Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 17th, 2021 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’ve meant to read Denis Mackail’s Greenery Street for the better part of a decade, and I finally got round to it this week and I LOVED it. In fact, I think I loved it more for having waited: I suspect the parts about settling down into adult life would not have resonated with me in my early twenties, even though that is, in fact, the same age as the characters themselves. I have always been a late bloomer…
Anyway, this is a charming, closely-observed book about an English middle-class couple settling down to their first year of married life in 1920s London. Loved all the details about daily life (planning to steal some of the circulating library stuff for one of my books!), loved the gentle humor, just love in general that mid-century British style of writing. Good stuff.
I also read William Maxwell’s The Heavenly Tenants, a short and restful children’s fantasy. When the Marvell family goes on a three-week trip, they don’t realize that the hired man is laid up and can’t look after the farm - but the signs of the Zodiac step in and look after it while they’re gone.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward and upward in Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman! This is a fantastic book if you want to learn about China in the early twentieth century: Chao came from a prominent family and knew many prominent Kuomintang members personally, and she keeps having to flee Nanking for Shanghai to escape adverse military developments.
Also, Chao just seems like SUCH a character. At the age of nineteen she headed a girl’s vocational school in a building reputed to be haunted by fox spirits, and she made it her business to take a nightly walk around the courtyards with a lantern to reassure all the students: no fox spirits tonight!
Continuing on in Max Hasting’s Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. One thing that continually strikes me in this book is how little any of the superpowers wanted to be there. The US believed that both the USSR and China were chomping at the bit to spread worldwide revolution, but in fact they were just as reluctant as the US to get involved in Vietnam. Like the US, they grudgingly committed more and more resources because they thought it would damage their global standing if they did not: they had to be seen defending revolution just as the US had to be seen defending freedom and democracy. (Leaving aside for the moment whether the US could really describe itself as defending democracy given that South Vietnam didn’t have democracy, but rather a merry-go-round of military coups.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I had such fun with Greenery Street that I’ve decided that time has come for more light mid-twentieth century British authors, so I’ve put an interlibrary loan on D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage.
I’ve meant to read Denis Mackail’s Greenery Street for the better part of a decade, and I finally got round to it this week and I LOVED it. In fact, I think I loved it more for having waited: I suspect the parts about settling down into adult life would not have resonated with me in my early twenties, even though that is, in fact, the same age as the characters themselves. I have always been a late bloomer…
Anyway, this is a charming, closely-observed book about an English middle-class couple settling down to their first year of married life in 1920s London. Loved all the details about daily life (planning to steal some of the circulating library stuff for one of my books!), loved the gentle humor, just love in general that mid-century British style of writing. Good stuff.
I also read William Maxwell’s The Heavenly Tenants, a short and restful children’s fantasy. When the Marvell family goes on a three-week trip, they don’t realize that the hired man is laid up and can’t look after the farm - but the signs of the Zodiac step in and look after it while they’re gone.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward and upward in Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman! This is a fantastic book if you want to learn about China in the early twentieth century: Chao came from a prominent family and knew many prominent Kuomintang members personally, and she keeps having to flee Nanking for Shanghai to escape adverse military developments.
Also, Chao just seems like SUCH a character. At the age of nineteen she headed a girl’s vocational school in a building reputed to be haunted by fox spirits, and she made it her business to take a nightly walk around the courtyards with a lantern to reassure all the students: no fox spirits tonight!
Continuing on in Max Hasting’s Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. One thing that continually strikes me in this book is how little any of the superpowers wanted to be there. The US believed that both the USSR and China were chomping at the bit to spread worldwide revolution, but in fact they were just as reluctant as the US to get involved in Vietnam. Like the US, they grudgingly committed more and more resources because they thought it would damage their global standing if they did not: they had to be seen defending revolution just as the US had to be seen defending freedom and democracy. (Leaving aside for the moment whether the US could really describe itself as defending democracy given that South Vietnam didn’t have democracy, but rather a merry-go-round of military coups.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I had such fun with Greenery Street that I’ve decided that time has come for more light mid-twentieth century British authors, so I’ve put an interlibrary loan on D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-17 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-17 07:44 pm (UTC)I'm also very fond of The Four Graces, which was written at the tail end of World War II and is just brimming with details about daily life in England in the time. And Celia's House is a retelling of Mansfield Park, an affectionate homage that nonetheless gives the heroine the chance to take a bit more control over her own fate than poor Fanny Price.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-18 06:26 pm (UTC)