I sat down tonight to take a few minutes for myself. It’s been a long and very stressful week and it’s still Thursday. God knows what apocalyptic events might yet happen. A gentle spontaneous combustion, perhaps?

This was going to be a post on a delightful bookish-blog discovery: theserialcomma.com. Funny, intelligent and written by a gentleman who lives in Rome — what more could you ask for?

I guess I found the answer to that one: “longevity”.

After an all-too-brief existence, we are left with a white screen and the simple message: “(The Serial Comma blog is closed)”. Life is too damn ephemeral.

Good-bye, you will be missed!

I suppose you’ve guessed what this post is about.

I’m so excited!!! I’m not sure when I’ll get it here, maybe late October, early November. Time to call in sick at work! Too bad I’m self-employed.

When Brigg’s translation came out I was devastated. I’d been hoping and waiting for eons for my favorite Russian-to-English translators to get to War and Peace. I thought surely no publisher would release another translation of it for at least for a few years. How happy I am to be wrong.

While we’re all waiting, I found a wonderful article (reproduced in full) about Russian-to-English translators, translations and translating issues. It includes interesting details about V and P’s technique and the rather astounding fact that D.H. Lawrence and Constance Garnett were friends. (Somehow I can’t possibly imagine them in the same room together, let alone speaking.) There’s a lot of wonderful information in it, but I must say that I did find the writing of the article itself a bit uneven. Not that that stopped me — I devoured it in minutes!

I copied the text from the comments of this post on Prufrock’s Page (thank you!) and pasted them into a word processing program, then printed it out. I think if I’d read all 17 pages of it in that teeny text on my dreadful screen I would have gone blind (”…or insane!” Remember that from Love and Death? Ah, how I miss the early Woody Allen films…)

Any day now I will be crushed by the teetering stack of books beside my computer that I’ve read but not yet reviewed here. Hopefully that will happen before I get around to Julian by Gore Vidal.

Anyhow, unwilling to break with tradition and downright frightened at the thought of approaching the Stack, I feel compelled to mention The Digested Read by John Crace. A regular column in The Guardian books section, The Digested Read is the anti-hype answer to the publishing world’s gushing. It creates a bit of balance. In the columnist’s words:

The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers’ hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves.

The basic premise for the Digested Read is that it should be the book that has created the most media noise that week.

I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for parody and satire as it takes a great deal of writerly skill and wit to pull off. Besides which, when done well nothing is more hilarious. John Crace is not always brilliant, but is nevertheless an enjoyable and necessary voice in today’s media-mad world.

This from the re-write of Life Class by Pat Barker:

They lay on the dingy bed as the trains rattled past the window. “My husband will kill us,” Teresa said nonchalantly. “Look, he’s even written me a note to that effect.”

A fan website for Dostoevsky! No need to give up on humanity just yet! There’s even a forum to discuss him and other Russian authors you love.

And if you haven’t gone yet, here’s something to make you curious. At the site you can see a bigger version of this:

No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Off you go! And post on their forum — the world needs more people talking about books!

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”
Crime and Punishment