John Baker’s Blog

A panel at the PEN World Voices session came up with the following titles:
Antonio Muñoz Molina: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Catherine Millet: The Lily of the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
Yousef al-Mohaimeed: first the Arabian Nights, then poetry (including haikus), and then, of all things Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
Olivier Rolin: Under the Volcano by [...]

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has an interesting piece on the book trade:
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. [...]

LibraryThing’s list of books tagged unread by its members is fascinating reading. Here’s the top ten, but the rest of this very long list is even more revealing:
Most often tagged unread
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (236/9020)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (211/8930)
One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (183/11948)
Crime and punishment [...]

Hu Ling at Words Without Borders: Some say a good story should be like an iceberg.
. . . perhaps a translator is a bit like a Chinese restaurant owner, who finds himself serving mostly a non-Chinese clientele: should I assume my diners have unadventurous palates and always serve them the familiar “chow mein” and “kung-pao [...]