Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, a lively and informative book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson which really needed another editing pass. There were at least three instances where Wineapple quoted someone, and then two pages later repeats the exact same quote.

I also continued on in the Newbery project with Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8, which I think I’ve read before (the scene where Ramona cracks a raw egg on her head seems so familiar!), but I couldn’t swear to it. It’s nice to revisit Beverly Cleary, anyway. She’s so clear-eyed and funny about the thought processes of children.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached November 1915 in Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, and discovered that I had Robert of David and Robert lose his leg in the very earliest battle that’s a likely fit for his backstory: the Battle of Loos, where the British sent in two green regiments of their New Army, which promptly got cut to pieces. This is also the first battle where the British used poison gas against the Germans (!!!), a factoid which probably won’t fit in David and Robert but might get shoved into my next World War I book.

I’m also reading Pat Beauchamp Washington’s memoir Fanny Goes to War, who worked in World War I hospitals in Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. This book was published right after the war and can only be described as “jolly”: describing a zeppelin bombing on her hospital, for instance, Washington enthuses, “the elusive Zepp. could be heard buzzing like some gigantic angry bee. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” The bombing breaks all the windows in the hospital, and the staff spends the next five hours cleaning glass off the beds of the typhoid patients.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have MANY World War I books on the shelves, plus Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven waiting for me at the library.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

It sounds like there's quite a scale between the nurse whose book you talked about last (?) week, and Pat Beauchamp Washington.

Also, aww, Ramona Quimby! The egg scene has stayed with me for years. (Is this the one where there's a girl in her class who has the loveliest bounciest blonde curls, and she's obsessed with wanting to pull one? Because that was also a mood for kid!me.)

[osprey_archer]

In The First World War Hew Strachan talks briefly about how there were two types of war writing (and thus two competing interpretations of the war): the war as heroic endeavor and jolly lark vs. the war as a grinding machinery of death. The latter tends to be how we remember the war now, but it only became dominant at the end of the 1920s; during and just after the war heroic endeavor/jolly lark dominated.

The bouncy curl girl is in one of the earlier books, perhaps when Ramona is in kindergarten? I've never been able to remember which Ramona book is which, they all blend together in one vast Ramona omnibus in my mind.

[sovay]

The latter tends to be how we remember the war now, but it only became dominant at the end of the 1920s; during and just after the war heroic endeavor/jolly lark dominated.

I am going to have to write about Gristwood because he was publishing in 1927 and H. G. Wells, in his introduction written at the time, talks about how the jolly hockey sticks myth of the war is assuming the proportions of consensus reality and Gristwood is a desperately necessary corrective, please read him now, do we all have collective amnesia or denial, thanks.

[passingbuzzards]

Please pardon the lurker interjection, but I just read Gristwood’s The Somme this past weekend and have been thinking so much about this exact thing! Historians [especially revisionist historians, Gary Sheffield in particular comes to mind, being currently partway through Forgotten Victory] talk so much about the historiography and the notion of the bleak literary narrative coming about later on, but Gristwood’s thinly-veiled autobiographical recollection is so cuttingly honest that it’s simply impossible to imagine that this wasn’t how a majority of actual enlisted men viewed the war coming out. (One feels this was probably a matter of all that censorship followed by who had access to truly large-scale publishing first, as with the construction of the mythology of the London Blitz . . .) All those viciously bitter segments in Gristwood to the effect of “but doubtless Everett’s [awful, entirely unlike the propaganda] experience was exceptional and unfortunate,” ahhh!

(osprey_archer Hello! I found my way here through a post by skygiants, which is also how I wound up purchasing and reading most of your published works [which I adored, obviously]. Have been enjoying your Wednesday reading memes a lot, so much good stuff to read in here <3)

[sovay]

Gristwood’s thinly-veiled autobiographical recollection is so cuttingly honest that it’s simply impossible to imagine that this wasn’t how a majority of actual enlisted men viewed the war coming out.

Germane to this discussion: Sapper Martin: The Secret Great War Diary of Jack Martin (ed. Richard van Emden, 2009). It's not as unremittingly bleak as Gristwood, and without the trench-kept originals it is impossible to know whether or to what degree Martin edited his diaries in the process of transcribing them, but even so they are one of the very few uncensored sources direct from the Western Front—there's material in there that mightn't have passed muster in a memoir, never mind a letter home—and as such fascinating. I wrote a little about the book some years ago. Some of it is banal, some of it is bitter, some of it is haunting.

"People who live under modern conditions of civilisation can scarcely comprehend the meaning of absolute silence. And the silence of the trenches among the mountains is almost palpable . . . Yet you know well enough that away in front men are ceaselessly watching ready to give the alarm at the first sign of animation on the enemy's lines; and there are rifles and machine guns and trench mortars and field guns and howitzers of all kinds and sizes ready to break forth into a clamorous roaring and screeching at any mment. And there may be added the drone of aeroplanes and rushing of wagons and motor lorries and the rattle and banging of railway trains and many other incidental noises.

"You know that all this noise is possible and the Silence makes you shudder." (9 January 1918)

[osprey_archer]

Hello, and welcome! I'm glad that you've been enjoying my books and my Wednesday reading memes.

[regshoe]

I remember the Ramona Quimby books, although not much of the detail—that does sound fun.

Ooh, and I was thinking of trying Fire From Heaven at some point—curious to see what you make of it!

[osprey_archer]

I'm curious to see what I make of Fire from Heaven too. A Mary Renault book is always an Experience.