Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I already posted about The Cartographer’s Daughter, and nothing else this week. It’s been a busy week!

What I’m Reading Now

I’m actually working on two NetGalley books: Mary McAuliffe’s When Paris Sizzled (about Paris post World War I) and Daniel Blum’s Sleep Wise. I’m enjoying When Paris Sizzles, although I think it would benefit if McAuliffe had picked a slightly smaller cast of characters instead of throwing in everyone who was anyone.

Sleep Wise is on hold for the moment because I am trying for once in my life to actually follow the advice in a self-help book, and therefore keeping a sleep log.

What I Plan to Read Next

My eyes were bigger than my stomach over at NetGalley: I have The Story People, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (which is actually about post-Revolutionary War America, although you could be forgiven for thinking it’s yet another self-help book), and Winter with God, which is a devotional for when life sucks, which seems like the kind of devotional I might like, even though I’m not a Christian. Although we’ll see.

Then I went back and requested Krystyna Mihulka’s memoir Krysia about her childhood after being deported to a Soviet communal farm during World War II. I may have a NetGaley problem.

I also plan to read All Quiet on the Western Front sometime this month for my reading challenge. I have tomorrow off; perhaps I should devote it to this cause.

Book Review: When Paris Sizzled

I finished reading Mary McAuliffe's When Paris Sizzled, which is about life in the art world of Paris between the Armistice and the Wall Street Crash, and which I enjoyed very much; I would recommend it to anyone with a prior interest in the time and place.

But I might not recommend it to someone who is just dipping their toe into these waters for the first time, because McAuliffe throws so many different names and relationships at the reader that I think it would be very difficult to keep up if you don't already have a working knowledge of at least some of their stories. I already knew quite a bit about some of the cast of characters - the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Jean Renoir (the famous painter's son and a famous film director in his own right, and also one of the main characters in the charming 2012 French film Renoir), which left a lot of space free to sort out all the others - but I still don't think I got a good grasp on who all the music composers were, for instance.

It's all interesting, mind, I'd be hard pressed to point to any particular strand and say "This. This could have been left out and nothing of value would be lost." The stuff about the rivalry between Citroen and Renault cars, say, seems in some ways out of place with the rest of the book -and yet cars are so central to modernity that they do fit, as well.

Or perhaps the sections about Marie Curie? But those are so small, and Marie Curie is one of the figures that a lot of readers will already have some familiarity with anyway...

So the breadth probably makes this book a bad introduction to the time period: there's simply too much to take in at once. But if you already know something about the era, enough to make your way through the sea of names, it's a fascinating and evocative look at an era.

The strict chronological ordering contributes to the confusion - each chapter consists of little snippets about what our many main characters were doing during that time - but it also gives the book a sense of atmosphere. Because it's all scrambled together like that, you can really feel what a frenetic and busy time this was, culturally speaking, with so many people making so much art and trying to stretch art in so many different directions.

There's not a lot of depth here, but if you have enough prior knowledge to orient yourself, the breadth is breath-taking.