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Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 4th, 2020 07:24 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. Larina was not only Bukharin’s widow, but the adopted daughter of an old Bolshevik, Yury Larin, so she grew up knowing a who’s who of the old Bolsheviks. Naturally most of her anecdotes about them are personal rather than political, but in a way that makes it more sobering: it really drives home the extent to which the Bolsheviks all knew each other. Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials.
What I’m Reading Now
Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, a 1922 Newbery Honor winner which retells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, with shorter retellings of Greek myths sprinkled throughout. It’s just a straight-up retelling - no twist like “They’re all in spaaaaaace!” or whatever, just good old-fashioned ancient Greece. It’s been so long since I read a retelling of that kind that it’s actually kind of refreshing, just for variety's sake.
I’ve also begun to read Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is a… travelogue about modern memory of the Great War? I’m only one chapter in, so I offer this description rather tentatively: the first chapter is a lot more travelogue than it is anything else, but hopefully the memory stuff will rise to the surface later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have MANY books on my pile right now, and I need to read some of them, and instead I… well, I’ve been working on revisions, so I have at least been neglecting my books to some purpose, but still. The pile just keeps growing. I should at least try to knock out Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: it’s so short, and IIRC it was recommended to me as Dark Academia, which I love.
Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. Larina was not only Bukharin’s widow, but the adopted daughter of an old Bolshevik, Yury Larin, so she grew up knowing a who’s who of the old Bolsheviks. Naturally most of her anecdotes about them are personal rather than political, but in a way that makes it more sobering: it really drives home the extent to which the Bolsheviks all knew each other. Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials.
What I’m Reading Now
Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, a 1922 Newbery Honor winner which retells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, with shorter retellings of Greek myths sprinkled throughout. It’s just a straight-up retelling - no twist like “They’re all in spaaaaaace!” or whatever, just good old-fashioned ancient Greece. It’s been so long since I read a retelling of that kind that it’s actually kind of refreshing, just for variety's sake.
I’ve also begun to read Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is a… travelogue about modern memory of the Great War? I’m only one chapter in, so I offer this description rather tentatively: the first chapter is a lot more travelogue than it is anything else, but hopefully the memory stuff will rise to the surface later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have MANY books on my pile right now, and I need to read some of them, and instead I… well, I’ve been working on revisions, so I have at least been neglecting my books to some purpose, but still. The pile just keeps growing. I should at least try to knock out Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: it’s so short, and IIRC it was recommended to me as Dark Academia, which I love.
