Workshop Reading Lists
Technically not related to this post, but Game of Thrones is related to everything.
For our workshop participants (and anyone interested in reading along): Some books you could look up for research, comparison and direction. Excuse the oversimplified descriptions of your works in progress.
Crime thriller set in 19th Century Manila
– For style, the psychological thrillers (romans durs) of Georges Simenon, especially Dirty Snow, The Engagement, The Widow.
– Blair and Robertson’s massive The Philippine Islands is available at Project Gutenberg
– Accounts of foreign visitors to the Philippines, inc. Schadenburg and Jean Mallat
Science-fiction: Alternate history
– The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
– The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
– The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
– The Separation, Christopher Priest
– Watchmen, Alan Moore
Urban chaos short stories with gay themes
– Patty Diphusa, Pedro Almodovar
– A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund White
– Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin
– The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
A social comedy set in the film industry
– Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West
– Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Steven Bach
– Watch Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
– Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
A social comedy about relationships and marriage
– Jane Austen and her descendants
– Anything by Laurie Colwin
– The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
– After Claude, Iris Owens
Science-fiction: Cyberpunk, Dystopian future
– Neuromancer, William Gibson
– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
– Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
An existential crisis/search for meaning novel
– Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
– My Dark Places, James Ellroy
A coming-of-age novel of ideas and clashing philosophies
– Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
– Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Seymour, J.D. Salinger
– The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Science-fiction: Future society with individuals who possess unusual gifts
– Dune, Frank Herbert
– The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
– The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick
Comic meta-novel about fame and social media, told by a writer who can’t finish anything
– Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer
– The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh
– The Comforters, Muriel Spark
A coming-of-age novel about love, sex, responsibility
– The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
– I Conquer the Castle, Dodie Smith
– The Hotel New Hampshire/The World According to Garp, John Irving
A novel about family, the past, and the instability of memory
– The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes
– The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
– A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
A novel about friendship, betrayal, memory
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– The Old School, Tobias Wolff
– The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
– Atonement, Ian McEwan
A novel about travel and sexual awakening
– Platform, Michel Houellebecq
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer
A coming-of-age novel set in a small town populated with eccentrics
– Dubliners, James Joyce
– Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
– Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
– There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
– The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart
A fantasy novel about aswang and an alternate history of the Philippines
– The Philippine Islands, Blair and Robertson (Search the Index)
– The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson
– America’s Boy, James Hamilton-Paterson
Dante’s Inferno transposed to Metro Manila
– Obviously
– Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
– Vermilion Sands, J.G. Ballard
Filipino translation of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
– Read the Sherlock stories over and over till you get their rhythm.
– Interviews on translation with Pevear/Volokhonsky
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 14th, 2014 at 07:30
I’ve been meaning to read Notes from Underground for a while now. Any particular translation/edition you recommend for it?
January 14th, 2014 at 17:11
ManilaBeans: We like the Dostoevsky translations by Pevear/Volokhonsky, but we don’t know Russian so we can’t tell the difference.
January 14th, 2014 at 23:40
Wow, so many of these sound really interesting! Good luck to the participants, because I look forward to reading these when they’re finished! (“crime thriller set in 19thc Manila” in particular sounds cool)
for the person translating the Holmes stories into Filipino (my second favorite of the project descriptions!), I’m probably just projecting, but if I were them I might look into the more old-timey Filipino novels that I know exist but have never read*, in order to get a feel for slightly more old-fashioned Filipino prose. I didn’t volunteer for the proposed group project Holmes translation because my Filipino is very, very colloquial, and even if it’s a modern translation the Holmes stories probably still should have a slightly old-fashioned flavor (since that’s part of their charm in English, anyway). Of course, the person translating probably has a lot more skill at writing in Filipino than I do, so never mind, hehe.
*I have a copy of Resil Mojares’ “Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel” on my bookshelf, but have never cracked open the cover. Whoops.
January 15th, 2014 at 02:21
books2thesky: The person translating the Holmes stories into Filipino is actually also currently reading Noli Me Tangere (the old Tagalog version) – because it is the first old Filipino novel that came to mind, and obviously because it’s Rizal’s – for inspiration. “Nag-anyaya n~g pagpapacain nang isáng hapunan, n~g magtátapos ang Octubre, si Guinoong Santiago de los Santos, na lalong nakikilala n~g bayan sa pamagát na Capitang Tiago…” Obviously it cannot be imitated, but the translator hopes reading it while doing the translation adds – exactly what you said – a slightly old-fashioned flavor to the Holmes stories. :)