Five extra books/articles/links/etc. from March 2025:
- The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. The story of a seemingly normal family, told from each of their perspectives. I thought the book was full of witty little details, and though it was on the longer end for a novel, I breezed through it.
- Speaking of long novels: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I picked it up expecting to abandon it, thinking it would be a soap opera. But the plot turned out to be deeper and more thematically complex than I had expected—though if someone told me they found it too racist to get through, I would completely understand.
- The Minister’s Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a beautiful short story about a minister who one day decides to don a black veil which he never removes, and how that choice affects his community.
- Eye to the Ear, an album by Cosmo Sheldrake, whose music is such a kindness to the listener.
- On a much sillier note:
In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.
The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)
Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West
Here are some amazing highlights: