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00:13
@b_jonas All right, here's a few ideas:
I'm not much for picture books, but just about anything by Leo Lionni is good. (I particularly loved Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse and can also recommend A Color of His Own.) Graham Oakley's Church Mice series is meant for somewhat older kids, but I can imagine a six-year-old liking them even if they don't understand all the jokes.
I like Dr. Seuss and Jack Prelutsky for the ways they play with language... not sure how that'll come across in a translation.
Moving on to chapter books, I always recommend Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan. Again, maybe aimed a bit older, but should be fine for a six-year-old. Same goes for a lot of Beverly Cleary's works. Ramona the Pest is specifically about a five-year-old and might be a good place to start.
Pippi Långstrump, I assume, is best read in the original Swedish.
01:03
0
Q: What does "She was already suited" mean?

Silent SojournerFrom John Le Carré's Smiley's People: To ring her? To throw on his clothes and hurry round there, to be received as her secret lover, creeping away with the dawn? Too late. She was already suited. Suddenly, he wanted her dreadfully. He could not bear the spaces round him that did not contain her...

 
6 hours later…
07:18
@PeterShor Thanks for the tip. I was wondering when Hopkinson would be coming out with a new novel. It was almost as if she had stopped writing.
 
3 hours later…
10:01
@Bookworm Shelley put on a performance in the HNQ, impersonating Ozymandias.
@DLosc Thank you, I hadn't heard of Leo Lionni, I'll have to look up his children's books. Graham Oakley doesn't seem to be available in Hungarian translation at first glance.
@DLosc I'll also have to look at Beverly Cleary then, while Ramona the Pest in particular doesn't seem to have a translation, other children's books by the same author are.
10:34
Is nobody else reading Elschot's Cheese? I had forgotten how funny that novel is. It's also safe to read if you have lactose intolerance.
Beginning of Camus's The Stranger: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure." Second sentence in Elsschot's Cheese: "You should know that my mother died." I assume this is just coincidence; I don't think Elsschot was translated into French during Camus's lifetime.
> My eldest sister, with whom she lived, was good to her. She soaked her bread, made sure she went to the toilet and gave her potatoes to peel to keep her busy. And she peeled and peeled as if for an army.
> We all brought potatoes to my sister's, and so did Madame from upstairs and a couple of neighbours too, because once my sister ran out and tried to make her re-peel a bucket of potatoes, but she noticed—would you believe it?—and said: "These have already been peeled."
11:04
@CowperKettle No Grecian urn then?
11:20
@Tsundoku That might not be the only reason people haven't asked questions about it. They might not be able to get ahold of the novel easily, or they might not have any questions about it.
For the Robert Louis Stevenson challenge, I read The Master of Ballantrae, and had three questions while I was reading it. One of them I asked. Another, about Stevenson's inspiration for the novel, was answered satisfactorily by Stevenson's afterword. And the third, "Did the Master of Ballantrae poison Chew," I decided not to ask because I thought it was fairly clear that Stevenson deliberately left this ambiguous.
Maybe I should have asked this last question (I still could).
11:53
@PeterShor I'll generally ask questions even if I have a pretty decent idea about the answer, because it's good for the site to have those questions, and provides an opportunity for more people to learn e.g. techniques for interpreting works.
 
1 hour later…
13:14
@Tsundoku I have procured a copy from the Frisco library. I intend to read it but right now I'm slogging through a dreadful Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr; Cheese is up next.
I had to go up to "the city" (as San Francisco is called around here, despite the fact that San Jose is bigger) because no library nearer had a copy.
@Tsundoku you could ask
13:30
@verbose You're not the only one not to appreciate Anthony Doerr; I gave up around halfway through a different novel by Anthony Doerr — Cloud Cuckoo Land.
@Mithical Okay; I'll seriously consider asking the question belatedly. It'll take me a while, since I'll need to remember and refind the three or four different places in the book that are relevant.
I had almost forgotten we had had a Stevenson challenge. Even though I read Strange Case ... around that time.
It was one of those challenge for which I didn't come up with any questions.
@verbose Much appreciated. I even bought the book because there is no library that has it within a radius of 200 kilometres.
13:50
@Mithical Those questions make sense, but I still wonder if it would be worth for me to repost identify questions that I asked outside of SE but already got the answer.
I am already in Budapest so I don't have to go to another city to get a book. Admittedly it has happened a few times that I have to inter-library loan a book from the U-Szeged library because it's nowhere in Budapest. It certainly happens that I have to go to the OSzK or the MTA library for a book because it's not available in other libraries. Both of those are close enough, they just may require an extra subscription.
Plus I have had to get mathematics books from the Rényi Intézet, where the obstacle is that it's not an open library, you need a recommendation from a worker (my advisor in my case) to get permission to use it, even to just read in place.
At one point I've also borrowed a book from a small departmental library at the university (BME) that doesn't loan directly (because they don't want to be responsible for getting the books back), but are happy to loan their books for inter-library loan (in which case the intermediate library will get the book back from me). I can understand that policy.
Some of these departmental libraries exist mostly because the professors working for the dept want to buy books for themselves from the university's money, so those books technically have to be owned by university even if in practice it's just on the professor's shelf.
This works well as a status indicator by the way: seeing which professor has a lot of books on their shelf, and which ones have a room alone or share only with someone who's almost never present, those signs indicate which professors are high ranked more effectively than just their university rank titles and academic titles and awards.

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