Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Peter Carlson’s Big Bill Haywood, which really brought home to me - not that I hadn’t noticed this before; but brought home to yet again - how destructive and useless World War I was. Even the soldiers at the time could see it was pointless: they had a whole song about it, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Millions of people dead for no better reason than inertia.

This is really just a side point in the book, though, which naturally focuses on the way that World War I destroyed Haywood and the radical labor union he led, the IWW. Haywood and the IWW’s other leaders were arrested for violating wartime sedition laws (which 1) were bad laws in the first place, and 2) they hadn’t even violated), and they ended up cycling in and out of court and prison for the next five years, until Haywood - who was ill and getting on in years, and had been railroaded through an unjust murder trial once before in his life - split for the Soviet Union, where he lived out the last of his days in loneliness.

I also finished the tenth and final Betsy-Tacy book. Oh no! Whatever shall I read for my bedtime story now????

What I’m Reading Now

Actually I solved the whole bedside story thing pretty quickly: my new bedtime book will be War and Peace! The book is very long, but Tolstoy thoughtfully broke it into very short chapters, which is ideal for reading just before bed. And also, I think having a set time to read a little chunk of it each day will make it much easier for me to read. I’m thinking I’ll probably set aside a day each week for a War and Peace post.

I’m still reading the Emily Dickinson book. I’ve also begun Black Dove, White Raven again, and I realize this complaint is petty, but I just have to get it off my chest: the framing device for this story is terrible. Emilia wants the emperor of Ethiopia to grant Teo a passport so she can get Teo out of prison (this is all the first page, I’m not spoiling anything), so she... sends him pages upon pages of their school essays?

The emperor’s a busy man! There’s no way he’s going to have time to read that! Probably receiving this mountain of irrelevant material is just going to make him cranky and therefore less likely to grant their request!

I realize the idea of framing the story with a letter of appeal to the emperor is to give some urgency to the story right from the beginning, but I think it would have worked better to start with a letter of appeal and then segue into Em trying to distract herself from her dire straits by organizing a memory book about her and Teo’s childhood, or something like that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided to make April the month of Books I Have Previously Abandoned - War and Peace is among their number - which means not just Black Dove, White Raven but also Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, and… maybe even Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley? I have that on my Kindle so it would have to wait till I’m done with Anne.

Oh, and Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost. I have always felt somewhat guilty that I didn’t read that before writing my New Girl paper.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'll be interested in your thoughts on a bunch of those previously abandoned novels.

What's Emilia's logic in sending all the essays?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The idea is that he'll get to know them better (and also get to know how much they love Ethiopia; they've been living there for years, and Teo's father was Ethiopian) and then maybe he'll be more likely to grant his request.

She's a scared fifteen-year-old, so I guess it's the kind of thing she might genuinely think is a good idea. But mostly it seems like an awkwardly obvious excuse for a novel made of found documents - by trying to offer an explanation, it actually draws more attention to the fact that it's artificially constructed, to the extent that it becomes distracting.

I've had this problem occasionally with other documentary novels.

[ladyherenya]

I hadn't considered the framing device in Black Dove, White Raven - I mostly forgot about it as I read the book. But you're right, there definitely could have been far more plausible reasons for those documents to be grouped together.

Every so often I see Possession in second hand shops and wonder if I should read it.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've seen references to Possession over the years, so I want to read it, but I also got stuck not too far into the book the first time I tried. I had the impression - I didn't get far enough to tell if that impression was correct - that the story was going in an extramarital affair direction, which bothered me enough to distract me from the literary mystery, which should have been right up my alley.

[ladyherenya]

Ah. An extramarital affair would bother me, too.