![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wednesday
Jul. 4th, 2013 05:23 amNew kindle - or possible those harsh few kindle-less days - seem to have snapped me out of my 3 months long reading rut. Seriously, I'm incredibly happy. Kind of giddy, even. It's like a piece of my brain has been put back.
Recently finished:
I finished Anna Reid's Leningrad, about the WW2 siege. It's not the world's best organized book, and there was probably a bit of room for more of a blow-by-blow historical narrative, but that all completely pales next to the human story she weaves. It's absolutely, horrifyingly, riveting. There's a lot of diaries, memoirs, conversations, interviews, reports, recollections and so on available, and this vast tapestry of an entire city - a complicated, educated, cultured, terribly literary city - just being stripped completely of every basic human need, food and shelter and warmth, and how they coped and held on or didn't hold on. All those ways they managed to preserve humanity, and all the ways they lost it. The first hand accounts of what it looks like and feels like to starve to death, and in a few cases, the process of not quite starving to death and climbing back to life after that. I couldn't turn away.
Daniel Abraham's Tyrant's Law was last week, I just have nothing to say about it. It's very...competent.
Also, Margaret Macmillan's Paris, 1919, about the Versailles peace treaty. I thought it was a little too broad, if anything, with a lot about what was going on the world over and a bit less about the moment of the conference itself. (Not that it wasn't interesting, of course - I didn't know about D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume, or that there were 100k Chinese workers in the trenches of the Western front.) There was, of course, a great deal about the conference, just that it was all very focused on the big players and the big issues, whereas I found myself more interested in the weird stuff going on about the sidelines, all those small delegations with quixotic dreams. It just seems like that kind of information is ultimately more telling about the logic of that moment in time than understanding this or that long-irrelevant piece of specific political wrangling that led to this or that decision.
And a re-read of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I was inspired to go re-read because of watching the Big Bang Theory. Seriously. For some reason, some corner of my brain saw a connection, and I had it on a tentative re-read list for a while anyway. (My brain may be onto something, not sure.) Anyway, I still love it. I read it way back in the army, in translation, on some really lonely little base on the Egyptian border, and i've always wondered if I loved it so much just because it perfectly suited my mood and all that English rain and green hills were unbearably exotic just then.
But no, it's just brilliant, and i'm amazed it's so short. There's so much packed into the tone and the language. All that heartbreaking loneliness and disappointment, hiding behind the pomposity and clinging to a mask of what he calls dignity so hard its embarassing just to read about. These people that reader can see are acting like fools, but can't for the life of it see it themselves. Standing around in rooms and not noticing, or pretending very hard they're not noticing, that they're sad just now, or happy just now, or even falling in love just now.
Currently reading:
Frankenstein, I finally feel like i'm beginning to get a bit of a handle on it as a story, rather than as a historical artifact.
Around India in 80 Trains, by Monisha Rajesh. Not a terrible interesting travel book, about, well, what it says on the tin. I would like this books a lot more if she talked more about trains. It's like she thinks they're just the way to get to a place or something!
Recently finished:
I finished Anna Reid's Leningrad, about the WW2 siege. It's not the world's best organized book, and there was probably a bit of room for more of a blow-by-blow historical narrative, but that all completely pales next to the human story she weaves. It's absolutely, horrifyingly, riveting. There's a lot of diaries, memoirs, conversations, interviews, reports, recollections and so on available, and this vast tapestry of an entire city - a complicated, educated, cultured, terribly literary city - just being stripped completely of every basic human need, food and shelter and warmth, and how they coped and held on or didn't hold on. All those ways they managed to preserve humanity, and all the ways they lost it. The first hand accounts of what it looks like and feels like to starve to death, and in a few cases, the process of not quite starving to death and climbing back to life after that. I couldn't turn away.
Daniel Abraham's Tyrant's Law was last week, I just have nothing to say about it. It's very...competent.
Also, Margaret Macmillan's Paris, 1919, about the Versailles peace treaty. I thought it was a little too broad, if anything, with a lot about what was going on the world over and a bit less about the moment of the conference itself. (Not that it wasn't interesting, of course - I didn't know about D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume, or that there were 100k Chinese workers in the trenches of the Western front.) There was, of course, a great deal about the conference, just that it was all very focused on the big players and the big issues, whereas I found myself more interested in the weird stuff going on about the sidelines, all those small delegations with quixotic dreams. It just seems like that kind of information is ultimately more telling about the logic of that moment in time than understanding this or that long-irrelevant piece of specific political wrangling that led to this or that decision.
And a re-read of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I was inspired to go re-read because of watching the Big Bang Theory. Seriously. For some reason, some corner of my brain saw a connection, and I had it on a tentative re-read list for a while anyway. (My brain may be onto something, not sure.) Anyway, I still love it. I read it way back in the army, in translation, on some really lonely little base on the Egyptian border, and i've always wondered if I loved it so much just because it perfectly suited my mood and all that English rain and green hills were unbearably exotic just then.
But no, it's just brilliant, and i'm amazed it's so short. There's so much packed into the tone and the language. All that heartbreaking loneliness and disappointment, hiding behind the pomposity and clinging to a mask of what he calls dignity so hard its embarassing just to read about. These people that reader can see are acting like fools, but can't for the life of it see it themselves. Standing around in rooms and not noticing, or pretending very hard they're not noticing, that they're sad just now, or happy just now, or even falling in love just now.
Currently reading:
Frankenstein, I finally feel like i'm beginning to get a bit of a handle on it as a story, rather than as a historical artifact.
Around India in 80 Trains, by Monisha Rajesh. Not a terrible interesting travel book, about, well, what it says on the tin. I would like this books a lot more if she talked more about trains. It's like she thinks they're just the way to get to a place or something!
