(no subject)

[owlectomy]

The other news is that I've decided to get on my own case about something again--in this case, the fact that I don't read half as much fiction as I used to. And, truth be told, I haven't been that much of a fiction reader since middle school. In high school I read the books that were assigned to me, and manga. I had my big science fiction phase in middle school--that was Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, and Douglas Adams. I read and loved books after that, but sporadically, and started far more than I finished.

Whenever I get on my own case about something, I set up a Systematic Plan. I am very good at keeping to Systematic Plans for about two weeks. And then, well, who knows? I keep them up, or life interferes, or I keep them up half-heartedly while skipping days now and then, or I give it up as never a good idea in the first place, or I skip a couple days and let myself forget about it because truthfully, I don't have room in my life for a lot of extracurricular self-improvement. But the Plan this time is for 1000 pages a month. So far I have polished of The Brothers Karamazov and am working on Fudoki by Kij Johnson. My own fiction is going through a neglected time--I need to figure out a new schedule for myself, because I watch too much TV, and there's too much TV I actually like, and I need my nights for homework, too. Mornings. I think I'll have to write in the mornings. (As for the costumes, I intend to finish them in one huge burst this Thursday-Sunday; I can't work on them in little bits. But they're so close to being done that I'm not horribly horribly worried).

I haven't been working on Chinese at all since I switched to a job where I couldn't listen to my mp3 player all the time--I need to remind myself to do that while I'm home. I'm very reluctant to switch to a great extent to reading and writing until I have the oral stuff down a little better, because it'll make my pronunciation more terrible than it already is. I did read a sentence from a book today. It was a good long sentence, too. It took me about an hour to read that sentence, but I'd rather read an interesting sentence than a bunch of easy ones.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The Brothers K, huh? Whose translation? And is there a better one out than the old Penguin Classics one?

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation--though in this case I didn't pay much attention to the quality of the translation, since I wouldn't know how to judge it, beyond its being marginally stylistically competent. I think it's a pretty good one. It reads as very Russian, which is probably as it should be, though that didn't always make it very readable. (In any case, my own ear for style isn't much beyond marginally competent).