Top 25: The Best Books I Discovered In 2014

[Rev. Rye]

Kudos on choosing the P and V translation of Brothers Karamazov (and not Crime and Punishment for some reason). Hopefully, you'll find their other translations.

Here are a few of the best books I discovered (and rediscovered) up this year (mostly bought at Half-Price Books in Hardcover):

Discovered:

• Boy by Roald Dahl
  
• The Collected Works of Malcolm Gladwell
  
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (tr. Edith Grossman)
  
• Death Comes For the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  
• That Is All by John Hodgman
  
• The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
  
• Amphigorey by Edward Gorey (standing in for the MANY Gorey books I've collected since I went to the Gorey retrospective at Loyola.)
  
• A Melville 4-in-one of Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, The Piazza Tales, and Billy Budd.
  
• The Men's Club by Leonard Michaels
  
• Permanent Midnight by Jerry Stahl
  
• The Brilliant Disaster by Jim Rasenberger
  
• The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
  
• The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance
  
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  
• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
  
• Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert
  
• Forever by Pete Hamill
  

Rediscovered:

• If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell
  
• Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskins
  
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
  
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  
• Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  
• Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (tr. Johnston)
  
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
  
• Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses by James Joyce
  
• The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children, both by Tom Perotta
  
• Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
  
• Oliver Twist and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  
• Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson
  
• The Trial and Selected Stories by Franz Kafka
  
• Shibumi by Trevanian
  
• O Pioneers by Willa Cather
  

[Mudhammam]

Kudos on choosing the P and V translation of Brothers Karamazov (and not Crime and Punishment for some reason). Hopefully, you'll find their other translations.

Well, my brother had recommended that translation for The Brothers Karamazov, but he also said Constance Garrett's translation was good for Notes From Underground, so when I read that, along with her rendition of The Friend of the Family, which were both superb, and saw her name on the copy of Crime and Punishment at the store, I went with it. Today I just bought my other brother a very nice, hardcover, leather bound copy of The Brothers Karamazov, illustrated with some fine artwork, for Christmas, and it's the Garrett translation. I don't know how it compares with P and R's, but given my knowledge of her other work, I trust it's good. The down side, and what I loved about my version of TBK, is that it lacks the footnotes that they provided in the back.

[Rev. Rye]

Kudos on choosing the P and V translation of Brothers Karamazov (and not Crime and Punishment for some reason). Hopefully, you'll find their other translations.

Well, my brother had recommended that translation for The Brothers Karamazov, but he also said Constance Garrett's translation was good for Notes From Underground, so when I read that, along with her rendition of The Friend of the Family, which were both superb, and saw her name on the copy of Crime and Punishment at the store, I went with it. Today I just bought my other brother a very nice, hardcover, leather bound copy of The Brothers Karamazov, illustrated with some fine artwork, for Christmas, and it's the Garrett translation. I don't know how it compares with P and R's, but given my knowledge of her other work, I trust it's good. The down side, and what I loved about my version of TBK, is that it lacks the footnotes that they provided in the back.

Honestly, Constance Garnett is a very flawed translator, ESPECIALLY with regards to Dostoevsky. She was actually known to cut out passages that she found awkward, and more or less made Turgenev, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol sound the exact same.

Joseph Brodsky once said, “the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”

Trust me, if you want to read the best translations of Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky are your friends.