Weekend reads

[halfcactus]

Recently read

Joe Sparrow, "Fishing"
A comic that compares the concept of creativity, inspiration, and struggles to execute artistic ideas to fishing. Concise, well-communicated, and good choice of colors that differentiates what's above and below the water.


Snowlattes, "Grief Log" & Fatima Wajid, "Prism"
Both of these artists are ESL and could use a friend to help them copyedit (though I firmly believe that most amateur artists who get into comics need to run their stories with writing/editing and reading friends anyway); it still feels like a privilege to be entrusted with such personal and beautifully illustrated journals—one about grief and loss, the other about getting high with old friends. Fatima Wajid’s art and worldview are so marvelously depicted I got all emotional lol.




Megan Abbott, "The End of Everything"
The mystery cdramas I've been watching have me raring to read mystery, but unfortunately this... was not the type of crime/mystery I wanted to read. /o\ It's grooming and sexual harassment/assault framed in a missing persons case and told in the PoV of teenage girls who have daddy issues and are navigating school and sexual experiences. It's more interested in the psychology and the emotions than the crime and mystery, but the psychology and feelings aren't very interesting and the final twist is very standard.

The prose is attractive and the scenes of girlhood would fit really well in a coming-of-age novel. It has a writing style that I associate with fanfiction and amateur writers, ie. a lot of made-up verbs and "smelled like x and y and z"s but the word choices, at least, are quite logical and not just running on vibes. They still get a bit much sometimes though. XD

(I have a Kanae Minato novel lined up as my next mystery/thriller read, we'll see how that one goes since I've never read any of her work before.)

Recently sampled (then dropped)

Elizabeth Hand, "Wyldling Hall"
I... simply don’t have the brain to read a story written as a documentary/series of interviews. Also not sure how much horror is in this?

priest, "Stars of Chaos" (Sha Po Lang)
Sampled the first chapter of the first volume because I saw people in cnovels talking about how smooth the translation is and... well, the first chapter does read very smoothly. It's a lot less distracting than MDZS and Little Mushroom. But I still bounced off it because of a couple of oddities, and because I'm likely familiar enough with priest's writing style to feel the disconnect. And then I got distracted about my personal thoughts about what I like to see in a translation VS what other people like to see in a translation and the kinds of conversations I wish we could have about translation. I don't know how to talk about this without sounding ungrateful and nitpicky!!!

Anyway for this novel I might have to either cross-reference with the raws or supplement with the audio drama which is too much work and defeats the purpose of reading a translation. Stepping back for now and coming back in my own time, unprompted by any concurrent discussions.

-

Drama-wise I'm now at the final episode of Tender Light and trying hard not to laugh at the recent plot developments. Setting aside the issue of the plot not plotting, it's just really funny that there's this entire Devotion of Suspect X plot development when the author of the original novel has been accused of plagiarizing Suspect X in a completely different canon a couple years ago. I never watched Better Days but I would argue that Tender Light's setup is closer to Suspect X. I did hear that Tender Light deviates a lot from the original novel, which is allegedly plagiarized from a couple of other things, but I'm not interested in reading the original novel and checking. ^^;

Comments

[geraineon]

Ohh, what is the title of the short story collection?

I did buy SPL ebook version back during preorders... Will skim through it and let you know. I didn't read SPL in Chinese though so the only impression I can give is about how well it reads (or not), and style.

Re: honorifics: I'm kinda of two minds on this. When there's no equivalent, I think it's fine to keep (also need to consider how important having said title/honorific is to the story), but if everything is kept, it kinda impedes the reading experience a little.

Idk why is so controversial to complain when the quality is not up to scratch. They are there to do business, not charity. But I think part of this is because these publishers use fan translators, and critiquing official tl is like critiquing fan translators? While I appreciate all the work they did in their own time, for free, to provide other people access to novels in Chinese, when this becomes a job or a commission, officially translated, published for money, then it's different. Even free fan tl, once it's out there, people can have opinions on it.

... Most of my spicier opinions I just keep in a small friend group chat because danmei fandom is trigger happy and explosive (I have many theories about why).

Re: Canto<>Mando: I always thought that it's easier going canto to Mando, haha. It's awesome that you can go the other way round! (Funny story: I watch so much wuxia in Cantonese that I can understand wuxia dramas in Mandarin better than I can modern dramas sometimes)

[halfcactus]

The Butcher’s Wife and Other Stories
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/268445.The_Butcher_s_Wife_and_Other_Stories
It’s historical + literary fiction though and I expect the main attraction is Butcher’s Wife, which is a novella. I think the novella raws are online.

Ah, I also haven’t read SPL in Chinese and I don’t think I can, which is why I want a translation that holds up on its own. 😅

but if everything is kept, it kinda impedes the reading experience a little.
This is definitely how I feel a lot of the time haha

I think part of this is because these publishers use fan translators, and critiquing official tl is like critiquing fan translators?
Yeah a bunch of them basically BNFs and very online and are friends or enemies with each other. I remember that even before they got hired by 7S, some of them got really nasty about other fantranslators, questioning their cdiaspora identity, and defensive of the official MDZS one. Everything is just really personal, on top of the usual ship wars and megafandom nonsense.

I definitely feel that it should be fine to critique official translations and want better. :’) It’s not even that I don’t recognize how hard it is to translate, it’s that the publishers don’t caaaaaare.

[geraineon]

Sounds interesting! I've added The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories to me TBR

Ah, I definitely remember the multiple rounds of fandom wankery back then. The whole identity gatekeeping was weird and awful. Just watching it from the periphery has given me eye strain from all the side-eyeing I did.