![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 6th, 2020 09:04 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
DID YOU KNOW that right after World War II, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa (an acclaimed war photographer) traveled around the USSR like some kind of reverse-image Ilf and Petrov? WHY DIDN’T I KNOW THIS. Fortunately I found it while still I’m still working on Honeytrap edits… although honestly if it appears, it will be only briefly, when Gennady explains Ilf & Petrov and Daniel says, “Oh! Like Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal!”
Steinbeck and Capa went in with the avowed goal of making no big political pronouncements, but just seeing how the ordinary people of the USSR lived. In the first they succeeded - it’s actually quite refreshing the way that Steinbeck acknowledges that his view of the Soviet Union is of necessity limited (neither of them spoke a word of Russian!), and refuses to pronounce either for or against the country as a whole.
In the second, their success is more partial, not least because he and Capa spent so much time traveling that the strongest impression one gets is of the state of Soviet air travel at the time: stuffy, uncomfortable, and smelled strongly of the black bread that travelers carried with them, as there were no refreshments in any airports.
Steinbeck was actually rather famous in the USSR at this point - a translation of The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 to some fanfare - so it’s a bit startling that they didn’t do a better job rolling out the red carpet for him, especially given the USSR’s obsessive interest in controlling the impressions of visitors from abroad. In fact, one of Steinbeck’s most interesting observations is the basic counterproductivity of the Soviet approach to that goal: the micromanaging bureaucracy made it so impossible for journalists to function that even correspondents who came to the country well-disposed toward the Soviet system tended to leave with a very negative impression, which Steinbeck and Capa avoided only because they managed to escape being classified as foreign correspondents.
I also finished Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, which reminds me in a way of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: both books are gentle portraits of particular communities, centered on people who are rarely the focal points of novels: older people who have made the great decisions of their lives and are now living out their time, rooted in a place and a community… or, in the case of some of Jewett’s more eccentric characters, sometimes on the edges of that community, like Joanna who retreated to Shellheap Island after her fiance jilted her just before her wedding day.
What I’m Reading Now
Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, which is about reactions in the United States to the various wars of independence in South America during the early nineteenth century. Right now, I’m in the part where US Americans are cheering these revolutions as the spiritual brothers of the revolution of 1776, but in about 1830 or so, the southerners are going to start really noticing that these South American revolutions tended to be accompanied by legal reforms leading to the gradual abolition of slavery, and go “WAIT JUST ONE SECOND.”
I’ve also begun reading Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity is the Thing. My feelings about it so far are mixed, but I’m going to wait to write about it till I’m done, because a lot of Moriarty’s books have a twist that changes the shape of the whole story… which is sometimes amazing and sometimes “Actually the twist really undermines everything the story was doing well and we would have been better off without it.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m getting down to my last few library books. (Physical books, I mean. The ebook selection is functionally endless.) I’m keeping Eva Ibbotson in reserve for now. Should I go for Ingrid Law’s children’s fantasy Savvy, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope, about her husband (Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam), life under Stalin, and possibly the gulag?
DID YOU KNOW that right after World War II, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa (an acclaimed war photographer) traveled around the USSR like some kind of reverse-image Ilf and Petrov? WHY DIDN’T I KNOW THIS. Fortunately I found it while still I’m still working on Honeytrap edits… although honestly if it appears, it will be only briefly, when Gennady explains Ilf & Petrov and Daniel says, “Oh! Like Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal!”
Steinbeck and Capa went in with the avowed goal of making no big political pronouncements, but just seeing how the ordinary people of the USSR lived. In the first they succeeded - it’s actually quite refreshing the way that Steinbeck acknowledges that his view of the Soviet Union is of necessity limited (neither of them spoke a word of Russian!), and refuses to pronounce either for or against the country as a whole.
In the second, their success is more partial, not least because he and Capa spent so much time traveling that the strongest impression one gets is of the state of Soviet air travel at the time: stuffy, uncomfortable, and smelled strongly of the black bread that travelers carried with them, as there were no refreshments in any airports.
Steinbeck was actually rather famous in the USSR at this point - a translation of The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 to some fanfare - so it’s a bit startling that they didn’t do a better job rolling out the red carpet for him, especially given the USSR’s obsessive interest in controlling the impressions of visitors from abroad. In fact, one of Steinbeck’s most interesting observations is the basic counterproductivity of the Soviet approach to that goal: the micromanaging bureaucracy made it so impossible for journalists to function that even correspondents who came to the country well-disposed toward the Soviet system tended to leave with a very negative impression, which Steinbeck and Capa avoided only because they managed to escape being classified as foreign correspondents.
I also finished Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, which reminds me in a way of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: both books are gentle portraits of particular communities, centered on people who are rarely the focal points of novels: older people who have made the great decisions of their lives and are now living out their time, rooted in a place and a community… or, in the case of some of Jewett’s more eccentric characters, sometimes on the edges of that community, like Joanna who retreated to Shellheap Island after her fiance jilted her just before her wedding day.
What I’m Reading Now
Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, which is about reactions in the United States to the various wars of independence in South America during the early nineteenth century. Right now, I’m in the part where US Americans are cheering these revolutions as the spiritual brothers of the revolution of 1776, but in about 1830 or so, the southerners are going to start really noticing that these South American revolutions tended to be accompanied by legal reforms leading to the gradual abolition of slavery, and go “WAIT JUST ONE SECOND.”
I’ve also begun reading Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity is the Thing. My feelings about it so far are mixed, but I’m going to wait to write about it till I’m done, because a lot of Moriarty’s books have a twist that changes the shape of the whole story… which is sometimes amazing and sometimes “Actually the twist really undermines everything the story was doing well and we would have been better off without it.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m getting down to my last few library books. (Physical books, I mean. The ebook selection is functionally endless.) I’m keeping Eva Ibbotson in reserve for now. Should I go for Ingrid Law’s children’s fantasy Savvy, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope, about her husband (Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam), life under Stalin, and possibly the gulag?
