started a new audio book

[kareina]

I finished reading/listening to the audio book of Gösta Berlings saga yesterday, and today I picked up another audio book/real book combo to read. The Swedish translation of Aurian, by Maggie Fury. This is a fantasy I have never read before, but it is amazing how much more comfortable I am with this story than I was with Gösta Berlings saga. That book was all about human interactions, and I couldn't understand many of them, not because the Swedish vocabulary was beyond me (though sometimes it was), but because they were just weird (what kind of parent hopes their adult son will die so that they won't have to tell the son that his bride doesn't love him?). But this book is a much more familiar comfortable sort of tale. I am only 26 pages in (45 minutes of audio book), and there is magic and a contest of wills that I can actually understand. The other book I read/listened to because I need to learn how the Swedish printed word relates to the spoken word and to get a better sense of how sentences are typically formed in Swedish. This one I am going to read for fun, and listening to a native speaker pronouncing the words is just a bonus. Ok, a bonus that is worth making it take longer to read than if I just read it silently--I have caught myself a couple of times getting a line ahead of what she was pronouncing, and having to force my eyes back to the correct place in the text...

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I discovered the Aurian books rather by accident in college, and really enjoy them. They get reread regularly.