Classic Books

In middle school I read The Three Musketeers and enjoyed it overall. Later in high school a movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo was released and I enjoyed it enough to read the book. I feel like I lucked out in picking up the Robin Buss translation. It was a recent translation based on the most complete original texts he could find. He explained how the first anonymous English translations would sometimes edit the story to fit English sensibilities of the era or simply not be very good at translation. The book is full of endnotes explaining things, like references that would’ve been obvious to contemporary readers but are largely lost to anglophones over a century later, or things that simply don’t translate well, like an important scene where a character uses the formal vous tense instead of the informal/familiar tu tense but this distinction doesn’t exist in modern English. It made me want to re-read The Three Musketeers in a translation by Buss, but the only other Dumas work he translated before his death at the age of 67 in 2006 was The Black Tulip.

Have you read Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo? Have you found a similar translation you liked for The Three Musketeers? Searching online the most helpful listings I’ve found are a couple old Reddit threads where it seems like the two recommendations are those by Richard Pevear or Lawrence Ellsworth.

Politically, Napoleon divides the history of Europe in “before” and “after”. He grabbed the power in France after the Revolution with such skills that he had virtually no opposition. From there he conquered everything, from Egypt, to Russia and Spain. His fall was equally momentous. And then he did it again, leaving everyone confused and the political board of Europe forever reshuffled.

Victor Hugo is a man of that time, trying to make sense of all of this turmoil while mainly talking about people and their inner worlds. In Les Misérables he concentrated on the lowest of the low, poor people making bad choices.

At the time, it was believed that crimes had to be punished, but there was no hope for the criminal to be reinstated into society as a fully functioning member. Hugo makes the opposite claim: criminals are just good people in bad situations. And he talks about them.

While the length can scare readers off, I would encourage anyone to start it. Every page is a little masterpiece of human perception and empathy, with an author taking his time to fully build up not only stages but also souls.

There's a ton of places that give out free classic ebooks, especially gutenburg but they unfortunately aren't always formatted well for ereaders. Standard ebooks tries to fix that.

I read Plainsong by Haruf some two years ago, and I was immediately enamored with it. All characters are so easily relatable and the whole story unfolds along a sweet melody. While bad and sad things happen, you still feel lulled by the background song and you know things are going to get solved. For any fan of “slice of life” and small stories.