Le Baron's casual reading log

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DaveAgain
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:39 pm

Le Baron wrote:Just under two months ago I sent a letter to my old piano teacher? I got a reply today and the envelope was completely torn open at the top! >:(
There were some accounts in today's paper of French customs officials adding excessive duty demands to gifts sent through the post between France and the UK. Perhaps this is an example of the same spirit?
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Wed Jan 05, 2022 4:09 pm

DaveAgain wrote:There were some accounts in today's paper of French customs officials adding excessive duty demands to gifts sent through the post between France and the UK. Perhaps this is an example of the same spirit?

I didn't know about that. This was from UK to Netherlands though. However there have also been reports here of excessive duty and demands from the neoliberal post 'service' for extra postage costs.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Mon Jan 10, 2022 9:35 pm

Up to now I've used January to clear away any books. In the sense of reading through any books - that I started, but didn't finish for any reason in any language - before I start new books for the year.

Most were English and French, a couple of Dutch. One other was a German 'krimi'. Months ago, early in the year, I read about 5 pages of the play Knock by Jules Romain, yet found it unappealing at the time. Then It fell down the back of the bed, though I didn't know this and I retrieved it a bit later. Now I'm about 2/3 through it and it's marvellous.

After this I think I'll finish up La Part de L'autre - Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Or at least try, because 500 page books are rarely appealing to me these days. Though I did read a good 200 pages or so. I'll make the attempt and if it doesn't work, well never mind.

Through the year I'm going to pepper-in English books I've been meaning to read. Some classics, some new. I think it will bring a little relief when I get bogged-down in other reading.

Here's some music worth listening to. From Italian early Baroque composer Tarquinio Merula. Sends shivers up the spine.

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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Wed Jan 12, 2022 6:23 pm

I found a book in the street today in Utrecht. Thrown out with the paper for the old paper collection. And the collection truck was about 50 metres behind me, so I was casting a sneaky eye into the boxes because people do tend to throw out quite a lot of good books. I acquired a very good Dutch dictionary from such a source; a Koenen in hardback with the dust cover intact. Clean as a whistle and binding intact. To think that would have been destroyed in the paper truck...doesn't bear thinking about.

The book I found today was a paperback. French, Annie Ernaux Les Années. I've read a couple of her books before and they are very similar to one another, a sort of autobiographical fiction.

A previous Dutch reader has left some pencil notes in it. On one page they have circled 'GI' (L'ombre des combattants vainqueurs, des GI, flottait autour d'eux.) and has drawn a pencil line to 'Grands Invalides'. :?: This is what learning looks like.

For some reason, all the pages up to page 82 look like they have been damp and are cockled. After that the book is perfectly straight and ordinary. So I imagine someone had the book open, reading it, and there is a spine crease at that point, and put it face down somewhere. To answer the door, to go and eat, to take a shower... Then a glass of something was upset and the liquid travelled to one side of the open pages. Voilà! Then it dried and was read or left unread and eventually found itself in the old paper box where I found it.

Some years back, when I still lived in the city centre, I chanced upon a large box of Spanish materials awaiting the same fate. At that time I wasn't learning Spanish or had any plan to. However, being equipped with at least a bit of forethought, I decided the wise thing would be to save most of them. Big box so I couldn't take them all. Large hardback dictionary, some course books, literature, verb books and vocabulary. I found it rather lazy and thoughtless of the person to dump this out as rubbish when the second-hand shop is just 10 minutes away.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:40 pm

I made it through a Spanish translation of Dorothy L Sayers classic sleuth novel 'Strong Poison' or Veneno mortal in this case. It's a long time since I read it in English, so I couldn't completely rely on memory. The little paper dictionary saw quite some use, I'm surprised the pages didn't catch fire they were being flipped so often and quickly.

I actually read about 20 pages of this book around the middle of December, then picked it up again as 'bedtime reading' two weeks ago. It has gone quite rapidly. How much can I say I understood? Well I know what happened, but then I'm familiar with the plot. I missed turns of phrase, lots of words (some of which I looked up). Lord Peter Wimsey says things in an amusing way in English, I can't tell if they're as amusing in Spanish. This will need work. When I laugh at one of the jokes in Spanish I will be making serious progress.

But I finished it at least !
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Tue Jan 25, 2022 7:28 pm

Someone gave me a small pile of booklets dating from the middle 1980s, after the Sandinsta revolution in Nicaragua had taken power. These little books are largely government information provided to assist with health and work rights. A government actively trying to improve its citizens' lives? Remember that strange, old concept? A great one, until Ortega went mad, religious and monetarist/neoliberal, as he is today.

One I started reading is La Salud del Niño. It is a mixture of text, poetry and small cartoon strips, like those old Readers & Writers 'For Beginners' books, with which they share a clear ancestor in Rius's Marx para principiantes. On La Salud del Niño's back cover it it tells us it:
es un libro de medicina preventiva y de poesía para librar de enfermedades a los pequeños a través de vacunas saneamiento ambiental y formas alimenticias, desde que éste se encuentra en el vientre materno.
Estamos obligados a luchar para poder proporcionares a nuestros niños un mundo en libertad, un mundo justo, con una sociedad donde no haya ni explotadores ni explotados...

Poetry and humour and moral values for the public good in government information...we should be so lucky.

I'll read through these and perhaps get all radicalised.
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:06 pm

I'm reaching the end of my tether with Chamber's online English dictionary. I kept it on to use in that pop-up dictionary extension on Firefox.
According to the lofty minds at Chambers online the word tenacity doesn't exist. They have tenacious, yet insist the noun variant is 'tenaciousness'. And yet they don't think the noun variant of audacious is 'audaciousness' (though they list that) rather than 'audacity'. Tenacity is listed in my paper version of their dictionary. Also in the Oxford Concise. So that's one victory point for the paper dictionaries.

Their search system is annoyingly puritanical. If they decide a word doesn't exist or if there is a variant spelling, it claims to find nothing rather than offering a useful suggestion. Their etymology, which they seem to regard as 'thorough' (thoroughness doesn't exist in their dictionary though) is actually quite incomplete and slipshod.

They're becoming annoying to me and I am about to abandon this dictionary after 20-odd years of use.
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Feb 06, 2022 12:02 am

Le Baron wrote:They're becoming annoying to me and I am about to abandon this dictionary after 20-odd years of use.
You're a Collins man, you've just not known it until now!

tenacity
(tɪnæsɪti )
uncountable noun
If you have tenacity, you are very determined and do not give up easily.
Talent, hard work and sheer tenacity are all crucial to career success.


https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dicti ... h/tenacity
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sun Feb 06, 2022 1:22 am

A shame. Unfortunately Collins is one of the tentacles of Murdoch.

I'm going back to Oxford Concise, which served me well for many years (even when it was the 1950s edition).
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Fri Feb 11, 2022 8:28 pm

I finished all of those little Nicaragua books. 8 of them. I read two of them twice and extracted lots of useful and interesting things from them, and not just language-based.

I'm going to start the Che Guevara - ¿Aventura o revolución? - book by Horacio Daniel Rodríguez. The sort of book I thought I would never be able to even open. It's still probably too hard, but I'm giving it a go to see how it goes. Aventura o revolución indeed.

The worst news is that I bought some sun-dried tomatoes from the superbazaro and then left them there on the packing-in table presumably. Which is irritating because I was looking forward to them being in the salad. I could even mentally taste them before I went to the pantry and saw they were not there. This is the wrong way to start a weekend.

I'm righting this wrong with some jazz-funk by Patrice Rushen...before she went all pop music. The Rhodes piano is perfectly suited to jazz-funk, is it not?

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