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osprey_archer) wrote2021-07-28 07:39 am
osprey_archer) wrote2021-07-28 07:39 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
It’s all World War I all the time up in here. This week I finished Hew Strachan’s The First World War, which is an overview of the war a bit too zoomed out for what I wanted from it; I’m hoping to get a slightly closer look with Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918.
I also read two war memoirs, which neatly encapsulate those two kinds of war writing. The first, showcasing the noble and heroic side of war, is E. W. Hornung’s Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, which contains some truly superb chapters about setting up a library just behind the front lines, with notes about what the troops liked to read, YES I may be considering incorporating this into a future novel. There’s a particularly fun bit about a soldier who realizes that Hornung himself is a writer, and borrows a Raffles book from the library, which he “returned… without a word to temper his forgiving smile.”
(There’s also a tragic section about visiting the grave of a young friend, which became yet more tragic when I read Hornung’s Wikipedia entry and realized that this was the grave of Hornung’s own son.)
For the backwash, we have… well, The Backwash of War by Ellen La Motte. This book was written by an American nurse serving in a French hospital and it’s so bitter that it shocked me as I read it in the year of our Lord 2021. It was banned in England and France, and in America too once America entered the war, and while I am not in favor of banning books, I can see why the war authorities recoiled. It’s not good for morale to think that if your boy is injured, he might be cared for by a hospital nurse with nothing but disdain for the patients (uncouth grotesque poilus clutching photographs of their stupid ugly wives), who seems to subscribe to the philosophy that we might as well just let the grievously wounded die already.
What I’m Reading Now
Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That. I haven’t gotten to the war part yet. Graves is still at boarding school, where he has just confessed to the headmaster that yes, he IS in love with one of his schoolmates, and the headmaster is so bamboozled by this suicidal frankness that he decides the connection must be essentially moral after all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Lyn MacDonald’s 1915: The Death of Innocence is waiting for me at the library, and I’ve got her book The Roses of No Man’s Land, about the English nurses of World War I, coming on interlibrary loan.
After that, perhaps???? I should take a break from World War I for a bit??? Maybe now is the time to get D. K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron.
War, superb as it is, is not necessarily a filtering process, by which men and nations may be purified. Well, there are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war. I must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash. They are both true.
It’s all World War I all the time up in here. This week I finished Hew Strachan’s The First World War, which is an overview of the war a bit too zoomed out for what I wanted from it; I’m hoping to get a slightly closer look with Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918.
I also read two war memoirs, which neatly encapsulate those two kinds of war writing. The first, showcasing the noble and heroic side of war, is E. W. Hornung’s Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, which contains some truly superb chapters about setting up a library just behind the front lines, with notes about what the troops liked to read, YES I may be considering incorporating this into a future novel. There’s a particularly fun bit about a soldier who realizes that Hornung himself is a writer, and borrows a Raffles book from the library, which he “returned… without a word to temper his forgiving smile.”
(There’s also a tragic section about visiting the grave of a young friend, which became yet more tragic when I read Hornung’s Wikipedia entry and realized that this was the grave of Hornung’s own son.)
For the backwash, we have… well, The Backwash of War by Ellen La Motte. This book was written by an American nurse serving in a French hospital and it’s so bitter that it shocked me as I read it in the year of our Lord 2021. It was banned in England and France, and in America too once America entered the war, and while I am not in favor of banning books, I can see why the war authorities recoiled. It’s not good for morale to think that if your boy is injured, he might be cared for by a hospital nurse with nothing but disdain for the patients (uncouth grotesque poilus clutching photographs of their stupid ugly wives), who seems to subscribe to the philosophy that we might as well just let the grievously wounded die already.
What I’m Reading Now
Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That. I haven’t gotten to the war part yet. Graves is still at boarding school, where he has just confessed to the headmaster that yes, he IS in love with one of his schoolmates, and the headmaster is so bamboozled by this suicidal frankness that he decides the connection must be essentially moral after all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Lyn MacDonald’s 1915: The Death of Innocence is waiting for me at the library, and I’ve got her book The Roses of No Man’s Land, about the English nurses of World War I, coming on interlibrary loan.
After that, perhaps???? I should take a break from World War I for a bit??? Maybe now is the time to get D. K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron.
no subject
no subject
Oh, yeah.