Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I'd *like* to read more in French, primarily to keep my language skills up, but it's hard to find good material. I would love to learn more about Quebecois fiction, but the ebooks are not available. For instance, there was one year where the CBC Radio Canada Reads series picked a French author, and Kobo only had the English version of the book. That is one instance where I would have chosen the French if it was available.
So if I do want to read in French, it's all stuff like Dumas and Verne off Project Gutenberg----and that makes it less 'fun reading' and more 'language exercise' to me since I have read most of that in English already. If someone could point me to a webpage which lists, say, 25 great Quebecois novels with links to purchase ebooks, I'd love it. But so far, no luck  |
I also like to read in French (my only "truly foreign" language), and for the same reason - just to keep it up. Living in California, there would be plenty of chances to speak Spanish (if I spoke it), but not so many to speak French - not, at least, without flying 2,000 miles to Quebec or 5,000 miles to France.
Luckily I read pretty slowly in French, though, so a few e-books last me a long time. And, I find it helps if I've read the book in English, even if a long time ago, so I have a general sense of the story to help me out a bit if I get stuck. So I am actually happier with Dumas, Verne, Conan Doyle (for some reason widely translated into French) and other "classic" authors available on Gutenberg. I also just bought all 7 Harry Potter e-books in French, and those should last me pretty much forever
I'm not nearly good enough at French to really distinguish between "French French" and "Quebecois French". Speaking of Quebecois books, though, I really like Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache mystery books - if you like that genre, and haven't found them, you might try them out. Although written in English, some are available in French in DTB, but AFAIK no e-books are available in French. They are generally well-reviewed, and have won or been nominated for a bunch of mystery awards, although I don't know how they are regarded in Penny's adopted Quebec.
As far as variants of English - I speak US English, but adore historical mysteries. And many (most?) of those are written/published in the UK, so I read UK crime (notice - "crime" and not "mysteries"!) voraciously. I also like modern UK crime novels, but not in preference to US mysteries - I just like them both. By reading UK novels, I get to figure out UK-US equivalents like pavement = sidewalk, hire-purchase = lease, biscuits = cookies, crisps = chips, chips = fries, etc. etc. I still have no idea, however, what the UK equivalent of an American biscuit would be (definitely NOT a scone, although people have tried to tell me that), or even if such a thing exists in the UK...
Ditto for Australian crime novels, which I also like for the sense of place and culture, but they are harder to come by in the US.