Zafon, George, rubbish, LROB

La Sombra del Viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Vanity Fair article about Marriage Scientology Style: What Katie Holmes Didn't Know
My 403b plan fine print
Last two issues of London Review of Books
I, Richard, Elizabeth George

OK, there is some fairly desperate padding of the list, I will admit, there, but if one is going to be a blogger, one must be prepared to bare the gory details of one's innermost reading list to the harsh critical light of day.
The middle two (Vanity Fair article, 403b plan details) were both monstrously depressing, to the point that we don't really need to go into them; suffice to say that both made me feel completely inadequate, financially speaking. Tom Cruise has, turns out, just scads of cash.
However! La Sombra del Viento.... omg so much fun. I have a feeling that had I read it in English, I would have made myself slightly ill reading it way too quickly all in one sitting, whereas in Spanish, I am a bit like a whale swimming through molasses and I have to surface periodically for metaphorical air (air in this case being English, with the help of the internet. I remember when I had an actual collection of actual Spanish/English dictionaries - as in reference books, that sweetly quaint and inefficiently space-consuming habit we used to have, before the inefficiently time-consuming internets arrived.) Sludgy and slow though reading in Spanish, was, however,
(a) it was more confidence inducing than my 403b financial statements: there was initial depression at how many words I didn't even recognize per page, and then as I started looking them up, I got quite perky at how incredibly obscure they were ("slag-heap," "a lime blossom infusion," or, best of all, "spanishdict.com did not recognize your word; please try again" HA! not even in the DICTIONARY! boo-YAH!)
(b) it prolonged the pleasure of the juicy plotty gothic deliciousness of the book, of which I will not give away any details except to say waaaaaahahhh! the epilogue!!!!!! did ____ die, or ??? and if so, how?? and wtf?!?!  Not unlike _The Master of Bruges_ which I also devoured whole a while ago, which had me all hot to look up pics of the all the various paintings it mentions, this book had me constantly running to Google maps to look at Barcelona streetview - extra points for that - and
 (c) it reminded me that it is always, always, always worth reading things in the language they were written it if at all possible. A translation distances you, there is no question about it. I heard a very nice interview with Javier Bardem on I think Fresh Air last year in which he was describing the sensation, when acting in English, of having an office full of very busy people in his head, bustling around and working frantically to do the simultaneous interpretation from Spanish, and when he went back to speaking in Spanish, all the office workers could go home for the weekend and lock up. The thing is, all the office workers have their own agenda. I think I used to think that anything I read in translation was definitive, perfect; it never occurred to me that not only could there be multiple imperfect (and imperfectible) versions, but that there IS no perfect translation, no perfect 1:1 pre-ordained word correspondences, and there are, especially in fiction, cultural references that either have to be annoyingly explained, breaking up the narrative, or left out.
On that earth-shaking profundity, I will call it quits for the night and fall into the arms of Morpheus, in the hopes that baby will also stay tightly in said arms until at least 6 am. Dedos cruzados...