Tagged: 1967
Ornithology: An Introduction
Ornithology: An Introduction by Austin L. Rand, 2/5
On the surface, this 1960s paperback about bird science meets every criteria for Most Boring Book Ever Written. Despite finding it to be surprisingly readable (no doubt because birds are intrinsically bizarre), it is difficult for me to imagine that anyone else in the entire world has read this book in the last twenty years.
Why I read it: The comically boring title caught my eye in the thrift store and I bought it specifically to send me off to sleep on difficult nights. It worked perfectly.
Mots D’Heaures: Gousses, Rames
Mots d’Heaures: Gousses, Rames: The d’Antin Manuscript edited and annotated by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten, 5/5
This might be the strangest and most ingenious premise for a book I have ever seen–even after reading it, I still don’t really see how it’s possible. It is a collection of poems written in French that, when read aloud, sound like Mother Goose rhymes being read in English with a thick French accent. The author supplies entertaining footnotes that attempt, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of the “original” French.
Here’s an example for “Little Bo Peep”:
Little Bo Peep
has lost her sheep
and doesn’t know where to find them;
leave them alone and they will come home
wagging their tails behind them.
Lille beau pipe
Ocelot serre chypre
En douzaine aux verres tuf indemne
Livre de melons un dé huile qu’aux mômes
Eau à guigne d’air telle baie indemne.
Why I read it: My friend, Alison (whose own book, Entropy Academy, is soon to be released), gave this book to me while I was taking a French language class. Hearing the verses read aloud in her English accent was a hilariously bizarre experience.
N.B. There is a German version of this concept called Mörder Guss Reims.
OmniRambles 