Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 17th, 2016 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’m not sure I should count David L. Robb’s Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, as I got bored about seventy pages in, but in my defense, the book really only has enough information for a single magazine article: the Pentagon shapes Hollywood action movies by allowing or denying moviemakers access to military assets.
There, I’ve saved you from having to read the book. The rest of it is just piling up examples. You can pretty much take it as read that any Hollywood action movie that uses fighter jets, tanks, battleships, submarines, etc., probably danced a tango with the Pentagon in order to borrow those props from the military, because that’s so much cheaper than renting them.
I also finished Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Journey of the USS Jeannette, which is very good, although
Half the crew dies! The crew had to split up into separate boats after the Jeannette sank, and one half ended up lost in northern Siberia, and it wasn’t until spring that a member of the other, luckier half (which overwintered safely in Irkutsk) has the chance to go back and look for them, whereupon he finds their frozen bodies: so perfectly preserved in the ice that their cheeks were still rosy.
The ship’s doctor, Ambler, had the opportunity to go ahead with a forward party which was sent to get help (and eventually rescued, although they had no chance to communicate their urgent rescue mission till it was far too late), but he elected to stay with the sick and frostbitten crew, and ended up dying with them - dying last of all, with a gun on his lap as he waited hopefully for game, and blood around his mouth because in his last moments had been biting his own hand for comfort, because his own blood was the only warmth and sustenance within hundreds of miles.
I think I’m going to take a break from Sides after this. The only other of his books that the library has is about a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, which sounds a bit grim just from that description.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my Betsy-Tacy binge, I’ve reached Betsy in Spite of Herself, the tale of Betsy’s sophomore year of high school. I am torn between the desire to tear through these books as fast as possible, and the countervailing desire to read them at a measured and stately pace, the better to savor them with. They make perfect bedtime reading: interesting enough that I’m always excited to read more, but not so exciting that they interfere with sleeping.
I enjoyed Mrs. Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks so much last fall that I’ve started reading The Perpetual Curate, another work in her series The Chronicles of Carlingford (I hope it doesn’t matter too much that I’m reading them entirely out of order). I am a bit at sea with all the church politics in this one; in between this book and the TV series Grantchester, I’ve come to the conclusion that my understanding of the Church of England is deplorably sketchy. I have lumped together rectors and curates and vicars in my mind as “church people,” even though clearly they are vastly different types of church people (and curates, at least, always seem to suffer under excessively straitened salaries).
Also, in this week’s installment of “the more things change, the more they don’t stay the same at all”: one of the subplots in The Perpetual Curate concerns a bit of gossip going around Carlingford that the rector was seen walking! with a pretty child! (who is always described as a pretty child. I originally thought was about eight, although I think I underestimated her age slightly) and maybe is courting her! which is VERY SHOCKING!...
...because she’s the daughter of a lower-class tradesman and not at all suitable for a man of the church, even if he is a lowly curate. I guess if he were out walking (and maybe even meeting in the garden! Meeting in the garden, what degeneracy) with a twelve-year-old girl of an acceptable social background, that might be okay?
(The gossips are confused, and the curate is in fact in love with the age- and class-appropriate Lucy Wodehouse, whom alas he can never ask to marry him because of his miserable curate’s salary.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I have inched my way to the top of the holds list for Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, so hopefully that. Or possibly Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, which I borrowed from Caitlin? We shall see.
I’m also contemplating whether I might want to read some of Maud Hart Lovelace’s non Betsy-Tacy books - Early Candlelight was apparently quite popular - but perhaps I should wait till I finish the Betsy-Tacy series before I make a decision.
I’m not sure I should count David L. Robb’s Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, as I got bored about seventy pages in, but in my defense, the book really only has enough information for a single magazine article: the Pentagon shapes Hollywood action movies by allowing or denying moviemakers access to military assets.
There, I’ve saved you from having to read the book. The rest of it is just piling up examples. You can pretty much take it as read that any Hollywood action movie that uses fighter jets, tanks, battleships, submarines, etc., probably danced a tango with the Pentagon in order to borrow those props from the military, because that’s so much cheaper than renting them.
I also finished Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Journey of the USS Jeannette, which is very good, although
Half the crew dies! The crew had to split up into separate boats after the Jeannette sank, and one half ended up lost in northern Siberia, and it wasn’t until spring that a member of the other, luckier half (which overwintered safely in Irkutsk) has the chance to go back and look for them, whereupon he finds their frozen bodies: so perfectly preserved in the ice that their cheeks were still rosy.
The ship’s doctor, Ambler, had the opportunity to go ahead with a forward party which was sent to get help (and eventually rescued, although they had no chance to communicate their urgent rescue mission till it was far too late), but he elected to stay with the sick and frostbitten crew, and ended up dying with them - dying last of all, with a gun on his lap as he waited hopefully for game, and blood around his mouth because in his last moments had been biting his own hand for comfort, because his own blood was the only warmth and sustenance within hundreds of miles.
I think I’m going to take a break from Sides after this. The only other of his books that the library has is about a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, which sounds a bit grim just from that description.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my Betsy-Tacy binge, I’ve reached Betsy in Spite of Herself, the tale of Betsy’s sophomore year of high school. I am torn between the desire to tear through these books as fast as possible, and the countervailing desire to read them at a measured and stately pace, the better to savor them with. They make perfect bedtime reading: interesting enough that I’m always excited to read more, but not so exciting that they interfere with sleeping.
I enjoyed Mrs. Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks so much last fall that I’ve started reading The Perpetual Curate, another work in her series The Chronicles of Carlingford (I hope it doesn’t matter too much that I’m reading them entirely out of order). I am a bit at sea with all the church politics in this one; in between this book and the TV series Grantchester, I’ve come to the conclusion that my understanding of the Church of England is deplorably sketchy. I have lumped together rectors and curates and vicars in my mind as “church people,” even though clearly they are vastly different types of church people (and curates, at least, always seem to suffer under excessively straitened salaries).
Also, in this week’s installment of “the more things change, the more they don’t stay the same at all”: one of the subplots in The Perpetual Curate concerns a bit of gossip going around Carlingford that the rector was seen walking! with a pretty child! (who is always described as a pretty child. I originally thought was about eight, although I think I underestimated her age slightly) and maybe is courting her! which is VERY SHOCKING!...
...because she’s the daughter of a lower-class tradesman and not at all suitable for a man of the church, even if he is a lowly curate. I guess if he were out walking (and maybe even meeting in the garden! Meeting in the garden, what degeneracy) with a twelve-year-old girl of an acceptable social background, that might be okay?
(The gossips are confused, and the curate is in fact in love with the age- and class-appropriate Lucy Wodehouse, whom alas he can never ask to marry him because of his miserable curate’s salary.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I have inched my way to the top of the holds list for Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, so hopefully that. Or possibly Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, which I borrowed from Caitlin? We shall see.
I’m also contemplating whether I might want to read some of Maud Hart Lovelace’s non Betsy-Tacy books - Early Candlelight was apparently quite popular - but perhaps I should wait till I finish the Betsy-Tacy series before I make a decision.
