Books in languages

[schneefink]

The vast majority of fiction I've read in the past several years was in English, and mostly fic or science fiction/fantasy. When I started writing the D&D session summaries I noticed that it's been a while since I've written in German, so I decided to read more German books again.

It's surprisingly difficult to find science fiction/fantasy books written in German! Even in bookstores the shelves are full of translations, and there's no filter function for that anywhere, very annoying. There are a couple of German SFF authors, but I already know most of them from when I couldn't read English as well yet. I was disappointed.

One bookstore clerk recommended "Das Licht hinter den Wolken" by Oliver Plaschka. I've read the first few chapters now and I'm not sure I want to continue, I'm not really interested in anyone or anything yet. On top of that, the female main character is called "April." April! It's an English first name, but not a German one. It seems strange every time I read it, why would you do that.
There were a couple of other times too when I read a word and knew which English one would be in its place, and sometimes one language fit better and sometimes the other. That's probably just how it is with languages.

Maybe I'll stick to English science fiction/fantasy and try reading other books in German, maybe the genre switch helps. It's been a while since I've read other genres, might be interesting again.
(Or maybe I'll read Russian books once I figure out the translation function with Russian on my ebook reader, I should try that again...)

Comments

[extrapenguin]

It is annoying, isn't it? Finnish SF does seem to have a more active writerbase, but most of it seems to be fantasy, and libraries are wall-to-wall translations. Do you have any local SF clubs or cons? That's how I found out about Finnish-language SF.

Sometimes, word-names in other languages work – Hannu Rajaniemi has a character called Mieli, "mind", despite writing in English – though I suppose it's less jarring if the word is not a commonly used name in the other language. I find the English names in translated-into-Finnish works jarring, too.

[schneefink]

There are almost certainly ways to find German SFF that I'd discover if looking more closely, but it's annoying that that's necessary, and also I'm lazy. Maybe I'll get around to it.