Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. Larina was not only Bukharin’s widow, but the adopted daughter of an old Bolshevik, Yury Larin, so she grew up knowing a who’s who of the old Bolsheviks. Naturally most of her anecdotes about them are personal rather than political, but in a way that makes it more sobering: it really drives home the extent to which the Bolsheviks all knew each other. Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials.

What I’m Reading Now

Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, a 1922 Newbery Honor winner which retells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, with shorter retellings of Greek myths sprinkled throughout. It’s just a straight-up retelling - no twist like “They’re all in spaaaaaace!” or whatever, just good old-fashioned ancient Greece. It’s been so long since I read a retelling of that kind that it’s actually kind of refreshing, just for variety's sake.

I’ve also begun to read Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is a… travelogue about modern memory of the Great War? I’m only one chapter in, so I offer this description rather tentatively: the first chapter is a lot more travelogue than it is anything else, but hopefully the memory stuff will rise to the surface later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have MANY books on my pile right now, and I need to read some of them, and instead I… well, I’ve been working on revisions, so I have at least been neglecting my books to some purpose, but still. The pile just keeps growing. I should at least try to knock out Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: it’s so short, and IIRC it was recommended to me as Dark Academia, which I love.

Comments

[oracne]

The Rubin sounds intriguing.

[osprey_archer]

We'll see how it develops. The first chapter was more travelogue than I wanted - I like travelogue in travel books, but when I'm reading about the memory of the Great War then I want a focus on that - but now that the stage is set he may delve more deeply into the memory side of things.

[asakiyume]

Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials. D:

[landofnowhere]

Yeah, I was thinking, that sounds like the worst.

[osprey_archer]

Right? It makes Stalin's rise to power sound even worse to live though, and it already sounded pretty awful.

[osprey_archer]

Doesn't that sound awful? That sounds like the actual worst.

Of course it's more complicated than that - there are some things about Bolshevik beliefs that made his work way easier, like the enormous importance they placed on party unity (dissent is bad!). But still, part of it was just Stalin weaponizing personal antagonisms to tear the group apart.

[kore]

Hunh, I wonder if that last book is anything like The Great War and Modern Memory, which came out quite a while ago now.

[osprey_archer]

Possibly he will name-check that book? We will see.

[troisoiseaux]

Ooh, let me know what you think about Ghost Wall! I wouldn't necessarily have classified it as Dark Academia, but... it kind of is??

[osprey_archer]

I think I got the Dark Academia vibe from your review, so this is clearly a description I came up with at two removes. We'll see how it fits with the actual book!

[troisoiseaux]

I mean, it definitely does have shades of Dark Academia, but also more, like, Dark Society As A Whole, In The Microcosm Of One Family's Participation In The World's Worst Field Trip. That's not as catchy, though.

[ancientreader]

The Missing of the Somme, by Geoff Dyer. https://www.thedailybeast.com/geoff-dyers-the-missing-of-the-somme-reconsidered It's a mixed bag, as that essay makes clear, but, I dunno, Dyer's unclarity and bitterness seemed to suit his matter, so. Sorry not sorry about your TBR pile.

[osprey_archer]

It looks like my library doesn't have it, but I'll keep my eye out for it in the future!