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Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 4th, 2021 07:36 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, a lively and informative book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson which really needed another editing pass. There were at least three instances where Wineapple quoted someone, and then two pages later repeats the exact same quote.
I also continued on in the Newbery project with Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8, which I think I’ve read before (the scene where Ramona cracks a raw egg on her head seems so familiar!), but I couldn’t swear to it. It’s nice to revisit Beverly Cleary, anyway. She’s so clear-eyed and funny about the thought processes of children.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve reached November 1915 in Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, and discovered that I had Robert of David and Robert lose his leg in the very earliest battle that’s a likely fit for his backstory: the Battle of Loos, where the British sent in two green regiments of their New Army, which promptly got cut to pieces. This is also the first battle where the British used poison gas against the Germans (!!!), a factoid which probably won’t fit in David and Robert but might get shoved into my next World War I book.
I’m also reading Pat Beauchamp Washington’s memoir Fanny Goes to War, who worked in World War I hospitals in Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. This book was published right after the war and can only be described as “jolly”: describing a zeppelin bombing on her hospital, for instance, Washington enthuses, “the elusive Zepp. could be heard buzzing like some gigantic angry bee. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” The bombing breaks all the windows in the hospital, and the staff spends the next five hours cleaning glass off the beds of the typhoid patients.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have MANY World War I books on the shelves, plus Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven waiting for me at the library.
Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, a lively and informative book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson which really needed another editing pass. There were at least three instances where Wineapple quoted someone, and then two pages later repeats the exact same quote.
I also continued on in the Newbery project with Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8, which I think I’ve read before (the scene where Ramona cracks a raw egg on her head seems so familiar!), but I couldn’t swear to it. It’s nice to revisit Beverly Cleary, anyway. She’s so clear-eyed and funny about the thought processes of children.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve reached November 1915 in Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, and discovered that I had Robert of David and Robert lose his leg in the very earliest battle that’s a likely fit for his backstory: the Battle of Loos, where the British sent in two green regiments of their New Army, which promptly got cut to pieces. This is also the first battle where the British used poison gas against the Germans (!!!), a factoid which probably won’t fit in David and Robert but might get shoved into my next World War I book.
I’m also reading Pat Beauchamp Washington’s memoir Fanny Goes to War, who worked in World War I hospitals in Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. This book was published right after the war and can only be described as “jolly”: describing a zeppelin bombing on her hospital, for instance, Washington enthuses, “the elusive Zepp. could be heard buzzing like some gigantic angry bee. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” The bombing breaks all the windows in the hospital, and the staff spends the next five hours cleaning glass off the beds of the typhoid patients.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have MANY World War I books on the shelves, plus Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven waiting for me at the library.
