Comments on: The summer of long books

By: Lance Knobel

Lance Knobel — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:44:24 +0000

Thanks for the pointer, Hal.

By: Hal O'Brien

Hal O'Brien — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:26:03 +0000

Lance, do you have access to Factiva? I get my own access through my local public library (King County, WA).

Mr. Davies included a short capsule of Landes’ book in the FT for Christmas 1998. His longer, more enthusiastic review appears to be:

Count on the cost of living – Books.
By Howard Davies.
677 words
14 May 1998
The Times

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:22:50 +0000

It’s living up to expectations so far — I’m about halfway through. The translation is by Anthony Briggs, and it’s fine. Which I say as someone who vastly prefers the Kuniczak translation of Henryk Sienkiewicz to the Curtin. (And it’s interesting, too, that Orlando Figes — who wrote the review that got you to read the book and definitely seems to have preferred the P&V translation — contributes an afterword to the Briggs translation.)

By: Lance Knobel

Lance Knobel — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:16:35 +0000

I envy you War & Peace. I read it earlier this year and was completely swept away.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:12:30 +0000

It’s War & Peace for me, which I’m sorta reading with an old friend who lives across the sea now. I brought it with me to Tbilisi with the intent of reading it last summer, but we got real war instead. Hope that this summer we’ll get the local version of peace.

Hated the one David Foster Wallace book I read. Was going to review A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again under the title “A Supposedly Good Author I’ll Never Read Again,” but figured there wasn’t anything to add to the headline.

By: Jeremy Hartley

Jeremy Hartley — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:08:22 +0000

Thanks for the tip. I’m in.