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HTLAL Book Club | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| bluejay390 Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6269 days ago 227 posts - 259 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Malay, Italian | Message 25 of 77 03 February 2009 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This sounds great! I've always wanted to be part of a book club. :)
For English, I am currently reading Oryx and Crake by Canadian author Margaret Atwood for a class. It was published in 2003 and is a little more recent. I've read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. It was a good book and I think it would be a very good choice. I would love to read Ombre sultane provided that I can find a Spanish translation. It sounds very interesting. For Spanish I am currently reading the e-books Colmilo Blanco and Ines del Alma Mia but I would be open to a different Spanish book. Edited by bluejay390 on 03 February 2009 at 3:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5915 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 26 of 77 03 February 2009 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been thinking more about this Book club idea, and have a few more English books to suggest;The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. For non-fiction works, I would also be interested in reading some of Freud's or Jung's writings in the original German, but I'll have to learn German before I can do that.
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| ExtraLean Triglot Senior Member France languagelearners.myf Joined 5985 days ago 897 posts - 880 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 28 of 77 04 February 2009 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ah well there you go.
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6461 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 29 of 77 04 February 2009 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nice! Can you recommend other francophone authors from outside France to me then? So far I only read Shan Sa's "La joueuse de Go" (very recommended! especially if you know Go) and a couple books from Quebec. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6885 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 77 04 February 2009 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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OK, I'm game for this. But how should we all go about getting it started ?
It is not totally clear to me, so I'd like to see a list of steps that each of us should take to get off the ground with this thing, such as: 1. Get your hands on the book(s) in question 2. Start reading 3. Post comments in a dedicated thread * in the Multilingual area, on: - Your progress with the reading - How you are using it to study: word lists, word counts, other things - Questions about things you need help with - Comments and Opinions on the book itself * One thread per language. Or perhaps one per book? * Some naming convention for the threads, eg. "Book Club (lang): <book title>" * Comment in the target language of each book and/or in English. These are the main ideas that occured to me just now. I'm sure I am missing lots of things. Feel free to suggest more points. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6461 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 31 of 77 04 February 2009 at 9:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here's another suggestions for those who suggested non-fiction: "Lettres persanes" by Montesquieu. It's not actually non-fiction, but close, and will warrant discussion. Or, for a future month: "La ricerca della lingua perfetta" by Umberto Eco, about the history of planned languages.
Since people may need time to get the books suggested, I believe it's best to use out-of-copyright works for the first month, then people in places where Amazon doesn't deliver have 30 days to order the book through their local bookstore. So how'bout this: 1st month: French: Les trois mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas père text online English: Ben Hur by Lewis Wallace text online, audiobook German if anybody wants to do German: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane text online Anybody want to suggest books for other languages? 2nd month: French: Ombre sultane by Assia Djebar. This is available as a mass-market paperback for 5.50 EUR or less at European branches of Amazon or possibly even your local bookstore (I've seen it in German bookstores that only have one shelf of French books) English: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald online text, mass-market paperbacks are available too. German: Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink (= The Reader). The only German book to make it to #1 of the New York Times bestseller list, and they recently turned it into a movie, so that's a good reason to read it now. Edited by Sprachprofi on 04 February 2009 at 9:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6669 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 32 of 77 04 February 2009 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Very true! And that one was just excellent!
I insist :D And I am glad you listen to reason. I have another breathtaking literary suggestion for you, but it may be a bit hard to take in at first, and I know you will be all "no way", so I am still waiting for the right moment and the right way to present it. It's one of the few books that has touched me. By now you should have guessed that is not the easiest of things to accomplish :P
Right now we are reading "Une tempête", a remake of Shakespear's work. I think this is an excellent vocabulary booster, and unless you already have a highly soutenu vocab it would probably be an interesting read. I normally rarely find unknown words in a French book, but in this one I run into several per page. And it's a play, so it's not exactly dense! I write some about it in my TAC log, and will continue to write about things I do for my French class there, as well as on lang-8 in French. If you are interested in Francophonie, I can make sure to post any links I make use of for my class in my log. I was, by the way, mistaken regarding Djebar. I will be reading "L'amour, la fantasia" as well! Since I then had two books coming up and the teacher threw the question of what I was going to write my mini mémoire about for the class today at our online seminar, I decided to write it about Assia Djebar! Impulsive, I know. As for Quebec, we are reading one book from over there, "L‘Homme rapaillé", which is a book of poetry. The class, however, seems to be mainly focused on the more "problematic" part of la francophonie; les Antilles, l'Afrique... There is this caribbean (I think) book that I tried to read when I was way too young and naïve, and that I didn't understand at all, but that I think is actually very interesting, "Wide Sargasso Sea". About Rochester's crazy wife. I don't think I understood what I was supposed to think about it, cause I mostly just wished they would kill her and be done with the whole thing. Now I really want to re-read it though. Another one we are reading is "La traversée de la mangrove" de Condé. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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