More Litblog Co-op Pub

A couple of years ago at my old job as a group of us frittered away the last hours of the night shift, my coworker Lucia, who runs the world’s coolest online book store, entertained us with a fun little trick. She discovered that if you take William Carlos Williams’ famous poem about chickens, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and use Babelfish to translate from English into a foreign language and back to English, the results are quite amusing. Remembering this just the other day, I decided it would be fun to share this game with you:The original:So much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.English –> Dutch –> English:This way much hang from a red wheel wheelbarrow vitrified with rain water beside the white chickensEnglish –> German –> English:hangs as much after a red wheel truck off glazed with rain water beside the white chickensEnglish –> Japanese –> English:So side of the white chicken where the rainwater and the gloss which depend on the red monocycle can be appliedEnglish –> Portuguese –> English:thus very it depends in top of a red stand on hand of the wheel vitrified with water on rain to the side of the white hensEnglish –> Chinese (simp) –> English:Extremely is decided to a red wheel handcart to enamels with the rain water nearby the white chickenAnd finally… my favorite: English –> Korean –> English:Lapse in the rain adjacent waters which depends in the deep-red wheel grave the wheel me in the side of the white chicken

At the Happy Booker, Wendi points to a New York Daily News article which mentions that Oprah has been recommending Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World to book clubs, leading to speculation that her own book club will return to contemporary fiction, and Jones’ book will be her choice.Great news for Jones, but I see no reason why Oprah can’t have both contemporary and classic picks at the same time. She only selects three or four books a year, so double that wouldn’t be a big deal, and getting millions of people to read books like East of Eden and Anna Karenina isn’t a bad thing.

Still in the throes of controversy surrounding James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Oprah has selected Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night as the next selection for her book club. While this selection was no doubt in the works long before the Frey controversy, the juxtaposition is still remarkable. Frey’s confessional, sensationalized addiction memoir, the credibility of which seems to crumble further with every passing day, looks awfully silly next to the beloved memoir of a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor whose character is unassailable as far as I know. In the New York Times, Wiesel says he hasn’t read Frey’s book (big surprise), but then goes on to make some comments that seem to me to be directed at Frey’s fast and loose treatment of the truth (emphasis mine):He acknowledged that some people and institutions, including on occasion The New York Times, have referred to Night as a novel, “mainly because of its literary style.””But it is not a novel at all,” he said. “I know the difference,” he added, noting that Night is the first of his 47 books, several of which are novels. “I make a distinction between what I lived through and what I imagined others to have lived through.”As it is a memoir, he said, “my experiences in the book – A to Z – must be true.” He continued: “All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions it as a novel.”Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Amazon is changing the classification of Night from fiction to memoir. As of this writing, Night is number one on Amazon, bumping Pieces to number two.