2002-05-08 11:38

Summer (re)reading

Summer Rereading

This summer I'm going to reread Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. Again. It's probably my favourite verse novel ever, but since Don Juan doesn't count (it's not really a novel) that's not really saying all that much.

I remain amazed that a novel in tetrametric sonnets is even possible in a language as rhyme-poor as English and delighted to the point of giggling in public that it could be so good. Here's the introduction of one of the lead characters:

John's looks are good. His dress is formal.
His voice is low. His mind is sound.
His appetite for work's abnormal.
A plastic name tag hangs around
His collar like a votive necklace.
Though well-paid, he is far from reckless,
Pays his rent promptly, jogs, does not
Smokes cigarettes, and rarely pot,
Eschews both church and heavy drinking,
Enjoys his garden, like to read
Eclectically from Mann to Bede.
(A surrogate, some say, for thinking.)
Friends claim he's grown aloof and prim.
(His boss, though, is well-pleased with him.)

Inevitably, most of the sonnets are more context dependent (and thus less quotable) than that; they range from laugh-out-loud funny (especially in dialogue) to heart-breakingly sad.

In fact it's one of my favourite novels of any kind, firmly inked in on my desert island short-list.

What are you rereading this summer?

Summer reading

There's only two more Swedish classes left now before we break up for the long summer school holiday. The teacher has taken pity on me, though, and ransacked the college cupboards for material to keep me busy - I now have an assortment of easy Swedish readers and cassettes of mostly children's stories.

I'm mostly concerned to bridge the gap between the frothy gossip news-stories which I can read and the Serious Discussions of Weighty Issues, which I can't. As it turns out, though, niv� 2 (don't you just love those French borrowings in Swedish, by the way? F�nster and f�t�lj and fris�r and now niv�. I love that stuff.) is easier going than the gossip rags I normally go in for - I read right through the first story (about a troll and a beautiful golden-haired maiden) without much difficulty.

That's not a problem; it's a good way to build up a command of idiom and I like fairy tales and it's actually quite nice not to have to look up every third word in the dictionary and painfully puzzle out partial parsings with a grammar book.

Besides, summer reading is supposed to be fun, right?