March wrap-up and April goals

  

March reads

March wrap-up

• Finished: 9
• Started but not finished: 2
• Total pages read: 2,137
• Average rating: 4.06

In March, I finished three modern fiction novels. One of them, Cinasee Pollett’s WildWood Revisited, was a reread, and I will post a review of it later this month. My favorite (new) read in March was Amanda Darcy’s Of Love & Beer (5/5 stars). I also read Tricia Cresswell’s The Midwife (3/5 stars), which unfortunately did not live up to its premise with its disappointing ending.

One of my goals for 2024 was to finally read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and I sort of did. The problem was that the translation I chose was a “first version” and it didn’t cross my mind I needed to learn about the publication history behind War and Peace before choosing which translation to read.

Basically, Tolstoy wrote the first version of War and Peace in 1866 and published parts of it in serialized form. However, he was dissatisfied with the ending and later rewrote the book. That version was published in 1869, and is what people refer to when they speak of War and Peace. The first version has a different ending and some other differences as well. No wonder I thought this book occasionally read like a first draft. So now I probably need to read the other version or at least the ending to see how the versions differ. I know that in the first version at least some characters who die in the 1869 War and Peace do not die in the 1866 version.

Ancient Texts Project

I also continued my ancient texts project where I’m reading translations of some ancient Greek and Latin works. I finished five books. First was Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which is a collection of diary-type entries or short aphorisms. If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, this book is a great starting point.

Secondly, I finished The Complete Plays of Sophocles. My English translation is a Signet Classics edition which has all seven surviving plays by Sophocles. Besides the Oedipus cycle (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone), it includes translations of Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and The Women of Trachis. Ajax, Electra, and Philoctetes narrate events during and after the Trojan War, while The Women of Trachis is about the death of Heracles. I enjoyed Paul Roche’s translations, and the book also has a great afterword and notes for theatrical productions.

I read three translations of ancient epic poetry. Two were short translations made in the 19th century, of the sixth book of Homer’s Odyssey and the first book of Virgil’s The Aeneid. Those translation were quite old-fashioned, but it’s nice to see how ancient classics were translated into Finnish already in the 19th century. The third was a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey. The edition behind that translation considers a lot of things in the Odyssey as later additions and interpolations, and the translator left them out from his translation, so this translation was shorter than Odyssey usually is.

April hopefuls

April hopefuls

My goals for April are a bit more modest in comparison, as I’m only planning to finish three books, continue reading one, and to start reading one book. I plan to read one modern fiction book, Elizabeth Lim’s The Dragon’s Promise. It’s a Young Adult fantasy and a sequel to Six Crimson Cranes, which was one of my favorite reads in 2023. I’m excited to continue with the series.

I will continue reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. The rest are part of my ancient texts project. I’ll finish Euripides’s Medea and Virgil’s The Aeneid. Medea is my favorite ancient Greek tragedy, and the edition I’m reading this month has four different translations as well as essays on the tragedy. I will also start reading a collection of Sappho’s and Alcaeus’s poetry.