Am I the only one who's found the end of Maskerade to be extremely cruel and depressing?

So, I've been reading the whole discworld series since, uh, 10 days ago. I've just finished Soul Music, but now I'm faced with a certain degree of indecisiveness.

I love the Watch. Now, I quite like Rincewind and Cohen, and the Lancre witches are straight up awesome, but the Watch is The Watch. So... am I a bad person for wanting to skip Interesting Times and Maskerade and jump straight into Feet of Clay?

Now part of me is even willing to read Maskerade before Feet of Clay, I've read good things about that book, but somehow I'm just not up for Rincewind, even if he's tagging along with the fabled Silver Horde. He was cool and fun in the first two books but there's only so much interest a whiny wizard who never learns magic will generate on me. I've nothing against the cowardice. I just really wish he'd gain some skills.

I just finished reading the Graveyard Book. I had stopped at the witch's headstone when university ate me, then finally picked back up today.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaawl

I always felt like this whenever I finished LotR - this big empty space inside of me saying "the book is oooooooveeeeeeerrrrrr" while I went "noooooooo why can't it just go on FOREVER" - I don't know, I guess because we read a couple chapters of the hobbits getting their lives back in order in the Shire, when the end starts coming it feels like it's much too soon (even though any reader other than me would say it took forever). I guess I'm just weird enough to wish I could read all about Sam's family life and his army of kids, and Aragorn's kingly life and Faramir swooning over babies (injoke). And since we have all those characters who went over the sea, it's just such a final ending.

When Sam gets back home and just sits down with his baby on his lap it really feels like metaphorically putting the pen down. It really gets to me, and it takes a while to get me functioning again afterwards.

....well, I'll feel better after the Appendices. I always do.

Finally, after putting it aside way too long, I finished my reread of the Two Towers, and am finally ready to starts RotK which I haven't been able to read for close to eight years. (It was lent by my sister and never returned.)

I just wanted to register how much I fucking love Sam. Sam, I love you. You're my hero. You're the true badass in this book. You're the true badass, period. I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

AND I CRIED AGAIN THIS PART ALWAYS MAKES ME CRY LIKE A LOON. FUCK YOU SAM I LOVE YOU

By the way: I'll be travelling with my family from today till sunday. We're gonna spend Easter with my sister's boyfriend's family. I'll prolly be taking the book along, since it's sure to be a boring deal full of nutty religious zealotry (the guy's family is our equivalent to fanatical baptists).

Found in cheloya's journal: FUNNIEST SHIT EVER.

It's like one of those Fail Mary Sues, only it's a published work! Two pages of the most lollarious description of the female body the human mind could even come up with.

Lately I've been in the grasp of a pretty nasty cold. Stuffed nose, the constant feeling of an impending migraine that may or may not come anytime, scratchy throat. For some reason - masochism, I presume - I decided to use the time I would be stewing on bed or on my computer chair to finally tackle the LotR bookset I got from Phil.

I first read LotR in its translated brazilian version when I was 12 and The Hobbit when I was 14, and have re-read them many times since - at least until my sister lent The Return of the King to a university classmate who then dropped off the face of the earth, several years ago. After that, re-reading the books became kind of depressing, since I didn't have an ending to get to and the war in Gondor was among my all-time favorite book scenes, scoring right up there with Sam's CMOA against Shelob and the mines of Moria. Now, though, I have the original version in hands - there's no reason for me not to plunge right into it, right?

Reading the Hobbit was easy enough - I had actualy once come across its english version in the home of my deceased third grandmother Helena long ago, but my english wasn't nearly as good back then, and I hadn't read the translated version yet; I was mostly clueless throughout the book, and for some reason the part I best remembered afterwards was the last I read, when Bilbo finally fell asleep at the Eagles' eyrie. Mind you, I had no idea what an eyrie meant, and in fact by yesterday, when I came across the word again, I still didn't.

But just now I picked the Fellowship up and opened it and found myself reading and rereading the ring poem over and over again. It was such a strange feeling, to have it printed on paper in front of me, even after having read it countless times before in websites. It took actual force of will to flip the page and read Tolkien's Foreword, which I knew by heart from my brazilian version. When I reached the line about the decrepit corn-mill from his youth, a thought that had been building up since the Hobbit suddenly took shape; I immediately pulled out my beaten-up brazilian version and flipped over to the respective paragraph.

The translation is marvelous, but sometimes head-scratchingly arbitrary, principally when it comes to names. The translator took care to keep them as close to their intended feel and meaning as possible, but that's really not always possible. Which was why Sandyman ended up being called "Big Ginger" in our version. And there's really no way to translate Sandyman in a way that'll make any sense in our language. I mean, the first time I heard of the Sandman comic character, my first mental image was of a monster made of sand with powers over sand. And leaving the original name untranslated would be unthinkable in a book so linguistically-inclined - in fact the book's translation proudly claims to having been overseen by members of the Tolkien Society and other such specialists. And what does Sandyman mean? I'll be sincere with you, I have no clue. Does he have hair color that remind people of sand? Is his skin color or texture such that they bring people the mental image of sandy beaches, or the feeling that he'll turn into a muddy puddle under the rain? The brazilian name/nickname brings to mind the image of a red-haired, rough, strong guy (Ruivão, or, if your browser can't handle graphic accents, Ruivao), and in my head he was always a red-haired, rough, strong, uncouth hobbit. Other names were much easier to handle, such as Strider turning into "Longstride" (strangely enough I once read an excerpt of the european portuguese version and his name was untranslated in it... which was especially funny since it was the Prancing Pony chapter, and the innkeeper's explanation for the nickname sounded completely absurd, since it fell as flat as a foreign surname whose meaning no one cares about), and Oakenshield was pretty much translated literally.

This amusing "discovery" had me then poring through the Middle-Earth maps, comparing the names of places in both versions. "Vesperturvo" is "Evendim"! "Brandevin" is "Brandywine"! And what the hell is a Michel Delving? The Shire's map is completely different in the brazilian book, it's much bigger and more detailed - in fact all maps look bigger in it, since it's a slightly bigger book - but it doesn't describe the areas outside of it. The wider map of Eriador describe the respective area as Distant Hills, but that doesn't make much sense to me. Now more than ever I wish I had the brazilian third volume back with me, since it had my beloved, precious appendices with translation notes and conventions not only as described by Tolkien, but footnotes by the portuguese translator explaining some of his own choices.

Anyway, this is just me, geeking over one of the greatest influences in my life while having a stuffed nose and a cough and a slight headache. Apologies if I fail to make sense.

ETA: Michel Delving = Grã Cava! And Westernesse was translated as Ponente, which always felt like a very pretty, evocative name to me.

While waiting for the book my sister bought me to arrive (Eric), I saved up and bought Pyramids. It was a strange experience, since it's a little like my webcomic God of Destruction, only a lot more cohesive and funny. The guy who's suddenly a little bit of a "god" and has no idea what to do with that or if he even really wants to be one, you know. Without murdered parents, memory blanks or blood spatters on a wall, but with the domineering priests too. 


I noticed a few typos and mixed names in the translation (once they changed Dil to Dios, and it filled the scene with all sorts of wrong), but it was a great read all in all. The only bad part was my sister badgering me to finish this oil painting I didn't even want to start with. She home-made some canvas specifically to guilt/blackmail me into painting them, claiming it was for mother's day. I finished one for Mom, but she still wants another two >_> the more she bothers me, the less I want to do it, period.

So I bought the Da Vinci code yesterday and just got done reading it today. My mom was all "read it critically!! Don't believe in the stuff in that!" XDD My crazy catholic mom...

( My thoughts - Spoiler cut just in case )