A great range of Penguins Michael. One problem with large books is that if you read in bed and fall asleep, the book falling on your face is an instant wake-up. Beautiful covers, the editors sure know how to select art appropriate to each release.
The Robin Buss translation of The Count of Monte Cristo is amazing! I read an abridged version as a kid, and this one thirty years later, and it was so much better! Enjoy! Also, just added No Name and Woman in White to my Kindle. Really liked the Moonstone.
Emily Wilson has a translation of the Iliad out now. I plan to read it next year; her translation of the Odyssey immediately became my favorite, and her introductory essay was also wonderful. I’m expecting more of the same. I need to read Middlemarch, too. Had it here unread for too long. The audio version of the Ligotti has narration by his longtime friend, fellow horror writer and editor Jon Padgett. It’s wonderful.
I think they've also made the glued bindings on the newer Penguins a little more sturdy, so the spines hold up a bit better. I quite like the new redesign.
So glad for Ligotti. Love this video. Herodot is my all time favorite writers from ancient times. The translator is probably totally ok cos this is not too scientific book. It's a true fun.
A few of this are on my list. I've read Tale of Genji and enjoyed it, but then I'm very into Japanese stuff anyway. Also read the Homer books....I recall struggling with The Iliad a bit. I need to listen to Natalie Haynes lecturing on it, I suspect I'd understand it a whole lot better then.
A very interesting collection. I've not read The Iliad nor The Odyssey and keep toying with the idea of giving them a go. I've read Holland's translation of The Histories which were, yes, odd, but maybe because the original seems to be a mash up between history and mythology anyway. Certainly agree about Wuthering Heights : bleak I don't mind but a cast with no redeeming characters (she can't even make nastiness interesting) and a style that reads like a bad translation from a foreign novel means that she is not in the same league as Charlotte. Some people say Middlemarch is difficult to get into. I don't agree. The pages flew past and what is more, some of Eliot's observations were so sharp I frequently laughed out loud. Far and away my favourite Victorian novel. I found a good way to read The Tale of Genji. Many years ago, I took a boat from New Zealand to the UK, and with me I had the two volume translation by Arthur Waley. With the whole journey taking a month, and only a few distractions, it was read well before I arrived in Southampton. Anyway, a fascinating glimpse into another culture and another time.
No Name! I’m there for it in December. I read Captain Blood in high school too and yes the movie was always on - Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland and it was GREAT! 🏴☠️🖤🐧
This is one of my favourite versions of this great book. I fell in love with that edition of the homeric epic ever since undergraduate years. Thanksgiving Michael for this cool video
Michael I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo. I was surprised by the multitude of storylines that felt like modern crime thrillers. Dumas must have influenced Doyle & Christie.
I have looked at The Tale of Genji so many times in the bookstore. I usually enjoy the challenge of tackling giant books. But that one intimidates even me.
Michael.....I think your TBR shelf is made out of elastic!! 😂 Listening to you talking about the Iliad reminds me why I like your content. You always have these little tidbits of information to add to your reviews. I think you will enjoy Middlemarch. I had to read it at school. If you like a little bit of Captain Blood type adventure, I can thoroughly recommend the Dr Syn books by Russell Thorndike.
“Three Men in a Boat” is an excellent and funny book. “Three Men on the Bummel” is not so funny but the section about how dueling scars are acquired among the German officer class is enlightening.
Maybe the definitive sequel to Three Men in a Boat is Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. No penguin classics edition of that one though, just SF Masterworks.
My favorite translations of Homer's ILIAD and ODYSSEY are the Richmond Lattimore ones, because they are in English hexameter verse, matching the original verse format line-for-line, and if I'm not mistaken his was the first English translation to do this, rather than to transmogrify it into a standard iambic pentameter verse format or to revert to English prose, as Rieu's translation does. Lattimore was just terrific, and his version is the best, IMHO. Penguin also has a verse translation of Ariosto's ORLANDO FURIOSO that I recently re-read, and enjoyed immensely, translated by Barbara Reynolds -- the same person who finished Dorothy Sayers' translation of Dante's PARADISO (she having died before the last 11 cantos had been completed). I'm not against prose translations of verse works, but when a talented versifier can manage to retain the verse format of the original without losing any sense due to forcing a rhyme in English when the (Italian) original manages it effortlessly, well, one gains something in the 'feel' of that verse work that no prose version can hope to provide. Imagine translating a bawdy limerick from English into, say, Italian or German or Bulgarian . . . but transforming it into PROSE without the familiar rhythms of the 5-line stanza form and the rhyme scheme! The whole point of a limerick would be lost if one were to junk the rhythm and rhyme. I'd have to say it must be easier to translate Homer's original non-rhyming Greek hexameters than it is to translate the 8-line stanzas of Ariosto (rhyming ABABABCC), s kudos to Barbara Reynolds for her magnificent version of ORLANDO FURIOSO. I only wish she could have also translated Boiardo's ORLANDO INNAMORATO -- the FURIOSO being a 'sequel' continuation of the INNAMORATO. A guy named A. S. Kline has recently translated both the FURIOSO and the INNAMORATO, in the original verse-form, which is good . . . but he has a weird way of rhyming certain words, such as -- in Book I, Canto I, Stanza 3 of the INNAMORATO -- lines 1, 3, and 5 : "teller" "other" and "loser" -- rhyming on the unstressed 2nd syllable, the '-er' sound, almost as if one were trying to pronounce those words in a mock-French accent, like in a Monty Python skit. Odd choice, but one probably dictated by the fact that English has far fewer rhymes than Italian has at its disposal. I have the distinct feeling that Reynolds could have produced a far better English verse translation of the INNAMORATO had she made the attempt. One plus for translating Homer in English hexameter verse, rather than into pentameter (necessitating more lines per book than a strictly line-for-line version) or prose, is that Homer used certain 'epithets' in addition to Names, and this usually was done in order to fill out a line of poetry into the appropriate number of syllables. There are some translations which CUT OUT those Homeric epithets, since one can still get what's going on when you drop them out. The last line of the ILIAD mentions "Hector, breaker-of-horses" -- even though by that time Hector's DEAD and no longer spending ANY time breaking wild horses into tame ones; it's just that the line needed some extra syllables, and the epithet commonly associated with Hector was "breaker-of-horses" so Homer padded the line out by including the phrase. A translator COULD just excise all those 'filler' phrases, sure . . . but, like them or not, they're part of Homer's art, and I feel it's better to retain them, and a line-for-line verse translation shows how they were meant for inclusion: to make the verse feel appropriately 'complete' when recited aloud, as those poems originally were.
@@michaelk.vaughan8617 Aww, you're making me blush! -- All kidding aside, I have to say that you got me sidetracked from reading from a stack of books I've purchased more recently to delving back into Robert E. Howard, when you started your Cimmerian September binge. I decided to re-read the KULL volume first, and then re-read the 3 CONAN volumes (I'm just starting "The Hour of the Dragon" so I'm a bit behind) and then I plan on re-reading the BRAN MAK MORN volume, then the SOLOMON KANE one, then the EL BORAK one, then SWORD WOMAN and the HORROR volume -- and then I'm gonna read the Steve Costigan book I bought about a year ago but haven't got around to reading yet. Then I'll read the previously published other REH works that weren't in the DEL REY/BALLANTINE volumes, such as his Westerns, etc. -- Just one 'educational' comment to add here: the pronunciation of the word 'Cimmeria' should have the letter 'C' sounding like a 'K' rather than an 'S', since the word comes from Greek via Latin, the Latin letter 'C' having been always pronounced like a 'K' in Classical times, the Greek name 'Kimmerioi' [with the letter Kappa starting it off] meaning 'Cimmerian', mentioned in Homer. I'm sure everybody who's a fan of REH is used to pronouncing 'Cimmeria' as 'Simmeria' the same way that the Boston Celtics are pronounced 'Seltics' rather than 'Keltics', but properly speaking we should be pronouncing it "Conan the Kimmerian" -- with both names having those hard-K sounds. When I'm re-reading the Conan stories, I'm forcing myself to go against the grain and pronounce 'Cimmeria' with the 'K'-sound -- and I've little doubt that Howard himself would probably admit that it really ought to be pronounced that way, due to his pseudo-historical background ["The Hyborian Age"] preparing-the-way for the later historical cultures that arose after the more recent cataclysms which wiped out the Hyborian Age, that essay mentioning the emergence of places associated with those 'Cimmerians' -- such as Crimea, the Cymry, etc.
Sounds like I need to pick up those translations for Homer to have them ready for a reread in a few years! I'll add my voice to those telling you that Middlemarch is outstanding. Not as excellent as Count of Monte Cristo, but still really, really good.
Mmm Homer, I've not read the Rieu translations yet, the versions I read were Pope and I loved those .. Rieu's Iliad & Odyssey and Apollonius of Rhodes Jason and the Argonauts are among the books I'd like to read next year. Maybe sooner if a copy of Jason and the Argonauts falls into my lap, also one of the greatest movies of all time.
Michael, have you read any W.W. Jacobs? If so, what do you think of his work? I recently discovered him thanks to RU-vid audio books and find his work delightful! Thanks for the great videos! 😛
Damn some of those are BIG. Quite a lot there I want to read too, though the sheer size of some is daunting. I have the Iliad on my TBR too, albeit in the new Emily Wilson translation. But I do have the revised Rieu Iliad in paperback (along with Martin Hammond's version, the first one I ever read; never expected to see *that* reprinted but there it is) as well as his revised Odyssey. According to his son's intro, Rieu tended to smooth over some aspects of the original Greek to make it more "English". That Portable Poe is a good edition. I came away from reading that with a much greater appreciation of what Poe was doing in his work and where he was coming from as a writer and thinker. I just... still don't particularly care for his work. That Dumas edition apparently is indeed the one to get. Most other English editions follow an anonymous translation published in the 1840s that bowdlerised and cut a bunch of details to protect delicate Victorian sensibilities, which Robin Buss' version restores. Not entirely surprised at Ligotti getting a Penguin edition, just curious that it didn't appear in their modern classics line. I don't know what their rationale is. Case Against Satan is GREAT. I really need to read more of Russell's stuff (he and I share the same surname, after all).
You must consider reading 'Chandrakanta' by Devkinandan Khatri. It's an epic fantasy hindi standalone novel. (I hope some english translations might be available)...It's said that when it was published (1880s), the non-hindi speakers simply learnt Hindi language just to experience the real taste of this fantasy. I hope you'll read it once.
It actually makes me sad to know there are countless amazing books that I will never be able to experience because they've never been translated into English. Don't even get me started on songs!
Wow, some of those titles don't even sound familiar to me. I'm more illiterate than I even thought. Maybe if I got off Booktube, I'd get more reading in. Imagine that.
