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tolkien

Books

Multi-national and multi-lingual book roundup!

Picked up in print in Victoria this past weekend, when Dara and I kept having fun ducking into small used bookstores and going “So! Do you have any books in French?”:

  • La communauté de l’Anneau, Les deux tours, and Le retour du roi. J.R.R. Tolkien. These are, of course, the French translations of the three books of The Lord of the Rings.
  • Harry Potter à l’École des Sorciers, Harry Potter et La Chambre des Secrets, and Harry Potter et Le Prisonnier d’Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling. The French translations of the first three Harry Potter books.

Grabbed from Kobo:

  • Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis. Alternate history of the “WWII but with magic” school. Noticed this a while back as potentially interesting, grabbed now because Kobo had the price down to 2.99.
  • Wide Open, by Deborah Coates. Contemporary fantasy, by which I mean, fantasy set in the real world, but in a more rural setting rather than an urban one. Sounded interesting, about a woman coming back from a stint in Iraq and having to deal with her sister’s ghost.
  • Cold Magic, by Kate Elliott. Steampunk. Saw this one come out a while back, thought it sounded interesting, finally buying a copy.

And grabbed from Angry Robot directly, because they decided they wanted to celebrate SF written by women after the recent flaps over the Hugos and the Clarkes this year, to wit, go Angry Robot!:

  • vN, by Madeline Ashby. SF. Liked the concept of a heroine who’s an intelligent, self-replicating robot–a synthetic humanoid.
  • The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, by Cassandra Rose Clarke. SF, and again, oddly enough, about intelligent humanoid robots! In this case, a love story involving one.
  • Walking the Tree, by Kaaron Warren. Fantasy. This sounded like it had an interesting worldbuilding concept, about an island civilization dominated by a giant tree and a woman who’s charged to walk the circumference of the island.

75 for the year.

April 11, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 10 (German notes)

And now, last but not least, the notes for Chapter 10 of the German edition of The Hobbit!

Which are rather shorter than the French notes, but then, my grasp of German is still rather shorter than my grasp of French is these days, and I’m still not having those a-ha moments where I get chunks of German starting to make sense. But I HAVE started studying German in SuperMemo, so we’ll see what happens after I’ve done that for a while!

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March 21, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 10 (General notes)

Been a bit, but now, getting back to it, let’s do Chapter 10 of The Hobbit!

Objectively speaking, not terribly much actually happens in this chapter. We’re basically talking the following chain of events:

Bilbo and dwarves: *float downriver to Laketown*
Bilbo: *gets dwarves out of barrels*
Thorin: “I am Thorin Oakenshield! KNEEL BEFORE ZOD–” (Wait, wrong movie.)
Lake-town Men and Elves: “Wut just happened? WOO HOO PARTY WITH THE DWARVES!”
Thorin: “We’re all going to go beat up on the dragon now!”
Lake-town Men: “Yeah okay, you have fun with that.”
Bilbo: *spends entire chapter with a cold*

Raise your hand if you’re imagining Martin Freeman looking miserable throughout this chapter. It does rather add an extra element of “aww your poor thing!”

General notes:

It’s going to be amusing to see the shots in the next movie of Thorin and Fili and Kili coming out of those barrels. Somehow, I suspect they’re still going to manage to look dreamy even when bedraggled. And I can see Martin Freeman looking sneezy and unimpressed during their entire visit to Lake-town, too.

The narrator tells us that “I have never heard what happened to the chief of the guards and the butler.” Which, even though I understand that this is being said for effect here, still translates to me as “I didn’t feel like bothering to fill that in”. It’s yet another little thing I’m pretty sure a modern writer would never get away with!

Noticed this actually when going through the French, but since Tolkien phrased it this way in English too, it goes up here: Thorin telling the party that “we must thank our stars and Mr. Baggins”. I note the lack of “lucky” in this phrase, but that would seem to be the intent here.

I have to wonder how trusting the folk of Lake-town are! The town Master clearly isn’t buying Thorin’s arrival for an instant, but the town at large goes pretty much batshit with Happy–and all it takes is this band of ragged-looking dwarves walking up, and the one in front going, “I’m King under the Mountain!” And *bam*, they all start singing. Either they’re very trusting, or else they’re looking for an excuse to party.

French notes in the next post!

March 21, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 9

Well, Chapter 8 was pretty exciting with all the Bilbo being heroic and OHNOEZ SPIDERS and YAY STING and OHNOEZ THORIN and stuff.

Now, though, we get daring barrel-based escapes from cranky elves! (Because I’m kind of with Thranduil on this; if my house was infested with dwarves I’d be a bit cranky too. Unless the dwarves look like Kili. Then I’m down that. Still, though, those short hairy guys DO put a dent in the beer stash, don’t they?)

Onward to Chapter 9, “Barrels out of Bond”!

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January 13, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 8

This is the first of the Tri-lingual Hobbit Re-Read posts I’m making from angelahighland.com rather than annathepiper.org; I hope those of you who’ve been following me on the other site will pick them up again here. And for those of you who may be just recently joining me on angelahighland.com (hi, fellow Carina authors!), I hope you’ll enjoy this linguistic geekery!

Those of you who are following me from LJ or Dreamwidth, you shouldn’t see any change in these posts, except for a different site showing up in the ‘Mirrored from’ tag.

And for those of you who may just be joining me, I’m re-reading The Hobbit! But I’m doing it in three languages at once: the original English, but also German and French, since I’m interested in learning both languages and I consider this excellent practice. So join me for hobbits and dwarves and wizards and language geeking, as I dive into Chapter 8, “Flies and Spiders”.

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December 31, 2012 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 7 (third post)

Nothing quite like two viewings of the brand new Hobbit movie to get me in the mood to keep up with the Tri-lingual Re-read! Though I gotta say, people, it’s going to be difficult swinging back into Tolkien’s descriptions of the various dwarves, now that I’ve seen the movie–twice now–and have completely fallen in love with the parody Thorin Dreamboatshield: An Unexpected Hotness of Dwarves.

Because, seriously, say what you will about Jackson, love him or hate him, laud or decry his filming in 48 frames per second… the achievement for me in the new movie? Making me swoon for dwarves.

And on that merry note, let’s get back into Chapter 7, shall we? We left off with Bilbo and the dwarves taking it easy at the House of Beorn!

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December 26, 2012 by