reading

le courant de conscience: je lis, j’ai lu, je lirai / leo, leí, leeré

I used to read an extraordinary amount. When I was a child, I would always ask for several books for Christmas, and my mother would always oblige and wrap a tall stack of books for me to find under the tree. She did this, buying me a pile of books, knowing that I would immediately root myself onto the couch and plow through the whole stack within days. She remarked on this again when I made an offhand comment about how my son comes home from school and immediately picks back up on reading the book he’d been reading before leaving for school in the morning. I have always been very strict about tv time, he is *only* allowed to watch anything on the weekends and even then it’s one movie’s worth of time per day, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. If he wakes up before us on the weekend, he’ll curl up on the couch with a book or two and, whenever we take him to get new books, he finishes them within hours. He’s currently eight years old but, like both myself and my husband, he’s years ahead in his reading level. I’ve always found the contrast between myself and my husband to be interesting – I read at a lightning speed (which my son seems to have inherited) and I generally read fiction or sci-fi. Husband reads much slower, but he prefers reading biographies, music and pop culture theory, and economics. I’m curious to see which way The Kid will go when he gets older.

In my younger adult years, I still read voraciously. I loved reading books by philosophers, foreign authors, books about the human condition and relationships. I would get irritated with people I dated who wouldn’t give me time and space to read. I had one particular boyfriend with whom I had plenty of opportunity to read and we would sit across from each other in cafés and restaurants over brunch, silently staring into our respective pages as we sipped our coffee and shoveled bites of crêpes into our mouths, pausing only to share whatever erudite little tidbit we’d come across. (It seems strange to me now, the idea that I would spend so much time with someone with my nose buried in a book over meals and coffee, but those were the only quiet moments, I suppose, in what was otherwise a tumultuous relationship. Reading was a salve, of sorts.)

At some point, before I met Husband, I became too tired to read. When I left Prague and returned to Pennsylvania, I also returned to a hellish commute that left me drained. I used to read on buses and trams and trains but then I had to keep my eyes on the road. I drove an hour to work in the morning (stopping for giant, sugary Starbucks coffee drinks and inhaling four cigarettes along the way – if you know me now, this little tidbit is a riot) and an hour and a half home with the rush hour traffic. It was always dark by the time I returned to my parents’ house and though it probably would have been the best thing for me, it reading was the last thing I wanted to do. If I’m honest, I wasn’t just too tired to read, I was depressed and reeling from certain from years’ worth of events and the things that I liked to read felt like wallowing. I was desperate for distractions, not reminders.

Then I met Husband and there was no time for reading in the brief whirlwind that occurred in Pennsylvania before we moved to Los Angeles a couple of months later. I read some, but not my usual amount… but then The Kid happened. And, as many people with kids will tell you, reading becomes one of those things that falls by the wayside. Yet another strange thing happened – because I was so limited on time to read, I became fussy. Fussier than I have ever been in regard to books (and movies, quite frankly.) I also went through a spell where I was reading some pretty heavy stuff that even *I* could not finish with my usual speed. (By “heavy stuff”, I mean I was reading huge tomes of the history of communism and politics in China, books on neurobiology, European history, biographies of Henry VIII’s wives… )

AND THEN, I went back to school. If you think it’s hard to leisure-read when you have a kid/kids, try going back to school.

I’ve read a lot over the past few years but most of it was for classes. (Fortunately, in one of my favorite classes, I had to read an entire book that I loved and became one of the foundational pieces for my senior thesis – China Mieville’s City and the City.) In the past couple of years at UW, I have repeatedly tried to set a rule for myself that I was *only* allowed to do leisure reading during the bus commute. That worked for a day – then there were tests to study for, Arabic vocab to lock down, and bus time was valuable study time. When I realized there was no way in hell that I would be anywhere near fluent in Arabic after two years, I made a practical switch to return to second-year Spanish and begin French in earnest. I had obsessively been running through Spanish and French lessons on Memrise and Duolingo during the commute but this, my last quarter at UW, I’ve realized that my grades and GPA are safe and I don’t at all *need* that extra studying. (Besides, if I’m honest… I’m quite good with languages and don’t need to put in much effort to learn.)  So I’ve once again recommitted to the idea of “leisure reading” during my commute. (This does include, however, the French and Spanish novels that I’m slowly making my way through.)

All of this rambling is to say that I have slowly been making my way back to being a voracious reader and it feels AMAZING. I’m still fussy, but I’m getting quicker at lining up books that will hold my interest. I’ve managed to polish off two books in the last week (both by Rachel Cusk) in addition to a few more pages of the French & Spanish books that I’ve begun. It’s come to my attention that reading is the lynchpin to my overall ability to enjoy what is commonly referred to as “free time.” Or, as I’ve said during Spanish class introductions, «¿Qué es este ‘tiempo libre’ de que hablas? No tengo nada tiempo libre.» This isn’t really true, I have “lots” of time that one could call “free”,  I just manage it extraordinarily badly. For some reason, even though I find it difficult to put a book down once I’m into it, a good book is so inspiring and motivates me to manage all the other tasks I need to accomplish. (It seems easier and more satisfying to put a book down and look forward to getting back to it where, once I open up my laptop, I just fall into a black hole of wasted time and useless browsing.)

I am cautiously hopeful (though history tells me otherwise), that I may get back to “blogging” regularly again, particularly about languages and books. I will have finished my B.A at UW come June and intend to begin an Editing certificate (in addition to Localization later) in the Fall and I’m eager to apply these skills to this little hobby that I’ve never been quite able to let go of!

heureux les heureux

I have found knowing Spanish and my limited knowledge of Latin to be incredibly helpful in learning French. I was afraid that I’d mix Spanish in French frequently and struggle taking both beginner French and intermediate Spanish at the same time. Other than the occasional odd mix little mix up, it’s been fine and even somewhat useful. For example, when I forget the word for “slow” in Spanish, I remember that it’s “lent” in French which immediately reminds me that it’s “lento” in Spanish. Spanish and French are NOT that similar, even though people seem to like to say they are, but vocabulary shares many similar roots.

(As to what words I mix up, most recently I wrote inglés on French homework, docteur on a Spanish test, and frequently catch myself correcting et to y and vice versa. I also will occasionally say words with a Spanish accent in French class and often pronounce Spanish words ending in -ión and -ment with a French accent.)

I had begun reading some books in French to bolster my learning. I began with Le Petit Nicolas stories and “Stories for Beginning Learner” collections on Amazon but I quickly became bored with these. (I can get through them quickly but I haven’t finished one because I don’t feel very engaged with the stories.) I also want to learn French the way that French people actually speak and I was concerned that stories for children or written for French learners would be a little too “proper.”

After some time spent digging around on Amazon, I created a list of several modern, recent books by French authors that were available in the original French on Amazon. (I also found some by Spanish authors, from Spain, rather than South American authors but more on that later.) To begin with, I chose Heureux les Heureux by Yasmina Reza. Given that I’m only barely done with French 102 and maybe around level A1 or in the beginning of A2, I’m amazed at how much I can understand. I’m trying to allow myself to read a page quickly, understanding the gist of what’s happening and being said without understanding every single word. That’s hard to do because I feel like I miss a lot of great phrases and opportunities to solidify grammar. So I’m reading a page or two quickly and then going back to dig at individual words and sentences.

I’m so glad that I chose this book, it’s far more interesting and easier to stick with than Le Petit Nicolas. On book websites, the title translates to “Happy are the Happy” but from my knowledge it’s actually just “Happy the Happy”. (Sidenote: I was speaking to someone in Madrid on Skype the other day, for Spanish practice, who has an 8 year daughter. My son is also 8 and they were very curious about each other. She said that she was reading the “Diary of Greg” books and I asked to see the cover because I was pretty sure I knew what series that was. (Not that it’s that hard to figure out.) It turns out that she is reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, which is muy guay because my son loved those books. But that just goes to show, translations of titles (and other things) are not exact. So I’m going with “Happy the Happy”. I’m only about sixteen pages in but it reminds me of some of Milan Kundera’s books like Laughable Loves and The Unbearable Lightness of Being which I read several times decades ago. I love books about the human condition, so to speak – relationships, people’s emotions and faults. Heureux les Heureux opened up with a couple arguing in the grocery store, seemingly about cheese, and I’m delighted reading the words of someone angry and upset about Moblier cheese and who the hell eats that shit Moblier? (The argument isn’t REALLY about cheese, of course.)

I’ve been worried that, in my quest to do translation, I will be pigeon-holed into technology since that’s what my background is in. But I’ve realized that, in addition to language regarding language itself, travel, and culture (and coffee bien sûr), I can easily specialize in what I can only think to call “the human condition”. That is to say, I very easily understand the meaning of and can explain / translate words such as those in Heureux les Heureux. I have always gravitated towards the words of emotions when learning new tongues. I can feel them and explain them quite easily.

So. As I read through this book – in addition to the Spanish one I’m about to start (which will also get it’s own posts) – I’ll do some little bits of translation and talking about languages and words here. It’ll be good experience but also a fun way to dive deeper into these languages. You can only do so much in a classroom!

Reading: The Sympathizer

I have so many books to read or that I’m in the middle of reading and texts for my research next year – but the one book I took with me to Berlin and have been reading for the sheer pleasure of it is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen’s writing is a truly enjoyable to read and he’s got an excellent, biting sense of humor. I won’t do justice to the summary, so just click on that link to read more about it on Goodreads. I don’t find many books that I really want to stick to or have a hard time putting down these days – this is one of the rare few.