Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 18th, 2021 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which I really ought to have read earlier on while I was writing David and Robert (now tentatively rechristening The Larks Still Bravely Singing), but here we are! It’s probably just as well I didn’t have the temptation to insert David into the Oxford literary scene of 1920.
According to the introduction (written by Paul Fussell), this book so outraged Siegfried Sassoon that he annotated it with five thousand words of corrections. I’d love to know if Sassoon objected mostly to the things that Graves wrote about him (there’s a rather defensive chapter where Graves explains why he did everything in his power to ensure Sassoon’s “Finished with the War” declaration had no impact at all, despite agreeing with Sassoon’s sentiments) or to Graves’ approach more generally, but sadly Fussell doesn’t share.
What I’m Reading Now
Still creeping forward in Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918. The tsar has now abdicated and all the other countries are a bit worried that their governments might be next if they can’t win the war before their citizens’ morale goes ker-plat (and we haven’t even gotten to the Bolshevik revolution yet!), so they yearn to finish the war with a single decisive battle… hence the never-ending sequence of fruitless offensives. They were all meant to be decisive war-ending battles.
Except when the Germans attacked Verdun, apparently, that really was just meant to be a battle of attrition, which may account for the baffling fact that the Germans only attacked one side of the river, so the French hung out on the other bank and shot at them. My God, Falkenhayn, it’s like you don’t even want to win this war.
What I Plan to Read Next
I need to take a break from World War I, in fact perhaps from all wars, and read something light and fluffy. Will the library ever get a paper copy of Sarah Rees Brennan’s latest Fence novel? I’m PINING here.
Actually, this would be a good time to read the first book in the new American Girls series. (They’ve made a 1980s girl, Courtney Moore.) I suspect this will end in yet another rant about American Girl’s tragic lapse in standards, but sometimes you just gotta fall on that sword.
Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which I really ought to have read earlier on while I was writing David and Robert (now tentatively rechristening The Larks Still Bravely Singing), but here we are! It’s probably just as well I didn’t have the temptation to insert David into the Oxford literary scene of 1920.
According to the introduction (written by Paul Fussell), this book so outraged Siegfried Sassoon that he annotated it with five thousand words of corrections. I’d love to know if Sassoon objected mostly to the things that Graves wrote about him (there’s a rather defensive chapter where Graves explains why he did everything in his power to ensure Sassoon’s “Finished with the War” declaration had no impact at all, despite agreeing with Sassoon’s sentiments) or to Graves’ approach more generally, but sadly Fussell doesn’t share.
What I’m Reading Now
Still creeping forward in Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918. The tsar has now abdicated and all the other countries are a bit worried that their governments might be next if they can’t win the war before their citizens’ morale goes ker-plat (and we haven’t even gotten to the Bolshevik revolution yet!), so they yearn to finish the war with a single decisive battle… hence the never-ending sequence of fruitless offensives. They were all meant to be decisive war-ending battles.
Except when the Germans attacked Verdun, apparently, that really was just meant to be a battle of attrition, which may account for the baffling fact that the Germans only attacked one side of the river, so the French hung out on the other bank and shot at them. My God, Falkenhayn, it’s like you don’t even want to win this war.
What I Plan to Read Next
I need to take a break from World War I, in fact perhaps from all wars, and read something light and fluffy. Will the library ever get a paper copy of Sarah Rees Brennan’s latest Fence novel? I’m PINING here.
Actually, this would be a good time to read the first book in the new American Girls series. (They’ve made a 1980s girl, Courtney Moore.) I suspect this will end in yet another rant about American Girl’s tragic lapse in standards, but sometimes you just gotta fall on that sword.
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Date: 2021-08-18 02:34 pm (UTC)Also YES, "If you'd sent me money I wouldn't have had to write that memoir" is a very friendship ending sort of letter! I bet it made Sassoon regret all his past generosity: here he's been forking over all this money to that spendthrift Graves, and the ONE TIME he doesn't cut a check, Graves writes mean things about his mother.
Also, even after Sassoon made Graves take out one of Sassoon's unpublished poems, Graves left the first line in: "I'd timed my death in action to the minute...", with the comment that this was the most horrifying of Sassoon's war poems. I can only assume he was hoping that readers would inundate Sassoon with letters begging to read the rest of the poem. His final revenge!