The Reader, Smoothies and Puréed Bangers and Mash

The good news is, I feel human again, the bad news is my throat is still KILLING ME. I went to the doctors this morning - the first thing he asked me, THE FIRST THING was: "ooooo so how's the revision going, my son is up to here with his" what revision?! revision? I'm not here to talk about revision, I feel like I'm dying and you ask me about revision!!??? - anyway, he wasn't particularly sympathetic until he examined my throat. Then he went "oh dear" - ominous... he thinks it's tonsillitus but it could also be this "new" sore throat so he took a swab of my saliva (which hurt a LOT!) and told me to stay off school till Thursday. This is not good, I''ve only JUST caught up on all the work I missed from being in France, now I'm going to be even FURTHER behind!!! I'm very sad and annoyed about this.

I still can't eat solid food. I had a smoothie, which was pretty darn good (!) but other than that I've been pretty hungry all day - Mum bought me some Lucozade which has been nice, but the fizz irritates my throat :-( The plus point to all this madness is that it's given me time to read. I finished "A Room with a View" and wrote a very long review of it in my reading log - this made me feel very good. I also read "The Reader" (yes, the one that's now a film). It's a very good book, the first part is a BIT dodgy - a 33 year old woman having an affair witha 15 year old...tch. But the later parts are really, really good and also rather sad.

I have one little issue with the "reading club" section at the back. Basically the book is about this boy who reads (out loud) to this older woman (before they have sex, but that's not really the point) - I just realised, that if you don't know the context of "The Reader" you might be questioning my choice of book, it is essentially about the Holocaust...oh just READ IT - anyway the question for the book club is: "Who do you think "the reader" of the title is, can it be applied to more than one character?" Now, if the book was English I would have no problem with this question, because the reader could be any one of the two main characters (the woman is illiterate and learns to read by the end of the novel) however, the book is translated from German and in German the title is "Der Vorleser". The verb "vorlesen" means to read out loud, "lesen" is the verb "to read" which means in its original form that question can only apply to the boy, because he is the only one who read outloud. I'm not sure why I'm so annoyed about this, I think it's more the fact that so few people realise that it's actually a German book and fail to recognise that some things do get seriously lost in translation. Maybe I just wanted to show off my knowledge of German verbs (which admittedly isn't very great *sigh*)

To top the whole day off, my mother had to stick my dinner in the blender because I couldn't swallow it. It was sausages, sweet potato and veggies - I attempted the sausage, but it was really hard to eat so my mother was like: " RIGHT, I'm blending it!" (not what I wanted to hear) and after it was blended into this wondefull orange-green pulpy mush it was slodged onto my plate - my brother said " that looks like sick". Thanks a lot.

2 comments :

  1. OMG Yay you had a linguistics spaz! I can so empathise! I read a book once where the narrator was describing his ROMANIAN girlfriend's RUSSIAN accent - ROmanian is a Romance language! grrr.... Also, in the same book, a girl who came from LUXEMBOURG was homesick for the ALPS. Luxembourg does not equal Lichtenstein just because they both have names which are bigger than they are! Forgive my little rant. It just really flops me off.

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  2. Ellie!
    I know this is a bit late, but I just realized you had a blog and I am reading The Reader right now! It's amazing...
    happy easter

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