Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I've Just Finished Reading

Brian R. Little's Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-being. I suspect this book is better if you go into it without a lot of background in personality studies (is that a phrase? whatever), because I had seen a lot of this material before. However, Little's presentation is fun and occasionally funny, so it was a pleasant review.

I also read Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Velvet Room, which is delightful. The story takes place during the Great Depression - it actually reminded me irresistibly of Doris Gates' Blue Willow, which is also about the bookish, imaginative daughter of a family who lost their home and have been itinerant farm laborers ever since. (I also highly recommend Blue Willow.) It's a perfectly charming book (and the titular Velvet Room does not disappoint when our heroine comes across it); it goes off a bit at the end, but I feel that way about many of Snyder's books, and it doesn't detract from the enjoyability of the book as a whole.

What I'm Reading Now

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (volume one), because I am a glutton for punishment, apparently. He's marvelously sarcastic, probably because if you can't mock, then you'll never stop crying about some of these things.

A couple of quotes: "These limiters were pursued for several years. In all branches of the economy they brandished their formulas and calculations and refused to understand that bridges and lathes could respond to the enthusiasm of the personnel."

It reminds me of what we were talking about last week, asakiyume, the Maoist farming manuals that recommended things like using glass for fertilizer - as if you could make things work the way you want them to just by wanting it enough. Wishful thinking elevated to philosophical system, and setting out tentacles from philosophy into agriculture, engineering, psychology, everything else on the way.

Or this one, about victim-blaming, Stalin-style: "when our soldiers were sentenced to only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner (action injurious to Soviet military might), this was humanitarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist code, they should all have been shot on their return home."

As if they got themselves taken prisoner on purpose, out of a vindictive desire to hurt the Soviet state. Because the world bends according to human will, right - so anyone who gets taken prisoner does so willfully, or at very least did not throw their whole will behind supporting the USSR, because that would presumably have shaped reality to give them a glorious death in battle.

Or, speaking of the section of the legal code referring to espionage: "This section was interpreted so broadly that if one were to count up all those sentenced under it one might conclude that during Stalin's time our people supported life not by agriculture or industry, but only by espionage on behalf of foreigners, and by living on subsidies from foreign intelligence services."

What I Plan to Read Next

Probably Solzhenitysn for the foreseeable future. I have a list of gulag memoirs I mean to get next time I go to the university library, but I'm going to try to pace myself on those.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I loved The Velvet Room but don't recall much about it, other than the room itself. I should re-read.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The room itself is pretty awesome. I want to visit it.