The big read this February came in the form of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad, which I’d actually started months ago and read on and off until deciding I really needed to give it the attention it deserved. Previously, I’ve read The Iliad in the Fitzgerald (verse) and Rouse (prose) translation, but I was never really swept away with either of those as I was with Fagles. Fagles seems simultaneously more and less modern than other translations, and he renders the story of the war outside the walls of Troy with a vigor and intensity I had not experienced before. For anyone looking to encounter this classic for the first time or revisit it again with new eyes I highly recommend the Robert Fagles translation. I’ll be reading his Odyssey, too, sometime this year.
Wading through the trenches with Sarpedon and Patroclus left little reading time for other things, but I did manage to squeeze in a few. In the mood for some non-fiction, I read a book that has been on my shelf for a while, John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel. McWhorter is a consistently engaging and fascinating linguist whose books (and Teaching Company lecture series) I’ve enjoyed for quite some time now. Back in July I talked about his pithy little masterpiece, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which explored about the linguistic evolution of English. The Power of Babel is a bigger book with a larger scope — nothing less than the evolution of the thousands of languages and dialects heard around the globe. A more technical and somewhat less purely readable book than Bastard Tongue, Babel falls mid-way between the scholarly and laymen approaches, but it is nothing that can’t be appreciated by the motivated reader. Probably not the place to start with McWhorter, for that I’d recommend the aforementioned Bastard Tongue, or Doing Our Own Thing.
Finally, I also finished a fantastic short story collection from J.G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach, on loan from a friend of mine. This was my first experience with Ballard beyond isolated shorts in collections, and I fully intend to rectify that gap in my reading soon, as he’s a terrifically brilliant writer. Stand outs from the collection include ‘The Drowned Giant,’ ‘Endgame,’ and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ but my favorite was ‘Billennium’ a story in which overpopulation has squeezed people together until the concept of personal space is merely a fantasy and abstraction. Ballard is powerful and precise in his language, and takes the reader on strange journeys through the human soul. Highly recommended.
[This post has been 'backposted' -- perhaps the cheapest form of time-travel there is -- as I thought I had posted it originally around this same time, but instead it was sitting in my drafts pile for a month. One of these days I got to get organezized.]
