Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 25th, 2025 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.
But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.
One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.
My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.
Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.
What I’ve Reading Now
Nothing that requires a progress report right now.
What I Plan to Read Next
Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.
I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.
But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.
One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.
My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.
Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.
What I’ve Reading Now
Nothing that requires a progress report right now.
What I Plan to Read Next
Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.
