Howling Frog Books

Ekaterina at In My Book hosted a language challenge last summer that I really enjoyed, so I'm joining up again.  Here is the second edition! There are a whole lot of rules and arrangements, so go visit Ekaterina to check it out.  I'm going to commit to the Beginner level of just one book in a foreign language, and if it goes really well I might do another one.  Right now I am not sure what to do.  I have two possible titles--a YA book called Stjernen Uden Himmel (The Star Without a Sky) , about WWII that I am pretty sure was translated from German.  It's probably not a very difficult book, but I have never read it before.  My other possibility is to read the classic Niels Lyhne , which is Serious Literature and more difficult, but I have read it fairly recently in English and I still have the English copy to help me along if I get stuck. Ekaterina has some questions: What languages do you know? Note: even if you are a beginner, it totally counts!...

Der Struwwelpeter , von Dr. Heinrich Hoffman Finally, I read another book, this time in German.  Struwwelpeter is right about my speed, since I haven't studied German in years and years--I quit after two semesters to take Russian.  Quite a few words were a bit old-fashioned, but I mostly did OK.  I also found an English version online to compare them---I read the German first and then the English--but of course the English version had been rendered into rhyme, so it mostly wasn't the same words. Although I read a whole lot of nursery rhymes and cautionary tales as a child, we did not have Der Struwwelpeter.  I shouldn't think very many American children do, but the older British novels I've read often make a passing reference to the stories in here, so it must have been pretty well-known in the UK in the past. These are cautionary rhymes in the traditional 18th- and 19th-century style--that is, children misbehave and are hideously punished, and everyone enjoys...

I feel so cool!  For the first time in about 20 years, I read a novel in Danish.  It was "Det caribiske mysterium," or The Caribbean Mystery , by Agatha Christie. At first it was quite slow going; I almost had to read aloud in my head to make sure I was paying enough attention to each sentence and not skimming.  But it wasn't too long before I was doing much better and reading a little bit faster and much more comfortably.  The Danish part of my brain responded to a good workout (and presented me with several weird dreams in Danish, which happens anyway sometimes, but not usually so many at a time). The funny part was that I am so familiar with how Agatha Christie wrote in English that I almost always knew exactly what the original would have said.  That may have helped me understand the story, I don't know.  I would like to try a non-English author to see--I don't have a large collection of Danish books, but I did find the book I was originally looking...

...summer reading is already out of control!  People keep posting all these neat things to do.  I have now started In the First Circle , so there's that, plus the EBB/RB letters, and then: I've picked a book for Ekaterina's Summer Language Freak Challenge--I'll be reading Det caribiske mysterium , otherwise known as The Caribbean Mystery , by Agatha Christie.  In English, I can knock out a Miss Marple mystery in 2 hours.  In Danish...I'm aiming for a chapter a day, or two if they are very short.  I'm on chapter 4 now.  I can understand most of it pretty easily, but I cannot read fast.  It is slow.  And it is far too easy to skim and not realize that I didn't pay proper attention to that sentence. Adam at Roof Beam Reader is hosting an event: The Beats of Summer, in which everyone will read something by a Beat poet.  He mentions a couple of intriguing titles by women involved with the movement, and I might grab one.  I will pla...

Because I don't have enough challenges on my plate...Arenel at  Slightly Cultural, Most Thoughtful and Inevitably Irrelevant   is now Ekaterina at In My Book.  She is hosting a Language Freak Summer Challenge !  In other words, brush up on whatever language you need to practice by reading a book!  The rules are long (yet entertaining) so I'm not going to quote them all here; go take a look.  But this challenge is for you if you answer yes to any of these questions:  Do you love learning foreign languages? Have you ever suspected that something is lost in translation when reading a book? Do you feel ashamed of not practicing some foreign language enough? Are you an unbearable snob who tells everybody that they haven't read a book if they have read it in translation? I can answer yes to the first three, though I hope #4 does not apply!  (I'm pretty sure it is true , which makes me really sad because I will never read Russian anywhere near ...