Buy the book here or here. It’s called Libraries. By Candida Hofer, with an introduction by Umberto Eco.

Everyman’s always produces lovely, easy-to-hold editions, and this volume is definitely on my must-buy list. However, I’m a little nervous about the company’s claim that this translation “presents Dumas’ work as it was meant to be written.”

I can understand a new translation that presents the work as it was meant to be read; but as it was meant to be written? Can we really go back and second-guess how Dumas meant to write the book and “correct” it accordingly?

Everyman’s publicists also note that this “slightly streamlined version of the original 1846 translation speeds the narrative flow while retaining most of the the rich pictoral descriptions and all the essential details” of the book.

Huh? So, which of the “rich pastoral descriptions” were not included? And exactly what got “streamlined”?

I know that Dumas is no Hemingway, but are we really supposed to go back and do a developmental edit on an author’s work some 160 years after its publication?

Even if you’re a business writer like me, consider subscribing for just this month to the Borzoi Reader Poem-a-Day newsletter, this year dedicated to the work of John Updike (1932-2009). Because even tech writers need some creative inspiration.

I like poems that touch on the very tangible, day-to-day realities of life. Here’s an excerpt from Updike’s “Baseball,”  from Endpoint, his final book, published yesterday by Random House/Knopf Doubleday:

It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

Describing a baseball as being a “city block or more high” above your head . . . Updike is tying an abstract distance to a concrete measurement that you can easily visualize. A technique like that can bring even the most dry business writing to life.

OMG! OUP has a book club! And it’s about classics! (Sound of me fainting dead away).

(Sound of me picking self up.) OK, ANYWAY, last month’s book was Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I’ve never read this and have just ordered it from the library. The current book, the one for June, is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that I started to read Tess about a year ago, got about a third of the way through, and found it so full of impending dread that I had to put it down. If I recall, Tess was about to make a terrible mistake driven by guilt and doubt and desire, a mistake that you just knew would wind up coming back to haunt her a hundredfold.

By myself, I just couldn’t bear to finish the book and see poor Tess crushed by circumstance and fate (at least, this is what seemed to me was going to happen). But for Oxford … I’ll pick it up where I left off and do my darnedest.

I must pause in my editing this morning to ask an important question. Are the people at the New York Public Library crazy? Reuters reports that the NYPL has just released a list of its “10 greatest love stories of all time.” Although I completely agree that “Instead of trying to glean wisdom from Britney’s (Spears) latest meltdown,” it’s better to turn to “stories that have stood the test of time,” I must question NYPL’s choices.

• Wuthering Heights - greatest love story of all time? Perhaps the gloomiest and most sadistic one!
• Anna Karenina - OMG completely depressing. Ends in regret and death.
• Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare, I love ya - but the title characters both die!
• Dangerous Liaisons - The principal characters end up full of regret, having ruined their lives and thrown away their chance at happiness.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Mother sends her own daughter to the gallows. Le Hunchback commits suicide. All hopes of love are foiled.
• Doctor Zhivago - Mistakes, betrayal, and death.
• Casablanca - Well, I suppose I agree that this is perhaps the greatest love story on film - but the main peeps don’t get together in this one either.

What gives, NYPL? And don’t even get me started on the fact that Jane Eyre does not make their list.

July 23, 2007 Update

Correspondent D.C. recently read this blog entry and offered her two cents on NYPL’s list.

While I’m with you and prefer a neat, tidy, happily ever after kind of story, I may be able to shed some light on the New York Public Library’s choices:

One, it’s New York: the land of high crime and perpetual psychotherapy.

Two, there is something powerful and nostalgic about thwarted love that grips our very souls. Take Romeo and Juliet, for example, whose love was so immense they could not fathom to be apart in this world and chose union in the afterlife. In the era of divorce and sketchy relationships, this kind of devotion seems to provide an almost admirable contrast. Would it not have been more tragic for them to live and suffer a lifetime of being apart? In my screenwriting class, the instructor mentioned that conflict is what keeps the story going. Sometimes the protagonists do not always meet their goal, but if they are ennobled in the effort, the story can pack a powerful punch.

Perhaps this is what the library was going after. Perhaps I’m just a hopeless romantic. Perhaps I should sign off and get back to work before I get fired before I can quit …

We say: Don’t get back to work, D.C.! Keep sending us your insights …