Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 28th, 2021 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat 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
Date: 2021-07-28 05:36 pm (UTC)Oh, you totally should! It is a gloriously slashy enemies to lovers story. I read it in late 2019 after a writing drought (well, relatively so) of five years...and then I spent the pandemic doing research about the 18th century and writing almost 300K of fic for it, ha ha.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 06:20 pm (UTC)Yes, the other two are worth reading (especially the second one), but they sadly only contain one of the characters in the main m/m couple. : (
But if you want to read more Broster, I also recommend Mr Rowl, which is about Raoul, a Napoleonic officer on parole in Britain; it has crossdressing and other Heyer-esque hijinks, and two different British officers obviously pining for Raoul. The endgame is het, though, but likeable het! Also The Wounded Name, which has ridiculously drawn-out hurt-comfort with two French royalists. Waterloo happens off-stage while the two main characters share a bed in a cave and exchange anguished confessions (because really, you have to focus on the important stuff). That one's hard to get hold of, but a fannish friend of mine is working on a Gutenberg ebook.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 06:32 pm (UTC)I will have to see how I feel about Flight of the Heron before I commit to any other Broster books! But "sharing a bed in a cave exchanging anguished confessions while Waterloo happens offstage" seems like the right narrative priority.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 10:07 pm (UTC)Whoa.
[edit] I found it on Google Books; it was amazing. Thank you for the heads-up.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 07:20 pm (UTC)Oh, yeah.