Le Baron's casual reading log

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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 07, 2021 2:51 pm

I did start an English book. Patrick Hamilton's 1953 comedy/thriller Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (which was used for the ITV series The Charmer in 1987). Clearly there are a lot of differences between the book and that TV series (which I saw at the time) and this is confirmed by Wikipedia. So I will not just be reading something where I already know all the twists and turns to come. The writing style is so unlike that of a modern novel and a welcome change. It has the touch of a playwright.

For those who don't know Hamilton was also the author of the play Gaslight from which the current term 'gaslighting' is taken. He also wrote the play Rope which is what Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope is based upon.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:11 pm

Heavens! I just hand-wrote a personal letter to someone in French, which is something I haven't done for some time. It was trickier than I remember. So yes, I did type it out and correct it beforehand, prior to any pen touching paper. No sense in having blotches of correction all over the page now is there? :lol:
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby luke » Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:46 pm

Le Baron wrote:Heavens! I just hand-wrote a personal letter to someone in French, which is something I haven't done for some time.

I'm sure they will like your personal touch.

With respect to your signature, have you considered 21 in '21? :lol:
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:49 pm

luke wrote:With respect to your signature, have you considered 21 in '21? :lol:

Yes. It's exactly what I thought earlier on! That it is incongruous. I'll likely fit in another book before the end of the year, so I think I'll be altering that.
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Nov 20, 2021 11:41 pm

I'm halfway through my final book 21. Went for a language I'm not learning (French) so it could be considered a cop-out, but since I'm the one who gets to decide who can contradict me? :)

It's Le Nœud de vipères by Francois Mauriac. I had thought about maybe picking up Hugo's Quatre-vingt Treize where I left off (less than half-way), but I doubt I would have finished that before 2021 ends.

2022 will have to be at least 50% Spanish books and only a few texts for maintenance languages; otherwise I'll not really make enough progress. Indonesian is more casual. It's not anything like as stressful and I find reading progresses well.
When next year dawns I'll read through Orwell's Animal Farm in Indonesian, which has the title Binatangisme (Beastism). When I was trying to work out what the title might be so I could search for it, I thought maybe it would be Kebun Binatang, but it turns out that actually means zoo. :lol:
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:55 pm

Bonsoir mes amis...

I now really have no more challenge books to read. I actually exceeded my official total of '21' in the last three weeks. This means I have been reading at a much faster pace because it's all for pleasure. I've given the fiction a bit of a rest because it's always more taxing to read 'art' prose than non-fiction...most of the time.

Spanish is not painful for me to read in general, but I'm still accruing words and working out grammar. I read and just finished the book Sartre vs Merleau-Ponty (not a description of a fight) by Simon de Beauvoir. This was only a small book of 118 pages, not closely printed. Still I'd been lingering over this for several weeks; five to be exact.
It prompted me to dig out some other Sartre books I have in French and to re-read them for pleasure: Esquisse d'un théorie des émotions, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Réflexions sur les question juive. I'm in the middle of the third one, I'd forgotten Sartre actually wrote some books with non-strangulated prose. I polished-off the other two within days, they're very slim volumes. The reading speed between French/Spanish is palpable for me. Still I read a fairly technical book in Spanish and didn't sink into an abyss, so it's progress.

Other than that I watched the 2015 film Er ist wieder da about Hitler waking up in 2014 and becoming a You Tube star and unwitting comedian. Has anyone seen this? It's a hilarious film, but perhaps risks hitting the wrong target, though I don't know what the author's real aims were. I haven't read the book it is based upon, I might do so.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 29, 2021 11:59 pm

I went out for a walk earlier and on the way back I decided to follow the small alleyways off the road. Halfway home I turned the corner and there was some carnal activity going on in the very narrow ginnel. I just said 'good evening' and moved on.

It reminded me that I read in the newspaper recently that someone in the North East of England phoned the police because they saw two people in 'carnal congress' in a back street. They are now to appear in court! This I found very prudish, even if back-street activity is a bit low-rent. It is after all a common plot device in films, so it must be widespread.

Une histoire de memoire...

Il y a un toute petite salle de cinéma à Utrecht, il s'appelle 'Springhaver' . J'étais là un soir dans une salle presque vide - il y avait peut être juste quelques cinéphiles de ci et de là. Derrière de moi, cinq places en arrière à peu près, il y a eu un homme et une femme qui étaient en train d'avoir des 'relations sexuelles' . Bien (ou pas très bien... ça dépend comme on le régarde) . Pour info, je ne les ai pas observés ! Comme je l'ai déjà dit c'était presque vide ce soir-là, mais ça voulait dire qu'ils étaient plus 'visible' ou audible que non . Ce que je ne comprends vraiment pas, c'est que le prix d'une place de cinéma est plutôt cher rien que pour faire ce que l'on peut faire chez soi !
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:18 pm

As I mentioned above I've been reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (I see it was translated into English as 'Anti-Semite and Jew', probably because it was thought a direct translation of the title might have 'connotations', though it shouldn't). It's curiously divided up into one long section, then one very short section, then another long, then another very short.

It may be the best book I've read this year. I've never really got on with Sartre's books in the past. I hated his novel La Nausée and got really frustrated with his L’être et le néant. I was starting to suspect that he might be a bit of a charlatan, but I don't think this is the case. More recently I've been reading his 'Situations' series and the book (with others) L'Affaire Henri Martin.

That last book is a very early analysis of the kind of politics that would characterise the coming conflicts through the rest of the 20th century. The Henri Martin of the title (who only died in 2015 btw) was a sailor who was mobilised with the idea that he would be battling Japanese occupation/colonialism in the East, but by that time they'd been bombed out of the war anyway. Instead he found himself being used to fight 'the communists' in Vietnam, which was of course then still a French colony just taken back from the Japanese. He basically saw a dry-run for the sort of thing that eventually led-up to the U.S./Vietnam War (which as we know was a continuum).
However, Martin was himself a communist and he dumped his navy mobilisation and returned to France where he engaged in promoting a first-hand view of what was going on. He was promptly arrested as being a 'military saboteur' and eventually imprisoned for supposedly mis-characterising the Indochina war.

Back to the first book though. What struck me about it is that the description Sartre sketches of the anti-Semites and their political-psychological motivations, is almost a picture-perfect representation of the modern right-winger, the simple racist and any vacuous nobody of any political persuasion preaching authoritarianism at any time. It seems to me to explain the mindset of any person you can name right now who is like that. The French prose in this book is nothing like that of other books I'd read of his before I started reading the ones I mentioned above. So I'm corrected, he wasn't a charlatan at all, but clear thinker with a rapier-like intellect.

To get away from all that though, here's Valentina Lisitsa playing Rachmaninov's prelude Op.32, no.5. It owes something to the 1970s performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy which I have on a CD somewhere, but Lisitsa gives it her own touch and just watch her hands! She doesn't just play the piano, she caresses it into making those beautiful sounds.

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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Thu Dec 16, 2021 5:29 pm

I'm posting this here so as not to hijack german2k01's thread.

Language is a particularly social phenomenon not a solitary activity. I'm not knocking the value of structured literary reading for language learning because it obviously provides a lot of the meat for study, but this is a different way of learning a language than learning by use and immersion. Before anyone decides to accost me on this, I know learners also use listening and italki and whatnot, but I think it's pretty clear that a lot of people on this forum depend heavily on written material. This is not how one naturally learns a language and it provides different results. Not wrong...different.
Some may want those type of results stating they only want to read, that's perfectly fine, but to rely on this as a methodology for engaging with native speakers on a daily basis is not going to bear fruit. Or at least the fruit you want. It doesn't make anyone suddenly launch themselves into conversation passing for an educated speaker. That doesn't work. You have to go through an annoying gradient where your speech is rubbish and you lack everyday common vocabulary which everyone else uses without thinking, and which no books will ever furnish you with.

I'm going to freely admit that even after 20+ years of Dutch I can pick up a novel and sometimes in the initial chapter (which is always the most florid as the writer carves their path) I will encounter words I simply don't know. I started a book a few weeks back, Tijding van ver by F.Bordewijk, from 1962. It caught me off-guard with some of the vocabulary and the structures which are in a particular sort of written Dutch that isn't even standard in some modern novels. Yet if I get a letter from the authorities, even though it's written in civil-servant-speak, I can easily read it. Perhaps I'll learn a new word now and again. Just like other people.

My basic argument is that reading is what already-functional language users do, not the other way around. They don't read to learn the language, they learn the language then read - I imagine this will appear contradictory, but it isn't. It makes you a better user, but reading novels is not the initial thing that makes you a functional user of a language in the general sense. It only helps and the amount of what might be called 'baggage' or 'wastage' is high because novels are experiences and collecting things from experiences is slow and low-yield, but when your every waking hour is filled with such experiences it accrues.

I know 2nd language learning is different and that it is approached in a less organic way, but ultimately the actual practise of using a 2nd language roughly boils down to the same sorts of experiences. You can use the words and ideas you've amassed to furnish your usage, but becoming a user is a different skill. Which is why it doesn't matter to me about counting pages in the thousands and 'strategies' for conquering and minutely dissecting novels, but looking at how much more I can understand someone saying something or how much more I can say myself and be properly understood.
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german2k01
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby german2k01 » Thu Dec 16, 2021 6:44 pm

I agreed with whatever you are trying to say regarding absorbing language through listening like interacting with native speakers; watching TV shows, cartoons and movies. Then try bothering with reading in the language. That's how I learned my native language. Through listening for the most part. I do not remember ever reading a novel in my native language however I watched a lot of movies during summer vacations and watched TV dramas daily. I only read news articles in the newspaper which caught my attention but I never read it from cover to cover. Maybe read short stories aimed at the kid's section in the newspaper.

My question is, how long should we aim for the consumption of media through listening and also through speaking before actually picking up a book and start to read it?

At some point, I would also like to enjoy reading books/novels fluently in my target language.
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