Friday Memes and 'Mercy and Other Stories' by Rebecca Lloyd

It's Friday, so excuse the obvious post with the memes. But I enjoy all of them too much to not participate each week! So, on to business, or so they say. Book Blogger Hop is hosted by Billy over at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer and this week's question was submitted by Emma from Words and Peace!


Do you books in translation? What are the last 3 book translations you read?

I do read quite a lot of books in translation, I think. Growing up half-Dutch, half-German, I read most books in translation. Mainly Harry Potter, which I have always read in German, even after I learned English. The great thing was that they kept all of the names as they were in English, whereas the Dutch version, thinking it was obviously a kid's book, changed all of the names, which meant that by the time the books got darker, you had these characters walking around with ridiculous names! Anyways, the last three translations I read/reviewed were:

1. 1948, written by Yoram Kaniuk and translated by Anthony Berris
2. The Impossible Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, written by Chan Koonchung and translated by Nicky Harman
3. The Professor and the Siren, written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampeduse and translated by Stephen Twilley

I named my blog A Universe in Words because I wanted to push myself to read as many books from all over the world as I could. Unfortunately I don't read as many as I'd like to, but there's a good few.

Follow Friday is hosted by Alison Can Read and Parajunkee and this week's question is:

If you had a time machine (i.e. a TARDIS), where would you go?

I would love to have a time machine, even though I'm reading H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and it isn't making me very fond of time travel. Although, Wells' novel is one of the few in which I can accept time travel, whereas in general I really don't think it works in a narrative, at all. J.K. Rowling did it really well in Prisoner of Azkaban as well, but that was because there the time travel was part of the story from the very beginning, if you know what I mean. Hermione always threw the rock, not just at the end of the book.

Anyways, if I could travel anywhere I'd probably travel back to the time of the Anglo-Saxons, just because I could ask people what exactly they were thinking when they wrote Beowulf etc. It would really help me ace my last year at University, I think. Although there's a big chance I'd never come back!

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 are hosted by Gilion over at Rose City Reader and Freda at Freda's Voice respectively. This week I'm using a book I reviewed a couple of days ago, Mercy and Other Stories by Rebecca Lloyd. It's a collection of strange short stories, so the BB and F56 aren't from the same story!

BB:

'I do not play piano now; it is no longer interesting to me; since my wife was stolen, I have lost heart in it. I played only for her, and my music drifted sweetly through the rooms of our house. I know if she could have, she would have danced for me in the dress of blue organza, making the dust motes swirl in the sunlight.' 1%

Don't let the sweetness of this beginning fool you, this husband is crazy!

F56:

'It was about a month later that the whole ghastly business tumbled out of him. He made me quickly afraid, not of course about the real thing, but about what I took to be the utter mashed up state his nerves were in.' 56%

This was one of the stranger stories in the collection, although I really liked how Lloyd described the paranoia of the characters!

So, which books are you sharing today? Any translations? And where would you go in a time machine?