WotD: scabies

1. die Krätze
2. het schurft
3. la sarna
4. la sarna
5. la gale
6. y crafu
7. galar an tochais
8. świerzb
9. 옴, 개선 (疥癬)
10. 疥瘡 jièchuāng

Notes: Don't worry, I'm not about to run to the drugstore for some Lindane. I was only just reading a Spanish novel where I came across the word sarna. Surprised to find an ailment with such a technical name in English going under such radically different form, I decided to look at other languages and, lo, only one overlap in the bunch!

Evitando los detectives

So when it comes to my recreational reading, the question I've been asking myself recently is, "How many novels will I read to avoid picking up Los detectives salvajes?" So far, at least three. After I finished the Vanderhaeghe, I went back to my Unread shelf and settled on a shorter Faulkner novel, The Unvanquished. Still took a week and a half of reading it in ten-minute snatches on the shuttle to finish the damn thing. During that pass, I selected a few other possibles, among them Somerset Maugham's The razor's edge; I've just now made it to the end of Part One.

It's a shame for a lot of reasons that our trip to Spain didn't come off this year, and one of the most minor of them is that it would've provided me a deadline for making progress on Bolaño's novel. On the one hand, I'd've been zealously working on building up my Spanish, a task that reading an advanced text in the language would naturally complement. On the other, I'd've had a definite date for having to face the woman who gave me the book, la madre de mi cuñada, and that's not a meeting I'd like to walk into empty-handed, as it were.

The perfectionist in me makes me unreasonably intimidated by new beginnings, so I decided I had to do something to subvert it. Tonight, after a cool day of mostly cloudy skies, the sun finally started to break through shortly before setting. So after dinner I sat down in the comfy chair amid the golden light of dusk, brought out my copy, and read through a couple of excerpts. (Fortunately, the episodic nature of middle section is very conducive to this.) At least that way, when I finally do tackle it, I won't be reading all 600 of its pages for the very first time--not to mention the fact that it's very encouraging to have a dictionary to hand and crack it open fewer times than the number of pages.