War and Peace: Acquired

[osprey_archer]

Copy of War and Peace: acquired. I ended up buying the Ann Dunnigan translation, both because that's the one my Russian professor recommended and because I liked its translation of the first paragraph best when I compared it to the two others in the store.

Plus, no footnotes. Ever since a footnote gave away the ending of Jane Eyre halfway through the book, I have looked askance on footnoted classics. (Who does that? I had already read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, so I already knew it, but still. Who does that!)

***

In other news, a girl spent most of the afternoon in a corner of our Starbucks sculpting a boa constrictor out of Saran wrap. For what purpose? And why in Starbucks? Did she get chased out of the Saran Wrap Sculptors Guild? We may never know.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

1. YAY :D

2a. I share your dismay at the footnote that GAVE AWAY THE ENDING??!? I mean, maybe it was a scholarly edition or something so they assumed that anyone buying it would have read it already? But still! Have some thought for the first-time reader!

I always skip the introductions to books in case they give away the ending.

2b. Some people (my mom, for example) find explanatory footnotes really helpful, so I don't begrudge them, but I prefer no footnotes 99.9% of the time (books where the footnotes are part of the author's text are an obvious exception). I don't like to have someone elbowing me at every turn, like the fairy in Ocarina of Time, to tell me that a barouche is a vehicle or whatever else they think I don't know/can't figure out from context/have no possible way of looking up in this benighted Dark Age of information access.

3. It's as good a place to work as any!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Like the fairy in Ocarina of Time

OMG--I've never played that game, but my kids adored it, and ever since they played it, I've found myself externalizing my advice-to-self voice as an exasperated blue sprite who says, "Hey! Hey, pay attention!"

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I skip introductions too. Even if they don't give away the ending, I feel like they tend to skew your reading of the book so it's in line with the introduction, even if that's not the only or best (or even a good) reading. Much better to read the introduction after when I have the information to judge.

I used to like explanatory footnotes, but as I get older, the more they seem to interrupt the pace of the story for me. Even if I don't flip to the back to read them, the footnote number is still there, nudging me.

[silverusagi]

Ever since a footnote gave away the ending of Jane Eyre halfway through the book, I have looked askance on footnoted classics.

I was deeply impressed by the fact that the annotated Emma gives PLOT SPOILER warnings in bold (mainly relating to what is up with Jane Fairfax) before annotations that talked about future knowledge.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

That's sensible! If only the Jane Eyre annotator had thought of that.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I was just literally thinking this morning that this might make a good read-aloud classic.


re: Saran-wrap snake, maybe her GPS was messed up and she thought the Starbucks WAS the Saran Wrap Snake All US Championship and she's like,"Score, I'm the only contestant." Oh, or worse, one of the other contestants, fearing that your sculptor would win, messed with her GPS to send her to Starbucks.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Depending on which translation you choose, there is sometimes a lot of French, which might make it a little harder to read aloud. But some of the translations have much less.

Clearly the Saran-wrap sculpting world is a bitterly competitive place. Maybe she chose the Starbucks on purpose to hide her boa constrictor from the other contestants, so they wouldn't know what she was making.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Man, I'm not sure I'd want to read W&P without annotations, especially if it's an edition that either leaves the French untranslated or doesn't mark out where it was. I just don't have enough period context....

I also don't care about spoilers, though.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I find that annotations usually break up the flow of the story, for me, aside from that one annotated Alice in Wonderland that I read where the annotations added a huge amount of context (the one I remember is that the poems are almost all parodies of popular didactic poems for children at the time) that was really helpful. So we'll see how W&P goes.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

They do for me as well, but so does going and googling - with really contextual historical bricks I have a lot of trouble just zooming over the things I don't get. Different strokes!