We seem to have given up reading round here. I must admit that I'm not sure of the difference between this thread and the one in Star Trek Miscellaneous. I tend to put my ST reading in that one (mostly) and my other reading here.
Anyway, I have finished Dante's "Hell" in the translation by Dorothy L. Sayers. Translators of the Divine Comedy are always damned - at least one major critic will hate it. IIRC, it was Sayers translating into terza rima that aroused the critics' ire. Personally, in comparison to Alasdair Gray's translation (which was the one I'd read most recently), I thought AG's was easier to read and to understand but I enjoyed DLS more. Definitely better for reading aloud too.
Also just read "The Camels Are Coming" by WE Johns. This is one of the early Biggles books. I had read it in the Dean reprint "Biggles Pioneer Air Fighter" which bowdlerised the book somewhat. This Red Fox edition uses the original text (so we see two squadrons competing over a case of prewar whisky rather than prewar lemonade). The Biggles books are usually considered to be children's books but these early stories are more than that. They do talk about people drinking too much and cracking under the strain, and the limited life expectancy on the Western Front. Someone who has been a likeable major character in a story may "go west" in the next.
I tried Stefan Zweig's collected short stories. Whilst I thought his writing good (and some of it is very poetic), I just found the collection too many stories all at once and didn't really enjoy them.
Currently rereading "Biggles of the Camel Squadron" another Dean reprint and James Swallow's "Cast No Shadow" (about which I find I remember nothing). My serious reading is "Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past" by Richard Cohen which is, mainly, about historians.
