I find that I get lots of my ideas about books to read from other people's blogs. I also find that with teenagers instead of toddlers, I have way more time to read! I don't fall asleep at 9 pm and I can read on holidays instead of chasing around and sweeping all the time. I'm not sure what happened in those years between toddlers and teenagers, but I certainly notice that now I have more time!
So, I am reading a lot. I see things I think I'd like to read; I put a hold on at the library; at some unspecified time in the future, the book will arrive. Sometimes I even forget where I heard about a book, some are revelations and some are, of course, duds.
This September I saw that there was a movie at TIFF of
Thérèse Raquin, by Emile Zola. (I see they have retitled it
In Secret.) It has that cute Tom Felton as a sickly and pale husband, who has to be disposed of by the lovely and talented Elizabeth Olsen and her tall, dark, handsome lover, Oscar Isaac. Now, I like a good movie, but I do like to read the book first, so I decided to read Thérèse Raquin, and in the original French. Heck, it's only 32 years since I got a BA in the subject, after all. It was surprisingly easy to get back my ease of reading in French, perhaps because this is a book about people who live in a city, hang around home, kill off husbands... all pretty straightforward vocabulary.
Chuffed with that success, I took on Madame Bovary.
In this book, I bet 17 different kinds of trees are named; 37 different fabrics; there are furnishings, kinds of clothing, architectural bits, carriages and medical terms. Sometimes I knew what the words meant but things still didn't make sense. I had an English translation nearby -- I still often wondered why he'd put that sentence just there. A bit more challenging, for sure.
I have a stack of other books by the bedside, and I even bought some more French books. Now, I think, a thriller in English, though. And starting today with Madame Bovary, I will put a list in the sidebar of books I have finished.
