Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Welcome to the final post of 2023, and thank you so much for your support this year. I hope you’ve found the blog helpful, and if you’re looking to get a jump on your 2024 professional development, our January classes (Using objective data to set your freelance rates; Getting started as a translator or interpreter in the age of AI) are now open for registration!
As I did last year, I’ll wrap up this year with some mini-reviews of the books I read, then the newsletter will take a holiday break, and I’ll be back in your inbox in January with some new content!
I read 15 books this year, and I have one on deck for winter break. In the order in which I read them, here we go!
1. Olav Audunsson: Crossroads, by Sigrid Undset, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally. Admittedly, I’m obsessed with the Olav Audunsson series: I read the first two volumes in 2022, and couldn’t wait to dig into this one. This is medieval historical fiction set in Norway, written by a Nobel prize winner, and it reminds me quite a bit of Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII series. I think with this series, you love it or you don’t, and I love it: I love the medieval stuff, the family drama, the stories about traveling around Norway during that time…bring it on!
2. The Ransomware Hunting Team, by Renee Dudley and Daniel Goldin. A complete 180 from the first book I read this year, this is an excellent non-fiction book by two technology reporters at ProPublica, focusing on how ransomware attacks happen, and a team of cybersecurity specialists who work in the ransomware recovery world.
3. No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos. I got sucked into the whole Bernie Madoff story after watching the Netflix series “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street,” and I wondered if there were any interesting books on the topic. I really loved this one, by the forensic accountant who was a primary whistle-blower on the Madoff case. It’s just nerdy enough, and gives you a lot of the financial details on how Madoff pulled off such an extraordinary level of financial fraud, and what it took to uncover it.
4. The Prodigal Child, by Irène Némirovsky, translated from the French by Sandra Smith. I read this in English because Sandra Smith is a friend and gifted me the book, plus I just love Sandra’s translations. This is a beautiful and heartbreaking short (80 pages) novel, set in turn-of-the (last)-century Russia, about a boy with a gift for storytelling, who is adopted and then rejected by a wealthy patroness. It’s so incredibly well-written and well-translated; I don’t typically read “downer” fiction (to be honest) but I highly recommend it for the quality of the prose!
5. Inseparable, by Simone de Beauvoir, translated from the French by Sandra Smith. If you’re into Simone de Beauvoir, you need to read this. It’s the semi-fictionalized story of Simone de Beauvoir’s close friendship with Zaza Lacoin (names are changed in the novel) and it’s so good! Here’s the New York Times review of it.
6. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, by Deborah Feldman. Another book that I found via the Netflix miniseries! I liked both the TV show and the book, but/and they’re very different. Both are worthwhile; the TV series is a lot more sensational and dramatic (how unusual for a TV series…haha), but Deborah Feldman is an excellent writer, particularly for someone who was prohibited from even having a library card as a child, and her path from Brooklyn to Berlin is really gripping as a story.
7. Ducks, by Kate Beaton. I’m not a graphic novel person in general, and this was one of my absolute favorite books of this year, and maybe even the past few years. Kate Beaton is an artist from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, who ended up working in the oil sands of Alberta to pay off her student loans, then drew/wrote a graphic novel about it. I actually heard about this book on a Marketplace podcast about the offbeat jobs that people do to pay back their educational debt, and I was absolutely captivated by it. I’ve since gifted it to three other people who loved it too. A must-read!
8. Hello, Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano. I was honestly pleasantly surprised by this book. It’s a fairly long novel (not my typical thing), and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick (with all due respect, also not my typical thing), and I honestly really liked it. It’s a multi-generational family story about a group of four sisters in Chicago, intertwined with the complex family story of one of their husbands. I like reading about complicated family dynamics, and Ann Napolitano is a great writer. This book is not something I would have ordinarily picked up, and I’d actually recommend it!
9. There There, by Tommy Orange. My mom was reading this with her book club and loaned it to me; it’s definitely really well-written (Pulitzer Prize finalist, PEN Hemingway award). It follows various Native American characters in Oakland, CA whose paths become intertwined on the way to a Powwow. I’d recommend this book if you don’t already feel relatively beaten down by the reality of Native Americans in the U.S. That may sound like kind of a weird way to put it, but, having done a bunch of trips to the Navajo Nation with our animal rescue group, I sort of felt like, I’m so sad when I think about all of this (“this” being stories about alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, early death due to substances and despair, grandparents raising their grandkids) that I don’t really have it in me to read 12 characters’ stories about it. But the book is very well written!
10. Who Gets What–And Why: The new economics of matchmaking and market design, by Alvin Roth. I’d call this, “The book that could have been a podcast.” Actually, it’s the book that was a podcast, and that’s how I found out about it. I think I heard the author interviewed on the Freakonomics podcast, and I thought, “Whoa, really interesting, I want to read his book!” and it turns out that the most interesting parts of the book were what he talked about on the podcast. The author is obviously brilliant (Nobel Prize winner), and has designed “markets” for things like organ donation. It’s a fascinating topic, but the book makes the same point many, many times, and I’d recommend just reading an article or listening to a podcast with this author instead.
11. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach. I love Mary Roach, and I’m an animal person, so this book was a winner for me (a gift from my sister-in-law). It’s a non-fiction look at the intersection between humans, animals, and other forces of nature (an entire chapter is devoted to how you can be killed by a tree). I find Mary Roach’s books really informative but also funny and easy to read. Definitely recommended!
12. Passion Simple, by Annie Ernaux (I’m including the French title here because I read it in French, it’s “Simple Passion” in English). I was really excited to read this book after Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize, and I hope I’m not going to hell for saying this, but I hated this book and found it honestly kind of cringe-y. Annie Ernaux is (it goes without saying) an excellent writer, but this is kind of a stream-of-consciousness account of the main character’s love affair with “a mysterious foreigner” who becomes her all-consuming obsession. Partially, I think that the subject matter just hasn’t aged well: it was written in the 90s, and maybe (maybe??) at that time, a book about a grown, independent woman who saves a glass that her aloof, unreachable lover drank out of so that she’ll have a relic of his saliva came off as less…anachronistic?? I don’t know…I’m going to give Annie Ernaux another try (“The Years” is on deck) but I was not a fan of this book.
13. Going Infinite: The rise and fall of a new tycoon, by Michael Lewis. I know, this is one of those books that everyone read this year, but I got really drawn into the Sam Bankman-Fried story, so I had to read it! You’ve probably heard the controversy by now (that Michael Lewis kind of goes easy on SBF, who, we now know, may be headed for multiple decades in prison), but Michael Lewis is a good writer, and this is a fun, captivating read, plus I knew almost nothing about the whole crypto sector before I read it.
14. Lone Women, by Victor Lavalle. OK, speaking of not my typical read: a fantasy-horror Western?? But wait, I actually really liked this book. It was featured in the book recommendations of one of my favorite podcasts, Melanie Padgett Powers’ The Deliberate Freelancer, and I had a couple of long airplane rides coming up, so I was, like, what the heck. This book is so good! It’s based on the true concept of “Lone Women” (solo women homesteaders) in Montana in the early 1900s, and I got soooo drawn into the story (what’s in the trunk?????). Highly recommended, particularly if you like fantasy-horror novels (which I normally don’t, but I really liked this one).
15. How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair. Oh. My Gosh. I’d say that this, along with “Ducks,” is my other must-read recommendation for this year. Safiya Sinclair is a poet, and I found out about this book because it was excerpted in The New Yorker. The book is a memoir about the author’s childhood in a Rastafari family in Jamaica, through her experience as a graduate student in the U.S., and it is crazy/beautiful/captivating/educational/heartbreaking/eye-opening. Like, it is all the things that a really good memoir should be, plus Safiya Sinclair is such a good writer that I would sometimes read the same paragraph over and over, just because it was so beautiful. I had no idea that “Babylon” is the Rastafari term for “mainstream Western society” (my husband lived on St. Croix for a couple of years after college and enlightened me about this). Another must-read.
If you’re looking for some holiday break reading, I’d suggest (in no particular order, and depending on your literary tastes): Ducks, Lone Women, and How to Say Babylon.
And with that, thanks for a great 2023 and I’ll talk to you in 2024!
Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!
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