Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 10th, 2021 08:09 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Norma Fox Mazer’s After the Rain, a 1988 Newbery Honor book about a girl whose grandfather is dying a long, slow, painful death of mesothelioma. It actually has lots of interesting details about daily life in the eighties (and some hair-raising details about medical ethics in the eighties… the doctors tell Rachel’s family that Grandpa Izzy is dying, but they don’t even tell Izzy that he has mesothelioma!), but, well, at the end of the day it IS a book about someone dying of mesothelioma.
What I’m Reading Now
“An extraordinary aspect of the decision making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom, if ever, allowed to intrude upon it,” Max Hastings comments drily in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. I have reached the mid-sixties and the Johnson administration, three-quarters aware that this is a terrible idea but one-quarter unwilling to believe it because it’s an unacceptable reproach to their sense of national power and prestige, have just committed themselves to a massive ongoing ground war in Vietnam.
Instead of the traditional hoopla (parades, brass bands, etc), the administration shipped the troops off as quietly as possible, apparently in the hope that the American people would fail to notice there was a war on. Unfortunately for Johnson, the American people DID notice, and antiwar protests sprung up concurrently with the first major troop deployments.
I’ve also begun Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which is actually a collaboration between Chao and her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, a linguist who translated Buwei’s original Chinese text into English. He begins the book with a forward where he muses about the growth of Chinese literature in the vernacular… except that after about a page, Buwei interrupts, the two go back and forth, and then she triumphantly takes over the forward and finishes it herself. She also interpolates footnotes in the actual text when she thinks her husband’s translation is too hifalutin. (My favorite is the one where he introduces a somewhat tortured metaphor and her footnote is just “?”.) I love them.
What I Plan to Read Next
I need to finish some of the many things I’ve started! Vietnam is very long (I’m only about a third of the way through), so that's going to take a while; but if I really put my mind to it perhaps I could FINALLY knock out Fire from Heaven... You were right,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kore, I should have started with The Persian Boy. But now by God I’m committed.
Norma Fox Mazer’s After the Rain, a 1988 Newbery Honor book about a girl whose grandfather is dying a long, slow, painful death of mesothelioma. It actually has lots of interesting details about daily life in the eighties (and some hair-raising details about medical ethics in the eighties… the doctors tell Rachel’s family that Grandpa Izzy is dying, but they don’t even tell Izzy that he has mesothelioma!), but, well, at the end of the day it IS a book about someone dying of mesothelioma.
What I’m Reading Now
“An extraordinary aspect of the decision making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom, if ever, allowed to intrude upon it,” Max Hastings comments drily in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. I have reached the mid-sixties and the Johnson administration, three-quarters aware that this is a terrible idea but one-quarter unwilling to believe it because it’s an unacceptable reproach to their sense of national power and prestige, have just committed themselves to a massive ongoing ground war in Vietnam.
Instead of the traditional hoopla (parades, brass bands, etc), the administration shipped the troops off as quietly as possible, apparently in the hope that the American people would fail to notice there was a war on. Unfortunately for Johnson, the American people DID notice, and antiwar protests sprung up concurrently with the first major troop deployments.
I’ve also begun Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which is actually a collaboration between Chao and her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, a linguist who translated Buwei’s original Chinese text into English. He begins the book with a forward where he muses about the growth of Chinese literature in the vernacular… except that after about a page, Buwei interrupts, the two go back and forth, and then she triumphantly takes over the forward and finishes it herself. She also interpolates footnotes in the actual text when she thinks her husband’s translation is too hifalutin. (My favorite is the one where he introduces a somewhat tortured metaphor and her footnote is just “?”.) I love them.
What I Plan to Read Next
I need to finish some of the many things I’ve started! Vietnam is very long (I’m only about a third of the way through), so that's going to take a while; but if I really put my mind to it perhaps I could FINALLY knock out Fire from Heaven... You were right,
kore, I should have started with The Persian Boy. But now by God I’m committed.
