This week you get another instalment of Weltenwanderers and Schlunzenbüchers „Gemeinsam Lesen“ (Reading Together).
Each Tuesday one of them asks four questions, with the first three always being the same about the book one is currently reading and the fourth a new one by either of them. All questions below are obviously translated from today’s German post.
1. Which Book are you currently reading and which page are you on?
I’m still reading „A Game of Thrones“ by George R.R. Martin, but for today I decided to talk about a different book that I had started back in July on our trip to the Book Hotel: Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea-saga.
Last week I struggled a bit to continue reading the other book for several reasons, so on the weekend I picked up this trilogy again.
I’m currently on page 350, which means I’m actually in the book The Tombs of Atuan.
2. What is the first sentence on your current page?
As I like to stop at chapter endings I will give you the first sentence of the new chapter, even though it’s in the middle of the page.
In der großen Schatzkammer der Gräber von Atuan stand die Zeit still.
or in English:
The time stood still in the large treasury of the Tombs of Atuan.
3. What do you desperately need to tell about your current book? (Thoughts, Feelings, a Quote, whatever you want!)
When I started reading at the Book Hotel I was soon captivated by Ged’s story in A Wizard of Earthsea and finished it, before we took off again, but when I started reading Tenar’s story afterwards, I soon got bored of her attitude.
Tenar or Ahar is quite annoying in my opinion. Bratty, selfish, arrogant and many more things I can’t quite name.
But not just that keeps me from reading on. The book has quite long chapters with rarely any breaks, where you could properly stop and you sometimes need to read up to 20 pages before a new chapter starts. And if you’re reading about a character you don’t really like those can be quite tedious 20 pages.
Still, with the faint memory of the movies in mind I still am curious how this part, which also seems to be the shortest of the three books, will continue.
It’s by the way quite interesting that the three books of this Earthsea-collection has fewer pages than A Game of Thrones, but is still a bit larger, due to larger print and occasional drawings.
And of course the fact that roughly 600 pages make up three books, while the other counts 800 for only one. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the German publishers had decided to release two translated volumes for each English book from A Song of Ice and Fire.
4. How bad are Spoilers for you? Are you annoyed, when you learn something somewhere – be it from the blurb or a review – or do you not care?
It depends.
Sometimes I read up on what is going to happen out of curiosity, sometimes I stumble across stuff through Tumblr or Facebook and then there are the times when I try to stay as far away from any information as possible.
When I am confronted with Spoilers when I don’t want to hear any than I can be quite annoyed by it, but the other times I either simply ignore it or don’t mind/accept that I now know more than I intended to.
With a series like Game of Thrones that is nearly as old as myself and has a huge Fandom, I came across several Spoilers way before I started reading and thanks to myself asking questions, I recently also learned things I’m not sure I wanted to learn in retrospect…
As reviews tend to give away quite a bit I don’t read them before I’ve seen/read it myself. I also try to write Spoiler-free Reviews here, but sometimes you can’t celebrate an awesome scene by not or only roughly talking about it…
In short: I don’t really like Spoilers – especially the big ones, but I occasionally look for them myself and am not mad if I come across them.
Additional thoughts
You can obviously participate in these questions by either using my translated or the original German version.
Besides differing intentions to continuing with the other book, my motivation to finish the final pieces of my Advent Calendar is slowly dwindling away…
There are only four stories left I need to type and translate (one of them needs to be written first), but I guess I have nearly reached my output limit…
Still, I’ll pull myself together and finish this project.
I wont give up this close to the end…
PoiSonPaiNter
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