Postby StringerBell » Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:10 pm
Reading Challenge Week 5: Jan 17 - Jan 23
Books read this week:
8) Zona Pericolosa - 50%/203 pages completed (translation of The Killing Floor - Lee Child, 1st book in Jack Reacher series)
A few years ago I went to my library to physically look at all the English versions of the ebooks I had bought to see how accurate the Amazon page count was. According to Amazon, this book has 529 pages. That didn't sound right for the kind of book it was and sure enough, the actual paperback has 407 pages. That's a pretty big difference! I'm counting it as 407 pages.
This was the first novel written for adults that I ever read. It's been a few years but I was pretty confident that I remembered the story well enough to read it now extensively without frustration. I was originally planning to read it while listening to the audiobook but I realized after a few pages that even if I wasn't looking up definitions, I still wanted to be able to take an extra few seconds when I needed it to think about a word's meaning, so I pretty quickly reverted to regularly reading, senza audiobook.
Every once in a blue moon I came across a page with handful of unknowns but they didn't affect my comprehension of the story (there was one sentence with like 4 unknowns but I could tell it was just describing how the morning dew looked after a big storm). Overall, it's more common that many pages go by with no unknowns at all and even when the occasional one pops up I can easily tell what the word is doing in the sentence (describing how someone is moving or walking, for example). I've been able to resist looking up words, with the exception of 2 words that kept getting repeated and it was driving me nuts not to know what they meant.
This author likes to use the same words over and over. The story is exciting but the writing quality is pretty crap. However, that's kind of what I'm looking for right now, so no complaints. I'm not sure if the characters actually know how to do anything other that to shrug and then look someone in the face because they seem to be doing this every few minutes.
At this rate, I expect to finish the book next week.
Favorite new words/expressions from the book:
un piede di porco = crowbar
There was a scene where a character used a crowbar, which was translated as un piede di porco (the foot of a pig). I've never come across this in Italian before (I obviously did years ago when I first read the book but since I have no memory of it, I must have immediately forgot it) but the minute I read that someone used "the foot of a pig" to pry open a door, I couldn't stop laughing. That is such a genius thing to call a crowbar, because that's exactly what it looks like. We should really switch over to calling it that in English, too. This might be my all-time favorite name of an object in Italian.
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