Book Roundup 2

Jen and I got really excited talking about what books we want to read, so we did a little research and made a big Abebooks order yesterday. Here's some of the books we're really excited about!

Atul Gawande, The Best American Science Writing 2006

Since we liked Gawande's essays in Complications so much, we thought he might be a reliable editor of other people's science writing.

Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening

I loved Planet of the Blind so much I was thrilled to discover Kuusisto has written other things.

From Amazon: "As Kuusisto recounts further seminal moments and improbable adventures, he presents exquisitely rendered soundscapes that capture aspects of the world most of us barely register, from the storm of traffic to the cacophony of our myriad machines to the songs of trees. As he goes "sight-seeing by ear" in places as diverse as Iceland and Venice, and celebrates the music and literature that sustain him, Kuusisto foregrounds the aural realm and evinces great tenacity and trust in his candid tales of life as an acute and contemplative listener in a loud and hectic world."

Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics , No 8)

We are really excited about this one. Here's the idea: Clearly, there are words in other languages that are difficult to translate because they refer to things, rituals, or social practices that English-speaking cultures don't have. The project of Wierzbicka's book is to show how a detailed, systematic study of the meanings of words can also help us understand more abstract elements of other cultures: their characteristic values, perspectives, and ways of understanding life.

In the introduction she gives the example of the Japanese word miai, which refers to a custom in which unattached individuals are introduced to each to consider the possibility of marriage. Through several examples she shows that the word (of course) doesn't just refer to the existence of a custom because the significance of the custom implies a particular way of looking at life's important events (which she then goes on to detail in the body of the book). Similarly, she devotes several pages to the Russian word poshlust (unfortunately I don't know how to render it with the proper characters here), and collection of related words, arguing that it represents a characteristic mode of evaluation or judgment that simply isn't part of the English-speaking experience. (Or, if it is, a rare and difficult to articulate one).

Anyway, it looks awesome to us.

Ivan Bunin, Sunstroke: Selected Stories

We recently met some interesting girls from Estonia who strongly recommended that I read something by Ivan Bunin; so I am!

Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English

This is another one I'm pretty excited about. I really loved reading the translator's preface in Pevear and Volokohnsky's translation of Anna Karenina. They discuss a number of examples that illustrate the difficulties of faithfully translating what they consider to be Tolstoy's distinctive Russian prose-style in English--comparing their own translation to existing ones to show what has been lost elsewhere. I really wanted to find more writing like that and I think this book may be it.

From Amazon: "...Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, treating it less as a substitute for the original works than as a special subset of English literature, with its own cultural, stylistic, and narrative traditions. Using a blend of translation criticism, close reading, and linguistic analysis, the author explores the translator's role as mediator between cultures and among the voices within literary texts. By observing historical trends in translation styles, May shows how translators have tended to mirror and strengthen contemporary attitudes toward Russia and how swings in political relations have affected the texture of Russian literature as it appears to the anglophone public. Focusing on specific stylistic effects and their treatment in translation, the author also demonstrates regular, repeated alterations of linguistic structures which have a profound impact on the way we read Russian literature in English. May's argument is supplemented with dozens of comparative analyses of Russian passages and their English translations, which provide model close readings, focusing on the thematic implications of stylized language."

Sergey Prokofiev, Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youth

I read about a hundred pages of this while we were visiting Peter and Patty last Spring, and I thought it was awesome. It's like reading a soap-opera about the arts! Prokofiev lived through some difficult political times for artists in Russia (though, from what little I know, he was less affected than Shostakovitch), and I'm curious to read about it from his perspective. Plus, it's a great insider's story of one of my favorite composers!

Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture

This is a book about culture's influence on behavior and communication. It introduces and discusses a number of concepts you can use to understand and navigate cross-cultural communications. For example, Hall discusses and illustrates the differences between what he calls "high-context" cultures (such as Japanese) in which much of the meaning of the communication is implicit in the communicative context, and "low-context" cultures that do more to explicitly encode the communication's significance in language. Mostly I'm just interested in some stories about how other cultures go about things, and in the possibility that a new set of interpretive concepts will give me a new way of looking at things in my own daily affairs. I think (hope) that some of the ideas here might be useful in my teaching, as well.

Magdalene Lampert, Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching

Speaking of. I've read bits and piece of this book already. It's a fascinating book. Lampert's idea is to describe the practice of teaching in all its complexity through an analysis of a year's worth of recordings and student data from her 5th grade math class. It's lively and engagingly written, and really captures the full breadth of considerations a master teacher weighs in her mind while planning, teaching, and reflecting about a class. In reading it, she shows you the kinds of details an experienced teacher notices about students and what they say (or don't say), and the many dilemmas she has to navigate in her decision-making.

I think it's a fantastic book, and I'd love to read more books like it for practitioners in other disciplines.

M. John Harrison, Things That Never Happen

I'm always on the lookout for new fiction, and this description really caught my attention:

"His characters typically live in the margins, or have conspired to live there through the vagaries of fate or experience. They quiver on the edge of discovering a great truth, uncovering a vast secret about the universe, or living a life previously unknown to them. Such characters are often enraptured by a vision or obsession invisible to the rest of us. The painter's precision with which Harrison works and the aversion to cliche and generic detail make his prose style hyper-real even in his most fantastical tales....Wise, unflinching, precise, these stories immerse us in a world we thought we knew but that stands revealed by turns as richer, starker and more complex."

Sounded pretty good!

Udi Manber, Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach

I was reading some advice in an Ask Metafilter thread about teaching (and learning) programming, and this book was spoken very highly of--and when I discovered that it's by Tali dad, that clinched the deal! How could I not check it out?! =) Plus, the Amazon reviews said that it would keep any puzzle lover engaged for a long while, which is just what I'm looking for.

Alton L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology

From Amazon.com (somewhat re-ordered):

Drawn from over three decades of studying, teaching, translating and writing about Southeast Asian languages and literatures, the essays [describe]...Becker's experiences in attempting to translate into or out of Burmese, Javanese, and Malay a variety of texts. They describe such things as the building of a Javanese shadowplay, how a Sanskrit story about the language of animals has been used in Indonesia, and some of the profound semantic silences a translator faces in taking an anecdote by Gregory Bateson from English into Malay.

In linguistics, the essays emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism. In anthropology, the essays demonstrate that much of culture can be described in terms of text-building strategies. And for the comparativist, whether in literature, history, rhetoric, music, or psychology, the essays provide a new array of tools of comparison across distant languages and cultures."

Sounds pretty good!

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I can barely wait until February!