart of Darkness, The Stranger

I'll think some more to see what I remember, but that's what I've got off the top of my head.

My kids' high school was very different - they took all kinds of more specific classes for English. For example, I know my son took one about books and film, so they read some things and watched the movies. I'll have to ask them what their classes were like.

>174 thorold: I have kept most of the books and when I joined LT ten years ago, I created a specific tag for these, so that helped immensely!
I think otherwise I might have started confusing them with the books I am teaching now because I teach at a similar school and some of the books overlap.

>174 thorold: "I’m amazed how many people can remember so clearly what you read each year!"

It seems to me that the more vivid my memory of the teacher, the more of the books I read in his or her class I can recall.

Nothing against the classics, but unsettling that American curriculum has not veered away from the "dead white men," with the exception of the (imo) overrated Harper Lee.

Have any GenXers or Millennials here been assigned any classics by authors of color, LGBTQ authors, or women? Or are curriculum committees getting enough blowback from Huckleberry Finn such that they anticipate fights about anything "controversial"?

Where are Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Alan Ginsburg, Tennessee Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry?

>178 nohrt4me2: dead white men

In fairness to our teachers, even though the official curriculum in the 70s was still pretty heavily slanted towards DWM-lit, we had “unofficial” access to and knowledge of a lot more than that at school. There was a sixth-form (17 and 18 year olds) library that was full of authors like James Joyce, Primo Levi, James Baldwin, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, Patrick White, Herman Hesse, Sam Selvon, VS Naipaul, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc. (possibly not Henry Miller, though, there must have been some limits…). And we knew who all those people were and read a lot of them, outside the classroom.

>174 thorold: Right? I barely remember what I read a decade ago (and only because I added most of it in LT - the ones I did not... oh well...).

Q21

I was in junior high and high school in New Hampshire, starting in 1994 and graduating in 2000. I know there was assigned reading every year for my various English classes, but I honestly don't remember most of it. Reading has been my primary form of entertainment since I was a toddler, so the assigned reading for school maybe had less impact than it might otherwise have had?

In seventh grade, I know we read The Hobbit, which I had already read at least once before it was assigned in class. I'm pretty sure we also read The Outsiders that year. I can't remember any of the other books we might have read, but I do remember that our quarterly reading grades that year were determined by "reading for pages". Basically, reading 1100 pages in a quarter would get one an A+. Reading above and beyond that amount would translate into extra credit. I want to say my personal best was seven or eight A+'s worth of extra credit in a single quarter.

Eighth grade introduced poetry; I remember copying out Robert Burns's "My Heart's in the Highlands" for an assignment (I think I illustrated it too). I don't remember any of the other books we read that year, though.

Either in eighth or ninth grade we read Romeo and Juliet, and we also went to see it performed. I remember the teacher giving the whole class a stern talking to ahead of time, telling us in no uncertain terms that the play was a tragedy, and no one was to laugh during Juliet's "oh happy dagger" speech. That same year, we also went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed theater in the round. That I remember because up until that point I had never laughed so much in my life. Puck was all over the theater, and it was amazing.

In tenth grade I know we read Julius Ceasar, A Raisin in the Sun, and 1984. We might have also read The Old Man and the Sea and Siddhartha, but I can't really remember. In French class, I know we read Le Petit Prince; we had to buy our own copies of the book so we could write in them, and I still have mine.

Eleventh grade was a bit odd; I started the year in AP English, but after the first semester I switched into a lower level class to salvage my GPA (yes, an AP English class should be more challenging than a standard one, but it shouldn't be upper college course level challenging). So I wound up reading The Catcher in the Rye twice that year, because the various classes would share books. I didn't much care for it. Other reading for the year that I remember included Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and The Bean Trees (chosen from a short list of summer reading options to write a paper about).

My senior year of high school as a bunch of elective English courses. I took a Mythology class, and one called Woman as Hero, and also a Science Fiction class. Of course, I don't really remember any of the specific titles we covered in any of those classes at this point in time, but I do remember enjoying all of them. Well, I remember that one of the books in the SF class was Rendezvous with Rama, but that's it.

>179 thorold: Yes, we had access, too, in the 1960s and 70s, but not the same as adding it to the curriculum. Many authors outside of DWMs remain sidelined on "auxiliary" or "for further" reading lists that a lot of kids will not read or discuss.

>178 nohrt4me2: My daughter graduated from high school last year, and I wrote this post last May:

To start things off, I thought I would share a curriculum analysis with you. This is Florida Virtual School's English curriculum for grades 10-12.

Sophomore year: Non-honors students were required to read zero female authors. An excerpt of a speech by Obama was the only required reading not by a dead white guy. In the second module, honors students choose between three books by men and two by women (although one of the two was about a boy's experience). Then honors students chose between Rebecca and Jane Eyre (two white women) and in the fial module read a lais by a twelfth-century woman. Evidently honors students can be exposed to women authors. Obama and Zora Neale Hurston (if you chose her book) were the only non-white authors listed.

Junior year: In a slight improvement, students were required to read one female author, Maja Angelou, who was also the only non-white author required. It was a single poem. Students who chose a woman every time they could would end the year with five works by women out of around twenty-five. Three non-white authors were possible. In a slight aside, the inclusion of King Kong with its lurid depiction of women as one of the few works for the year was deplorable.

Senior year: The first two modules feature zero women authors. Moreover, the honors selections included Rudyard Kipling, the originator of ″white man′s burden,″ and ″Song to the Men of England.″ Where are the women? Well, in module three, students are introduced to the idea of women authors. I say idea, because only about one-third of the works are actually written by women. The Obamas and Gandhi are the only named non-white authors, and Gandhi was optional, only for honors students.

As if these numbers were not shocking enough, if you look at the amount of class time spent on women or non-white (or living, for that matter) authors, even the over-represented Shakespeare would roll over in his grave. An entire year reading no works by women? Or a single poem in two years? In three years of English class, students were required to read only five works by nonwhites: excerpts from three speeches by the Obamas, a poem, and a newspaper article.

>162 avaland: Q21

The only reason I remember some of these is because I did some digging on the non-Bulgarian titles for someone else's thread; the Bulgarian ones were always clear

Bulgarian schools work a bit differently (no junior high): it is split into 3 sections: elementary (grades 1-3 when I was at school; 1-4 these days); basic (grades 4-8) and middle education (9-11/12). People who go for vocational and professional schools do that with a finished basic education. Science, language and art high schools start after grade 7 so you get the last grade from basic education in the new school - and for schools that teach a language, that year is actually split into two years - but that is a different topic).

Age 12/13 will put me at grade 7 (1993/1994 academic year; I graduated high school in 1999) - which is when I changed schools (the official acceptance is after grade 7 but the science schools run grade 7 as well which is considered the best preparation for the exam after the 7th grade). Everyone studies the same texts in Lit class - regardless if you are in an elite school or in the worst village one - if you are in the 7th grade, you must cover the prescribed list of books and works. As a result the mandatory part of the summer lists was the same for everyone - whatever will be studied the next year. For example after the 7th grade, as I was in the split 8th grade (aka prep class), we only got the first semester worth of mandatory literature (the second semester one went into the post prep class list). Which in that case meant Greek literature: Nikolay Kun's Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece, The Iliad, Sophocles's Antigone and Sappho (just one fragment of a poem) and the Bible (Selections from multiple books although it was strongly hinted that reading the whole books will be a good idea). But because it was a half year worth of material, we were also required to read The Odyssey, a couple more Greek plays (Medea and Agamemnon I think but I read more than the required (because the library had the big volumes with more than one play and I just could not not read the whole books after all) plus the whole anthology of Greek Lyric poetry where the needed poem by Sappho was. I got curious while thinking about it and tracked down the English version of the one we had in the textbook: https://www.best-poems.net/sappho/adoration.html That was also the only year without Bulgarian literature on the mandatory list - it remained in the second part that went into the 8th grade, post prep class.

For the rest of the years, the mandatory followed the standard program:

Before 8th grade: some early Bulgarian literature (Chernorizets Hrabar's "On the Letters", the Alphabet Prayer and the first Bulgarian biography (or a "life" anyway), parts of Decameron, Don Quixote, Hamlet and some of the Shakespeare's sonnets.

Before 9th grade: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Madam Bovary, Le Père Goriot (I think?), Eugene Onegin, "Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya" (the first Bulgarian history), "Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius" (the first Bulgarian autobiography) plus later Bulgarian literature (all the way to Botev).

Before 10th grade and 11th grade: The rest of the Bulgarian literature: Zahariy Stoyanov, more Botev, Vazov ("Under the Yoke", poetry and stories), Aleko Konstantinov ("Bay Ganyo), the two Slaveykovs, Elin Pelin (stories), Yovkov (stories), Yavorov (poetry), Smirnenski (poetry and prose including "The tale of the staircase", available in English here: https://www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=386&Level=1&WorkID=13571), Geo Milev (one looong poem), Debelyanov (poetry), Dimov(a novel: "Tobacco"), Haitov (stories), Chudomir (stories), Radichkov (stories), Talev (a novel from a tetralogy but pretty much everyone read the whole series), Vaptsarov (poetry), Pavel Vezhinov (with the only SF (or genre at all) story in the whole program with "One autumn day on the road"), Atanas Dalchev (poetry). I suspect none of these names mean anything to anyone. No women in the whole list - Fani Popova-Mutafova, Vera Mutafchieva and possibly Yana Yazova should have made the list on the prose side - although the first two made the recommended list (they write historical fiction which is partially why they did not make the official schedule I suspect); we did cover some of the female poets in class even if they did not make the summer lists... :)

We had a Literature textbook/anthology as well which had the texts we needed to work on (so all poetry, all stories and excerpts from novels). You were still supposed to have read the complete books (complete collection for example where only one story is discussed or the complete novel) but the textbook was the main source of texts for the year's work (and papers writing) -- although at least in my school, some of the longer works were required in full as well for the exams and the papers...

In addition:
- Each year had also a "recommended summer list" that had things like Dumas, the Russian, English and American authors and so on (I know Dante's Inferno was on that list at the same time Decameron was on the mandatory one for example. As I was reading a lot on my own, I am not sure anymore what made the lists and what came from my own reading...
- Before the last 2 years, there was also a mandatory reading list for the Philosophy classes (some of the Greeks and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is all I remember but there was more on that list)
- Before the last 2 years, the English department also had a mandatory list (no memories whatsoever what was on it - mostly stories I think - novels were in excerpts only so we were not expected to read the whole novels (although one could if they wanted to)). They also had a recommended list (American novels and stories mainly because the program was British-heavy).

I read everything on the lists (I was that kind of student) and promptly forgot a lot of it soon enough. I hated Nietzsche - no amount of explanation in class helped much... I've reread most of the Bulgarian works since then and I enjoy most of them. Most of the international ones had either made me seek more from the author or I had reread them later... I did not hate reading the summer lists - most of the books there were the base for later works so I think it is important to read them (even if they skew male -- that's what influenced later periods after all).

>178 nohrt4me2: Oh! I did have Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God and a couple others. And...Zee Edgell, though I don't remember which book - it was weird, because her daughter Holly was a friend of my sister's. Possibly some other POC women authors, it's pretty vague. Unfortunately I hated all of them - way too depressing.

I read Alcott, but I don't think I was ever _assigned_ any of her books.

>185 jjmcgaffey: I also read Alcott, not assigned, but because my parents gave me a gift set of beautifully bound Alcott books when I was in 8th grade.

I was a non reader until my last semester of high school. I read as little of what was assigned as I could get away with and still get my A (or try to). I turned 13 in 1986 at the end of 7th grade. High school was grades 9-12, 1987-1991. My current reading list begins in December 1990, with Brave New World (it wasn’t assigned). I gradated in May or June 1991.

Assigned reading I tried to avoid included Animal Farm (6th! And 10th grade), The Call of the Wild, The Pearl by Steinbeck (I think?), Fahrenheit 451, Rip van winkle by Washington Irving (probably I didn’t really read this), Edgar Allen Poe - I remember struggling with The House of Seven Gables - Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (a struggle), The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (a struggle), Red Badge of courage by Stephen Crane (was ok), Bartleby by Herman Melville (a struggle), Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (both were boring), one curious short story by Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (a struggle, but rewarded), Romeo and Juliet and Julies Caesar by Shakespeare (no clue how much I read, but I remember the movie of R&J we had to watch in class had nudity), an abridged version of Great Expectations, which I read very little of, and Jane Eyre…which I finished late, over the summer after I graduated.

I also read The Catcher in the Rye,
The Prince and the Pauper and The Hobbit. But it’s possible these weren’t assigned. I read the Old Man and the Sea without assignment.

So, one nice memory. In 10th grade my teacher let us read for extra credit anything on her shelf. I read for all four semesters in the first semester. I remember these: Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, Anthem by Anne Rand, 1984 (which shocked me), In Cold Blood by Capote, Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan, and The Once and Future King by T. H. White.

>178 nohrt4me2: Have any GenXers or Millennials here been assigned any classics by authors of color, LGBTQ authors, or women? Or are curriculum committees getting enough blowback from Huckleberry Finn such that they anticipate fights about anything "controversial"?Where are Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Alan Ginsburg, Tennessee Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry?

based on what my friends kids are reading, Id say it has indeed changed in many places, there may be required reading in the curriculum but there are often other books that teachers can choose from, That being said in a world where they can ban MAUZ for nudity, and black history just cozm Im ot sure this will be the case for long.

I went to secondary school in Belfast in 1984. Hmm - what do I remember...

This was the place - would love to say I've lots of fond memories, but I really don't. Don't be fooled by the photo - it's a massive school and most of the classes were in ugly 1970s concrete monstrosities. The old part of the school shown was mostly the boy's boarding department, gym, library and a few maths classes (most children were day pupils, but there were probably 100 or so boarders. There's no such thing as private (or public schools as they're called in England) in NI - we operate a system of tests in the last year of primary school, and if you pass you can apply to any of the grammar schools in your catchment area, which this is one of, but they're still state funded).

Fun fact - my next door neighbour went to school here with Jamie Dornan and went to her prom with him.



1st year - The Hobbit, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet. Hated the former (and still am not a fantasy / SF fan), loved the latter two.

2nd - 4th year - a bit blurry. Animal Farm I remember, and also Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. The Importance of Being Earnest I enjoyed.

5th year (GCSE) - also some memory gaps, but we definitely did poems of Seamus Heaney, Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth. We all found the Seamus Heaney poems a major bore. I think what spoilt it for us was all the hidden meanings which went right over our heads. Pride and Prejudice I enjoyed (I can still remember those quotes learned off pat - "It is a truth universally acknowledged...").

6th year (A Levels) - The Rape of the Lock, School for Scandal, The Great Gatsby, To The Lighthouse (which I hated with a vengeance - so glad I returned to it a few years ago as I really loved it), The Tempest, Hamlet, The Pilgrim's Tale. We went on an English Lit trip to Stratford Upon Avon for a few days to watch a few RSC productions - King Lear and A Comedy of Errors if I remember rightly. Also A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Swan Theatre, which I enjoyed a lot more than the productions at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre - you were very close to the theatre action there. To be fair, I'd gone on the trip mainly for a few parties with my mates rather than to take in the literature. As they say, youth is wasted on the young...

>187 dchaikin: i am glad that despite being a non reader you seemed to have found your niche.....Curious, were your parents reader? In fact that might be an interesting question- what type of reading models did you have growning up, I expect that the answer will be different for boomers, mills and Xers.

>190 cindydavid4: I don’t remember seeing my parents read. They read a little and these books came up in conversation. But it was rare. They both did seem to have an appreciation of literature - in a vague sort of way - sort of the same way they would occasionally attend an art exhibit. Neither reads books now or has in the past 15 years or more.

I always thought books were important but i had to kind of figure out the enjoyment aspect. i think I was a bit skeptical of that aspect. 🙂

>191 dchaikin: interesting. My dh also came from a non reading family (parents barely made it through HS) he had relatives that read to him and encouraged him to read more but his family moved frquently, and he just kinda continued on his own.

One of my best friends came from a family of readers, and she and her DH read, but none of their children caught the bug.. Always wondered what it takes to raise readers

Question 21

For me, junior/senior high were 1963-1969 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. Lexington is Kentucky's second largest city, about 100,000 population then, and the school system was one of the state's better ones.

If memory serves (it often doesn't), books the class read collectively included The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, Silas Marner, parts of The Canterbury Tales, A Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Huckleberry Finn, Death of a Salesman, and A Separate Peace. At least some of the W. H. Rouse translation of The Odyssey at some point. I remember listening in class to an audio recording of the first chapters of The Red Badge of Courage, so non-textual education is not as new as people sometimes think. I missed many of the books Lois read - no Light in the Forest, The Pearl, To Kill a Mockingbird, or My Antonia. George Orwell's books and Lord of the Flies were being read as individual choices, but not by me. No The Great Gatsby. I remember other kids talking about The Old Man and the Sea but didn't read it myself. Various classic poems in the anthologies - wish I had those books still, would be interesting to see what I was exposed to. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" for one.

I expect the texts I did read would hold up well enough today. Romeo and Juliet doesn't imply the same lessons our teachers meant for it to imply back then.

On my own I was reading great blocks of science fiction, but SF hadn't made it into the curriculum, except for a Ray Bradbury story or two in our literature textbooks. I read Fahrenheit 451 sometime around then; can't remember if it was required or not.

Out in the world the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were going on, and those events did reach classroom discussion, but not the reading list.

All my teachers at least tried to engage with the students. I don't recall disliking any of them, though some were better than others of course - so I was fortunate there.

>167 rocketjk: Hearing about your teacher who objected to The Catcher in the Rye - it's interesting how a book's reputation changes over time. I remember that my mother (born 1914) thought The Grapes of Wrath to be a scandalous book. Not that she'd read it, but that was the buzz in her community (southeastern Ohio) when it was published, and the impression stuck.

And it's a shame diagramming sentences has gone out of style. How do people see sentence structure?

>178 nohrt4me2: No authors of color taught to me - even in the middle of the civil rights era of the 1960s.

Question 21 Required Reading

I lived on Maine coast, south of Portland, in Scarborough,* a town with a population of about 7500, thanks primarily to the post war baby boom.

Junior high began with 7th grade in Fall of 1968 - Spring of 1970:

If I remember correctly (no guarantee of that these days!), in junior high we read: Call of the Wild, Light in the Forest, My Antonia, Red Badge of Courage, Silas Marner**. (not absolutely sure about that last one). There was reading of poetry (rhyming probably, can’t remember the specific poets, except there was always Longfellow - a native son).

High School was Fall of ’70 to Spring of ’74.

The Pearl, Fahrenheit 451, Scarlet Letter, Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye, Tale of Two Cities, Evangeline, Old Man in the Sea, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, Great Gatsby.…Shakespeare was “Romeo and Juliet” (I remember that one because we had a ‘field trip’ to Boston to see a production of it), Macbeth and one other. There was other poetry, somewhat contemporary — e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, comes to mind….

During my last year of high school, for one quarter I was assigned the short stories of John Cheever and John Updike (does anyone read Cheever and Updike any more?). I also allowed to do independent study where I created a school literary magazine and published it. And I got
school credit for my two years writing for the Portland Press Herald. Thus ended my high school English classes.

Of those books listed, I had no big complaints at the time with most.. although I did not care much for about half of the high school picks (Lord of the Flies, Old Man and the Sea and Catcher in the Rye, to name three). At this time I was also going through the fiction in the high school library.

Looking back, I’m disappointed in the serious lack of women and ‘others’ as main characters.’Twas the times. However, I did make a complaint to one of my children’s teachers about the same….seemed not all that much changed 25 years later…

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*25 miles east of Lisa’s school

** Not sure of the Silas Marner, it may have been one of my kids' reads. I read so much (60 years of reading now!), hard to remember everything.....

>163 nohrt4me2:, >167 rocketjk: Intriguing to compare lists with some of roughly the same age...same country.

>167 rocketjk: Diagramming sentences! Now there is something I'd forgotten about! In case anyone is being wishful over the practice, I see there is plenty on the web to reacquaint us!

>169 labfs39: I'm sorry to hear that...but damn, you turned out great despite it!

>181 shadrach_anki: I'll be interested in how your list compares with my kids (they were at ConVai similar dates as your schooling)

>183 labfs39: Fascinating. This is why I want to survey my kids....

>184 AnnieMod: Thanks for writing all that...it's interesting to compare.

>189 AlisonY: Very interesting. I particularly enjoy reading the lists of those who didn't go to school in the US.

And what about The Yellow Wallpaper??? About the time I retired, this book seemed to be beloved by Millennials teaching college lit as a specimen of feminist writing. M'okayyyy.

If nothing else, I’ve learnt one potentially useful thing from this thread that I didn’t know: after being impressed that so many of you had read that other Middle-English poem that usually comes free with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I finally twigged that The pearl is also a Steinbeck novella!

>189 AlisonY: Very discrete! :-)
I happen to know someone who attended that school a few decades before your time, and is very proud of having been there.
Did you get to watch the film of Walkabout? Sounds more fun than The loneliness of the long distance runner.

>198 nohrt4me2: didn't read that till I was a young adult. Do rember reading the doll house for Hs drama class
The two would have gone together nicely

>200 thorold: I think past pupils of my old school fall into 2 camps - loved it or loathed it. There's not really an in between! Interesting your friend went there - small world.

No, I haven't watched Walkabout, but now that I've been thinking about the book for the first time in years I'm quite tempted.

>194 dukedom_enough: "And it's a shame diagramming sentences has gone out of style. How do people see sentence structure?"

You're talking to someone who taught English Composition to (mostly) college freshmen. So, first I have to tell you that I am red/green color blind. When I was a kid they put those collections of colored dots in front of me and asked me what I saw. You were supposed to see a number or a word, I think, but all I saw was a sea of colored dots. No patterns appeared to me because I wasn't discerning the differences in the colors of the dots. That's how students see sentence structure now, I think. They are mystified, because not only do they not see patterns, but they don't know that there are patterns to see. One of the most important tasks for folks like English Comp teachers (and I assume this cuts across most other languages nowadays, but of course I'm only guessing about that) is to demystify the writing process, to get across the idea that there are patterns and processes that can be mastered, at least to the extent that they can learn to write a decent resume cover letter. Sometimes in my English Comp class, students would ask something along the lines of, "Well, I am going to be an accountant. Why do I need to learn how to write an essay?" I would say, "Imagine you have a job in company that you like, but you think you deserve a salary hike. You go to your boss and ask for more money and he says, 'Write a me letter and explain why you deserve a raise.'" Wouldn't you like to be able to write that letter clearly and effectively?

>203 rocketjk: Hi, sorry I didn't see this earlier. Good points.