To merely say that “I love books” would be an understatement. In my room at home, I have three floor to ceiling bookcases covered with books. In fact, I have so many books that I’ve started stacking them in front of the neatly lined rows of my bookshelves. I’ve even started commandeering room in other bookshelves in my house, like the one in my brother’s room and the one in my parents’ office. I’ve even got stacks of books on my floor, on my desk and on my dresser, because I just don’t have enough room to fit them all. So, what does one do when they have an addiction to books? Admit they have a problem in order to begin the recovery process? Who says I want to recover? Besides, I’m not hurting anyone or anything besides my wallet.

One of my bookshelves is full of books I haven’t even read yet. Regardless, I often find myself picking up a book or two when I browse the aisles of a bookstore. One of my favorite types of bookstores is one filled with old books. There’s a bookstore I had often passed on my way to visit my grandparents in Rhode Island and after much begging on my part, my boyfriend agreed to stop. One of my favorite smells in the world is the smell of books. When we entered the bookstore I took a deep breath and told my boyfriend how much I liked the smell of old books. He took a sniff and informed me that the aroma I found so enjoyable, in fact smelled like mold. This statement was also followed by an “I think I’m dating a crazy person” look.

My room at school looks very similar to my room at home, tons of books and not enough space to fit them all. Once, my environmental science major roommate walked into my room, looked at all the stacks of books and told me in a surprised voice that I had a lot of books for class. I responded that most of the books weren’t for class; I just read them for enjoyment. She was shocked that I had so many books for the purpose of reading for my own pleasure and that I actually had time to read them.

I sometimes get the feeling people find my obsession with books to be a little crazy. Yes, some of my quirks could be considered a little eccentric, for example, I cringe at the thought of bending a books cover or writing on the pages. My little brother once ripped a page of a book he had borrowed and bought me a new one, because he was afraid of how I would react. I assure you though, I’m not as crazy as I sound and I try to keep my addictive tendencies to a minimum. Even though I love the smell of books you won’t find me lurking in the aisles of a bookstore thumbing through pages frantically, and taking big whiffs to get my fix. Even I’ll admit that would be a little creepy. What can I say though, if being addicted to books is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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I’ll just come out and say that I have never blogged before.  This is an entirely new experience for me, and one that I’m still not certain my technological skills are up to.  But one of the things I have done a lot of is reading.  Trust me when I say that I’m an obsessive-compulsive reader.  You put something with writing on it in front of me—books, magazines, billboards, the backs of children’s cereal boxes, even the magnets on my fridge listing the number for Husky Pizza—and I will read it.  I can barely remember a time when I didn’t have a book somewhere in the immediate vicinity, and the reason why my suitcase was so darn heavy coming back from France this summer is because I discovered Toulouse’s weekly literary market.  Leather-bound classics for €1?  Yes, please!

So for this blog I thought I would do a feature on ten of my favorite bits of writing.  Some are serious, some are silly, but all of them remind me of why I love language so much.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.  Here goes!

1.  “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Jane Austen

One of my all-time favorite quotes from one of my all-time favorite novels.  I always feel like Austen is winking at me, inviting me to join in on the joke.

2. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” – Kafka

As far as first lines go, this one gets right to the point faster than any other book I’ve ever read.  And that’s part of what makes it so wonderful.

3. “Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. ‘Pooh,’ he whispered.

‘Yes, Piglet?’

‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw, ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’”

– Winnie the Pooh

I’ve always been an enormous fan of children’s books, and really good children’s books tend to be the most concise and accurate conveyors of truth that exist in literature.  For me, Pooh and Piglet share one of the greatest friendships ever committed to paper, and this quote is one of the reasons why.

4. “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” – Snoopy

Were truer words ever spoken?

5. “A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
– Alexander Pope

As with most poems, I feel like they really just speak for themselves.  That being said, this one pretty much describes my outlook on life.

6. “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus

No elaboration required.

7. “If this is the only world, then, by logical conclusion, this must be the best of all possible worlds.” – Candide

I find something both incredibly uplifting and incredibly sobering in this quote, and I tend to read it differently depending on my mood.  Then again, that’s probably what Voltaire intended.

8. “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” – E.M. Forster, Howards End

I read Howard’s End when I was in high school, and it pretty much confirmed my abiding love of Forster (if you haven’t read anything by him, I highly recommend doing so).  Of all the passages in the book, this was always the one that stuck with me, by the sheer force of how true it is and how relevant it remains to the world today.

9. “The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.” – Francis P. Church to Virginia O’Hanlon, 1897.

I first read this letter when I was in third grade, and I promptly went over to my father and started trying to explain to him (while crying) that fairies did exist.  He very kindly did not disabuse me of the notion, and I still secretly hope that fairies are going to pop up in front of me someday.

10.  “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.” – Barbara W. Tuchman.

A statement that I wholeheartedly agree with, courtesy of the wonderful historian Barbara Tuchman, and the perfect conclusion to this blog.

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I don’t know about the rest of you, but 3 of my favorite things in the world are books, movies, and video games (more or less in that order.) You’d think the only way any of these things could get better is to combine with one or both of another of these elements. Unfortunately, many of us know that the product of this incestuous relationship is usual quite tragic. Twilight was a mediocre book series that became a sub-par film series. The [original] Star Wars movies were excellent films made into not-so-excellent books. And Prince of Persia was an awful video game based on a movie that was based on an earlier video game. But that’s what makes the successes stand out so much more. The Lord of the Rings is an inspiring book series and a jaw-dropping, tear-jerking, academy-award-winning film series. As a previous blog post points out, so is True Grit (but as single entities, not series.)

On the other hand, I’ve only just gotten into the Halo games this past summer, a side-effect from having my sister’s boyfriend stay with us over the summer, bringing his X-Box with him. I’ve been a Nintendo girl for all of my video-game-playing life, and the closest thing to any violence I’ve ever encountered was fantasy sword fighting in Zelda (which, incidentally, I think would make top-notch books if crafted by the right hands.) But in point of fact, my first breach of the video-game-to-book world came with my sister’s boyfriend’s Christmas present to me, a trilogy of Halo novels.

If any of you have never played Halo, it begins about 500 years in the future, when humans populate other planets beside Earth, notably the planet Reach. However, the humans are being systematically wiped out by an alien race called the Covenant because humans are seen are infidels to the Covenant religion. In order to slow the gradual extinction of the human race, the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) initiates a plan to train genetically advanced soldiers called SPARTANs. One of these super-soldiers is the Master Chief, the character players of the video games control.

I was very excited to read these stories because I wanted to get more familiarized with the Halo world and thus become more knowledgeable of the games themselves. At first I was worried, though, because the opening scene was a battle ground describing military tactics and guns and vehicles from the game, things I was only cursorily familiar with. But as I read on, the descriptions went into more detail and I caught on pretty fast, corroborating what I already knew with what I was newly learning. These books are interesting in that they both satisfy the desires of a newcomer like me, as well offer enjoyment to someone who already knows the games inside out.

For me, it was also different going kind of backwards in the production process. For instance, I am so used to reading a book and then seeing the story pared down to the bare minimum for a movie. But in this case, it takes the existing material and adds so much more background and just plain story to it that the player of the video game wouldn’t get in a fighting style RPG. I haven’t finished the series, but so far I would recommend it to anyone in search of something new.

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I’m not sure how many people run into problems with translations, but I personally feel that I’m on a never-ending quest for the perfectly translated book (poem/novel/short story etc.).  Worse– I’m beginning to suspect it’s a wild goose chase.  Now, for those of you who don’t normally worry about translations, this is a multi-faceted issue.  To explain, I’ll split this into three categories:

1.  A book (see above parentheses) translated from its original into your first language:  for example, a book originally written in French then translated into English.

I read Madame Bovary in English because I’d heard of the novel’s infamous portrayal of adultery in the mid 19^th century and Flaubert’s supposedly outstanding details.  When I read the novel, though, I was very disappointed.  There seemed to be holes in the plot, a lack of explanation for some major events.  I attribute this disappointment to translation and I would think that it would’ve been much more satisfying to have read and understood the novel in its original form.

2.  A book in its original language, which happens to be your second language.

As a French minor, I run into this one quite often.  It’s lovely that I can now read some of my favorite books in their original French, but it is so frustrating when you can’t understand all the big words they use.  It can be compared to trying to read a big-kid book like Harry Potter when you’re in 1^st grade.  In the end, you may come up with the correct overall meaning of a passage, but you’ve missed all the fun because you had to figure all the words out.

3.  Books translated from their original, which is not your first language, into your second language:  for example, a book originally written in Middle English but translated into French.

Books in this category tend to be the most difficult reads.  Last semester I read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in French.  The poem has a fairly simple plot and because it’s in verse form it doesn’t have lots of extra wording and description, but it was still very time-consuming.

Each category has its particular weaknesses, but they all bring into play the question of wording vs. plot.  Is it more important as a reader and/or translator to focus in on the words themselves or the overall meaning?  Trying to stay true to the original text is the goal, but you’d also want the new version to be interesting and to flow satisfactorily on its own.  In addition, consideration must be paid towards societal and cultural conventions present in the original, both in wording and in plot.  Then again, there’s the problem of how complex the language is.  Should it be more/less complicated in the newly translated version?  I guess that would depend mostly on the intended audience and their skill level.

I’m not trying to say that all translations are poorly done and I certainly am not accusing translators of a lack of effort.  In fact, there are some really well translated pieces out there; Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf is a more recent example.  I especially appreciate when the original version is on one page and the translation is on the next and I know I’m not the only nerd out there who likes to try to see if they can guess which words match up.  End point being, however, that translating books so that they can be available to everyone is not simply an academic pursuit.  A successfully translated piece is in my opinion more of a triumph than producing decent writing of your own creation.

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