December 29, 2007 -- Saturday morning

Reading The Divine Comedy, by Dante. He's been reading it on BART trips for the past two months.

His favorite book--The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal, thought by some to be the greatest French novel ever and completed in just 52 days (the time it takes to see 48 states on the Greyhound). I'm not sure which translation he read, he had to leave before I could even give him the address for my blog ...but, there are two translations, and I'm guessing he read the second, (if not the original French), by Richard Howard, who, as described in a New York Times book review by Daniel Mendelsohn, has modernized his predecessor's [
the earlier translator's] period touches, streamlined some of the fussier locutions, and generally given Stendhal his high-velocity due. The result is a timely version of a timeless masterpiece, which shouldn't need to be updated again until, oh, 2050.

I included that quote for the "oh, 2050" part.

It's a romantic thriller about a man named Fabrizio, set at the time of Napoleon.