#raymond atwood | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bookquest2024 · 7 months

Text

100 Books to Read Before I Die: Quest Order

The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Under The Net by Iris Murdoch

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A Passage to India by EM Forster

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1984 by George Orwell

White Noise by Don DeLillo

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Ulysses by James Joyce

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

A Dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Little Women by Louisa M Alcott

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Watchmen by Alan Moore

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Money by Martin Amis

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

#quest #book list

7 notes · View notes

myheartalivewrites · 8 months

Note

Hi, happy nice ask day! Tell me what 5 books you have and intend to read them, but they've waited a long time already?

Hah omg, if you could see the size of the TBR pile that sits next to my bed 😬 Not kidding there’s over 100 books in it. I read a lot, but I’m also pretty powerless against the allures of a bookshop! 🤷‍♀️

Okay, so I’ve checked the pile and here are five of the ones that have sat on it for the longest time:

- The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

- The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood (for reasons of I want to reread The Handmaid’s Tale before diving into the sequel and just keep not getting around to it)

- The Book of Dust, by Phillip Pullman (for the same reason as the one above, except this would involve rereading the whole His Dark Materials trilogy and who’s got the time?? But also I have shit memory, so I really really need the refresher)

- The Vanishing Half, by Britt Bennett

- Stay Another Day, by Juno Dawson (which I keep meaning to read around Christmas time and then forgetting and then having to put off for another year 😂 I can’t explain the way my brain works, this is just how it is!)

Thanks for playing, this was fun! Talking books is 100% my jam 😊

#nice ask day #send me an ask if you want to play #about me

7 notes · View notes

bermudianabroad · 4 months

Text

2023 Reading Roundup

Everything what I read in 2023

I read a whole bunch.

Heartily Recommend Visceral Bleh Reread *Audiobook*

Fiction

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (where is the fucking humidity in your swamp, Delia??)

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Lot by Bryan Washington

Mr. Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

Trust by Hernan Diaz

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan

It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell (but everyone is called Thomas)

Verity by Colleen Hoover (awful but wacky and hilariously awful)

Katalin Street by Magda Szabo

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Animorphs #24 The Suspicion by KA Applegate (a trip)

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

The Trio by Johanna Hedman

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Silence by Shusaku Endo

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Babel by RF Kuang (was so disappointed by this one)

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

Island by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles by Giorgio Bassani

Must I Go by Yiyun Li

The 1,000 Year Old Boy by Ross Welford

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow

The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno

Yellowface by RF Kuang

The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Game Misconduct by Ari Baran

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (sorry Naomi :/ )

The Foot of the Cherry Tree by Ali Parker

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Matrix by Lauren Groff

The Twilight World by Werner Herzog

Wild by Kristen Hannah

*The Fraud by Zadie Smith*

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham (weirdly, one of the best depictions of a marriage I’ve read)

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abdulhawa

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Animorphs: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by KA Applegate

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

Animorphs #13 The Change by KA Applegate

Animorphs #14 The Unknown by KA Applegate

Animorphs #20 The Discovery by KA Applegate (snuck in two more under the wire… #20 is when shit REALLY kicks off. From there it gets darker and darker).

Poetry

Black Cat Bone by John Burnside

Women of the Harlen Renaissance (Anthology) by Various

The Analog Sea Review no. 4 by Various

The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Non-Fiction

Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street by Barbara Demick

Atlas of Abandoned Places by Oliver Smith

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews

City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London by Vic Gatrell

The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance by Geoff White (fully available as a podcast)

The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Stories by Leslie Leyland Fields (very niche but fascinating. Transcribed interviews)

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H.

Freedom by Margaret Atwood (just excerpts from novels repackaged)

*Born a Crime by Trevor Noah* (Noah’s narration is superb)

The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak (was expecting stories, but it was mostly academic essays)

Manga, Comics, Graphic Novels

Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco

The Way of the House-Husband, vol. 1 by Kousuke Oono

SAGA vol. 1-6 by Fiona Staples and Brian K Vaughan

Top of the Top:

Born a Crime was probably my favourite non ficition, and most of that probably is due to Trevor Noah's narration skills. It was very entertaining and heartfelt.

Less uplifting but just as gripping in a different way was Empire of Pain. Excellent book that went deep into the why and what and hows of Purdue Pharma. Anger inducing.

Lazarus Heist is great and available as a podcast. The book is more or less the podcast word for word.

Fictionwise: I read Trust at the start of the year and it was a bit soon to declare as favourite of the year, but it's stil made the final cut. Just very imaginative and intriguing. Just my kind of MetaFiction. Clever without being cleverclever.

Demon Copperhead I read right off the back of Empire of Pain so maybe that coloured my experience. I've not read any Dickens so loads of references no doubt flew past me, but the language was acrobatic and zingy. I loved it.

Wrapped up the year on a high with North Woods. That was so unexpected and entertaining. Again with the playful language, memorable characters and a unique approach to tying all the various stories together. One that sticks in the mind and makes the writer in me wonder how I can replicate his style (with my own personal twist of course.)

#a whole bunch of books #reading roundup #Still one day to go but i don't think i'm going to finish anything else #year in books #2023 in books

6 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 9 months

Text

Scores of books go into print in Iran every year. Data from 2018 puts the number of published titles at 102,691, positioning Iran as one of the top 10 nations with the most books released annually. The figures have slightly fluctuated ever since, but Iran has remained loyal to its publishing bonanza.

A tradition of translating literature from English, as well as other European languages, into Persian has long animated Iran’s cultural scene, accounting for the lion’s share of Iranians’ reading preferences. Some of the country’s most celebrated intellectuals rose to fame courtesy of their translation work, which the middle-class treasures as a bridge to the rest of the world, facilitated by elites who understand the nuances of exotic cultures and interpret them for the inhabitants of a hermit kingdom.

As different realms of artistic practice continue to be constrained by the hard-line conservative administration of President Ebrahim Raisi and independent artists find themselves hard-pressed to subsist under heightened levels of fear and inhibition, Iran’s vibrant tradition of literature translation is becoming the collateral damage of a retrograde cultural agenda. For a government that is overtly opposed to anything that resembles the relics of the modern world, clamping down on translated books that showcase the best of Western literature appears entirely justified.

The introduction of some of the finest translated classic literature predates the Islamic Republic. Still, the translation of contemporary U.S., British, and other European novels and nonfiction into Persian gained currency following the 1997 ascent of the reform-minded President Mohammad Khatami, who ventured to reverse the country’s self-inflicted isolation and initiated a fresh national introspection on the relatively alien concepts of press freedom and civil liberties. Along with dozens of progressive newspapers that were issued licenses to operate, new publishing houses were founded that specialized in translated literature.

After years of cultural strangulation in which newspapers, books, music, and other forms of artistic expression languished, the birth of a nascent reform movement meant Iranians were afforded propitious opportunities to explore the outside world. International travel became trendy, and many families started sending their children to language institutions to prime them for educational programs overseas. At the same time, literary translators provided enchanting insights into Western life by making the masterpieces of U.S. and European literature accessible to Iranian readers.

As the rules on vetting cultural products were eased and censorship mutated into subtle forms, young, middle-class Iranians gained better access to the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter, J. D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut, and exposures that were previously unthinkable were made possible piecemeal. The internet had not yet evolved into a dominant mode of communication, and people were still circumscribed in their ability to broaden their global experiences. The translated books would give them a glimpse of what distinct cultures and lifestyles looked like, especially regarding mundane particulars.

The year Khatami was elected president, no more than 2,450 titles out of a total of 14,386 books published were works of translation. When his presidential term expired in 2005, nearly 39,000 books were published, and 9,146 of them were translations. The significant rise in the number of translated books signaled that literary practitioners were orienting Iranian readers to the best of world literature and also that the market was receptive to that sort of output.

That doesn’t mean that every work of Western literature could be translated and published freely, though, or that those that survived the purgatory of censorship at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance were faithful, verbatim reproductions.

First, with Iran being an outlier of the 1886 Berne Convention on copyright, most books are translated in Iran without the authors’ and primary publishers’ permission, at times spawning international disputes.

Translated works were also plagued by bowdlerization. During the various stages of translation and preparation, any passage construed as having a political message that could be potentially unfavorable to the government was typically expunged preemptively by translators or eventually omitted by the stern reviewers based at the culture ministry, and the erotic innuendos that are fixtures of many novels were hardly ever tolerated. It was thus common to see poorly sanitized and redacted translations of Nobel Prize-winning books and other literary masterpieces for sale at bookstores and seasonal exhibitions.

Yet the window of cultural familiarization was open wider than it had been since immediately after the revolution, catapulting a number of prolific translators to national acclaim. Reading translated books came to be seen as a mark of intellectual sophistication and refinement. In cozy cafes in Tehran and other large cities, some of which had emerged as literary hangouts, passionate young people, including female university students, discussed the latest U.S. and European literature they had read, both as a departure from the vicissitudes of life and to flaunt their artistic know-how.

A career in translation soon became so esteemed that Iranian publishers featured the names of translators on the book covers with the same font size and stature as the authors, and usually included brief biographical blurbs of the translators somewhere on the back cover or before the preamble. However, translation work never matured into a profitable enterprise. Book circulations are notoriously low, and some titles are printed in as few as 1,000 copies. And despite near-universal adult literacy, which the government says stands at 97 percent (UNESCO puts it at 85.5 percent), reading is not ubiquitous across generations. This kept translators’ financial prospects within bounds.

With the advent of the internet and social media, the reliance on translated books as the primary conduit of learning about what lies beyond the national boundaries was challenged and supplanted with new availabilities, but the books didn’t lose their luster. Indeed, reading translated literature continues to be an emblem of enlightenment and cosmopolitan, pro-Western attitudes.

This is largely why resistance to translation has been a hallmark of the cultural policies of the various conservative, hard-line administrations that have been in power on and off since 1979—including the current government of Raisi.

Censorship has been the most effective tool used by hard-line administrations to sideline translation and stymie the intimate cultural connections that Iranians could have forged with unfamiliar Western cultures, even when those bonds were solely cognitive and cerebral. At times, translators complained that entire paragraphs or even chapters were eliminated from their drafts, often convincing them to withdraw the manuscripts in favor of their own reputation or that of their publishers.

Conservative administrations also often teamed up with like-minded publishers, earmarking substantial funds to purchase their books written by Iranian authors en masse, both as an economic stimulus and to proselytize a specific cultural and political viewpoint. The outcome was that in a barely competitive book market, publishers that primarily produced translated works were inevitably marginalized.

Since coming to power in August 2021, the Raisi government has been defined by its Orwellian aversion to civil liberties, women’s rights, and artistic expression. And translated literature has not been spared. Although no official road map has been announced on curtailing translation, it’s clear that the administration and its allies have been quietly working to thwart Western literature from influencing Iranian hearts and minds.

According to local media reports, in the three-month period ending on Sept. 22, 2022, a total of 1,431 translated books were published in Iran—a 37 percent decline compared to the summer of 2021, when 2,258 works of translation were printed over the same three-month period. In the first three months of the current Persian calendar year, 5,713 translated books have been released, while the number stood at 7,936 for the corresponding period last year, suggesting a steep decrease.

The administration doesn’t have the means to directly outlaw the translation of Western literature, though it’s likely it would have done so if it did have a legal mandate. But its top officials don’t shy away from publicly lamenting the notion of translation as something morally reprehensible.

Raisi explicitly told publishers at a recent book exhibit in Tehran that translated works should not be allowed to “overtake” domestically written books, and his minister of culture, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili, said last year that “a stack of translated work has captured the minds and spirit of our children” and that this situation should change so that books written about the “rich Iranian, Islamic culture” become the focus of attention. He didn’t forget to mention that the “ideals and norms of the Islamic Revolution” should be preserved by the members of the book supervisory committee, which is in charge of ideologically screening manuscripts before they can be circulated.

During the 34th Tehran International Book Fair that wrapped up in May, books by Iranian authors were sold with a special discount of 25 percent, while translated books were offered with just a 15 percent price cut.

One of the members of the policymaking committee at the 2021 edition of the book fair, the country’s largest cultural event sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and usually visited in person by the supreme leader, is on the record saying the prevalence of translated books can bring about “cultural invasion.”

He also argued that subscribing to the international copyright convention and translating treatises into Persian after securing permission from Western publishing houses is “extremely dangerous and illogical.” He didn’t elaborate on why Iran complying with its copyright obligations would be dangerous, but it is probably the case that, in the thinking of the Islamic Republic authorities, upholding copyright would necessitate refusing to arbitrarily abridge or alter the content of the books, and this is something they won’t acquiesce to.

Mohammad Hosseini, the vice president for parliamentary affairs and a former culture minister under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in April that the translation of written texts from other languages during the Qajar and Pahlavi eras induced “infatuation, alienation, and Westernization” among Iranians. In a conference dedicated to what is billed as the “reverse translation movement,” he gloated about the government’s plans to have the books of Iranian authors translated into the world’s most commonly spoken languages. He claimed that “from China to the United States and from Russia to Africa,” people around the world are curious to read the works of Iranian writers and intellectuals, which is why the government is going to invest in encouraging “reverse translation” as opposed to financing the translation of Western literature into Persian.

It’s not a bad idea to promote books by Iranian writers and make them available to readers internationally. But as long as they are merely works of a religious nature or otherwise ideologically charged materials that the government wishes to popularize, rather than the best works of modern Iranian literature, the reverse translation campaign will remain a lost cause.

Many young Iranians are still avid fans of Western literature, and however determined the Islamic Republic is in monopolizing the public’s media diet and cultural interests, most no longer wish to adhere to the government-mandated way of seeing things. A silent crackdown on translation may deprive some Iranians of the chance to access what their counterparts are reading elsewhere in the world, but it is hardly practical to cordon off a population that has never lost its appetite for international connectivity.

5 notes · View notes