
I included Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma in a post I wrote a few weeks ago about books I start repeatedly yet have never been able to finish. Various folks on Twitter and elsewhere told me I need to stick it out with the novel, including Jacob Siefring, who suggested I try Richard Howard’s 1999 Modern Library translation (instead of the 1925 Moncrieff translation I’d been struggling with). Jacob wrote about this translation on his blog Bibliomanic, by the way. I’m a little over halfway through with Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show and I plan to give this a shot next.