Best Book Only Read in L2

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Anya
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Anya » Mon May 22, 2017 7:07 pm

French : Amélie Nothomb "Stupeur et Tremblements"
Spanish : Julio Cortázar "62 Modelo para armar"
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby rlnv » Tue May 23, 2017 4:26 am

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Last edited by rlnv on Wed Apr 18, 2018 2:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby William Camden » Tue May 23, 2017 5:49 am

Voytek wrote:https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre_Rico,_Padre_Pobre

You all have to read this book. :) Unless you don't want get rich or die trying. :P


An American book and readily available in English.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby arthaey » Tue May 23, 2017 3:51 pm

William Camden wrote:An American book and readily available in English.

Translations still count as L2. :)
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby William Camden » Thu May 25, 2017 5:00 am

Only that it is originally an American book and in English.
I flicked through it in a bookshop. It struck me as very American - a British writer might use the same language more or less, but the background culture is quite different, in much the same way that Elmer Gantry is different from a Church of England vicar.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby geoffw » Sun Sep 03, 2017 1:14 pm

The clear winner for me is Die Haarteppichknüpfer, by Andreas Eschbach. It's the only time (not counting my defense of the Yiddish translation of The Hobbit) that I bothered to write an Amazon review of a book:

geoffw wrote:What an amazing book! After being somewhere between moderately pleased and bitterly disappointed with my last several books (by other authors!) this was such a refreshing find.

As a prominent review said, this book has the feeling of a short story that grew to the length of a novel. We are presented with an alternate universe, mostly believable as an alternate reality, save for the existence of faster-than-light-speed travel (which is just assumed in popular Science Fiction in any event), but with a bizarre premise: the hair-carpet weavers. From this starting premise, we gradually are introduced to a nail-biting suspenseful mystery that takes place over hundreds of thousands of years across the span of countless galaxies. I would not have thought this to be possible. Five stars.

[I cannot vouch for the translation, since I "read" this as an audiobook in the original German, so please rely on other commenters as to the quality of the English version.]


Also of possible interest, I recommend (slightly less enthusiastically, but wholeheartedly, nevertheless) Brandon Sanderson, [insert title here]. I've found everything of his fascinating so far. More specifically, I'm well into the "Mistborn" series in French translation.

While reading "Mistborn" in translation hasn't caused much consternation, my reading "A Song of Ice and Fire" did, to some degree. When the associated show "A Game of Thrones" became popular, I started reading the book series in German. I read the first and third books in German, the second in Dutch, and reread portions of the first in French and Italian. But I never read any of them in English. This led to some weird issues, because I had started reading the books (I didn't have HBO) to not be completely left out when my friends were talking about the show. The problem was, I still had no idea what they were talking about, because the names of so many key things were different in translation (e.g. "White Walkers" = "Anderen"). And whenever I wanted to talk about something like, say, the Wiedergänger, I had to first figure out what to call them in English--turns out the TV show didn't really give an answer anyhow! (There also was the problem of the TV show not being exactly parallel to the books.)

emk wrote:
tarvos wrote:For emk: Have you read La Horde du Contre-vent by Alain Damassio? You might like that one.

I've started it a couple of times, but honestly the payoff is a little slow for me. It's obviously a very well written book. But ever since I became a parent, I do better with finishing books that, like Déchronologue, start with fire and destruction and an interesting narrator on page 1, than I do with books that start slowly. Maybe someday.

I do have to admit that Fred Vargas is a whole lot fun, though.


Based on emk's recommendations written probably years ago, I looked for both of these books on my recent trip to Québec. I only found La Horde, unfortunately. I also got the next "Mistborn" volume, though, so I've got enough to keep me busy for now.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby DaveBee » Sun Sep 03, 2017 1:30 pm

A graded reader about the Citroen 2CV from my local library, 'La Grande Histoire De La Petite 2CV' (ISBN:2010183517). I liked it so much I bought a copy to give as a gift, and I'll likely buy another for myself at some point.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby aabram » Tue Sep 05, 2017 1:30 pm

DaveBee wrote:A graded reader about the Citroen 2CV


This is one of the geekiest things I've heard for a while, you must really love that car I guess :)
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby emk » Tue Sep 05, 2017 1:39 pm

geoffw wrote:
emk wrote:But ever since I became a parent, I do better with finishing books that, like Déchronologue, start with fire and destruction and an interesting narrator on page 1, than I do with books that start slowly. Maybe someday.

I do have to admit that Fred Vargas is a whole lot fun, though.

Based on emk's recommendations written probably years ago, I looked for both of these books on my recent trip to Québec. I only found La Horde, unfortunately. I also got the next "Mistborn" volume, though, so I've got enough to keep me busy for now.

I am very happy to announce that the US Kindle store now has Le Déchronologue and several recent Fred Vargas novels, all in "French edition"! I'm currently reading Temps glaciaires, which started a bit slow but which is shaping up to have all those charmingly odd Vargas characters that always amuse me so much.

It's not the full Amazon.fr catalog, as far as I can tell, but it's definitely bigger than it used to be. Prices are typically about $11/novel, which is in the same general ballpark as paperback retail in France.

So US French students, if you're looking for any recent books recommended in this thread, try a search on Amazon.com and you might find them!
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby reineke » Tue Sep 05, 2017 2:09 pm

Spanish and French book recommendations
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=5894
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