osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Peter Carlson’s Big Bill Haywood, which really brought home to me - not that I hadn’t noticed this before; but brought home to yet again - how destructive and useless World War I was. Even the soldiers at the time could see it was pointless: they had a whole song about it, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Millions of people dead for no better reason than inertia.

This is really just a side point in the book, though, which naturally focuses on the way that World War I destroyed Haywood and the radical labor union he led, the IWW. Haywood and the IWW’s other leaders were arrested for violating wartime sedition laws (which 1) were bad laws in the first place, and 2) they hadn’t even violated), and they ended up cycling in and out of court and prison for the next five years, until Haywood - who was ill and getting on in years, and had been railroaded through an unjust murder trial once before in his life - split for the Soviet Union, where he lived out the last of his days in loneliness.

I also finished the tenth and final Betsy-Tacy book. Oh no! Whatever shall I read for my bedtime story now????

What I’m Reading Now

Actually I solved the whole bedside story thing pretty quickly: my new bedtime book will be War and Peace! The book is very long, but Tolstoy thoughtfully broke it into very short chapters, which is ideal for reading just before bed. And also, I think having a set time to read a little chunk of it each day will make it much easier for me to read. I’m thinking I’ll probably set aside a day each week for a War and Peace post.

I’m still reading the Emily Dickinson book. I’ve also begun Black Dove, White Raven again, and I realize this complaint is petty, but I just have to get it off my chest: the framing device for this story is terrible. Emilia wants the emperor of Ethiopia to grant Teo a passport so she can get Teo out of prison (this is all the first page, I’m not spoiling anything), so she... sends him pages upon pages of their school essays?

The emperor’s a busy man! There’s no way he’s going to have time to read that! Probably receiving this mountain of irrelevant material is just going to make him cranky and therefore less likely to grant their request!

I realize the idea of framing the story with a letter of appeal to the emperor is to give some urgency to the story right from the beginning, but I think it would have worked better to start with a letter of appeal and then segue into Em trying to distract herself from her dire straits by organizing a memory book about her and Teo’s childhood, or something like that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided to make April the month of Books I Have Previously Abandoned - War and Peace is among their number - which means not just Black Dove, White Raven but also Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, and… maybe even Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley? I have that on my Kindle so it would have to wait till I’m done with Anne.

Oh, and Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost. I have always felt somewhat guilty that I didn’t read that before writing my New Girl paper.
osprey_archer: (window)
What I’ve Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor, which I ended up purchasing - in hardcover, no less! - because I enjoyed her book How to Be a Victorian so much. Again, full of fascinating (and potentially useful for writing) tidbits about everyday life in history; Goodman is particularly good at teasing out the way that practices that seem bizarre now actually worked: brushing your hair a hundred times a night with a natural bristle brush will keep your hair clean and shiny even if you never wash it, for instance.

She’s also good at taking apart the givens of modern thought, if you will, and showing how societies can be organized differently. She notes, for instance, that most modern people assume that reading and writing will be taught concurrently, but in Tudor times they were viewed as separate skills, so there were quite a lot of people who could read but nonetheless signed with a mark because writing classes were quite a bit more expensive than reading.

I also read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Emily of Deep Valley, which I enjoyed very much! It’s loosely connected to the Betsy-Tacy stories, but I think that was a marketing decision as much as anything, because that could easily be cut out; Emily is a few years younger than Betsy and Tacy and thus her social world is quite separate from theirs.

At the beginning of the book, Emily is graduating from high school; she would like very much to go to college, but she’s an orphan living with her kindly but increasingly frail grandfather, who needs her care, and can’t leave, and the book is about her finding a way to move forward and pursue her goals even though she is in a sense stuck.

I’ve been thinking about taking a trip to Minnesota this summer, partly to see my aunt and also partly to visit Maud Hart Lovelace’s house in Mankato, and this might be the book to buy while I’m there. And also perhaps a box set of the first four Betsy-Tacy books? Or maybe I should splurge for the whole set of ten...

I also finished Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy. Following Joy’s mother’s death, Joy comes to live with Gypsy’s family; the two girls are initially at loggerheads, but slowly learn how to get along with each other and see each other’s good points. Lots of fun if you like mid-nineteenth century children’s books (I recognize this is perhaps an obscure taste) - somewhat moralistic but of course that comes with the territory. There are two more in the series, but Amazon doesn’t have them. :(

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, from the list of Eight Classic Female Bildungromane You Should Know about If You Don’t Already. I’m enjoying Anne, I’m enjoying the immensely atmospheric island which used to be a fur-trading post, and has dwindled from its former glory (I am all about dwindling from former glory), and I already have grim forbodings (and not the good kind) about where the subplot with Anne’s little one-eight Chippewa, three-eighths French half-sister Tita.

Aside from Anne, whose loyalty to her half-sister is presented as a part of her charming naivete, pretty much everyone in the narrative muses grimly about Tita’s flaws: she’s small and dark and sly and self-dramatizing and (no one spells this out, but I’m conjecting) is undoubtedly going to either kill someone sneaky-like or possibly run off with a deeply unsuitable man before long. They all ascribe her manipulative secretiveness to her mixed-race heritage; I think it’s because ever since she was a wee babe literally every adult in her life has been murmuring that she’s doomed to go wrong. Why should she be open with them if they interpret everything she does in the worst way possible?

But we’ll see. Maybe the story will surprise me.

I’ve also been reading Peter Carlson’s Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, mostly because Carlson wrote K Blows Top, a hilarious yet poignant book about Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States. Roughneck isn’t quite in the same league (then again, what is?), but it’s an interesting exploration about the history of unionization in the United States, which previously I hadn’t known much about.

What I Plan to Read Next

In the Labyrinth of Drakes, the fourth of Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent books, is coming out! Or did come out yesterday, or something. Actually I probably won’t be reading it for a while, because I’ll be waiting till the library gets it, but I’m so excited about its existence that I had to mention it here!
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Alethia Kontis’s Enchanted. I seem to be in some kind of reading rut, because this is yet another book that I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as I expected to. I think there’s a critical mass of fairytales that you can cram into one novel and maintain coherence, and Kontis clearly surpassed it.

Or perhaps that’s not the problem, exactly. I felt like Kontis didn’t really have anything to say about any of the fairy tales. They’re there so the reader can squeal upon noticing the fairy tale allusion, but there’s really nothing more to it: the stories have no thematic resonance.

And there are really only so many times I can read the hero and heroine sigh about how they love each other so so so much (but can’t be together because once he’s in prince form he refuses to tell her he’s the frog she fell in love with, WTF dude) before I want to knock both their heads together and scream.

On the other hand, I’ve also just finished an excellent book, Peter Carlson’s Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy, which is about a couple of Union reporters who got captured by Confederate troops, paroled, and were supposed to be sent home...except they got sucked into the Confederate prison archipelago and ended up spending nearly two years there.

This is pretty grim stuff, and both Junius and Albert occasionally give into black despair (Junius is particularly prone to flinging himself on the floor and attempting to give himself up to the sweet liberty of death), but Carlson manages it with a light touch: he shows not only their despair, but the dark and sometimes goofy humor with which they tried to keep up not only their own spirits but those of their fellow prisoners. Everyone seems very human in his history books, which I think is why I like them so much.

(Carlson also wrote K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist, one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. K Blows Top has been optioned for a feature film. I WANT THAT MOVIE SO MUCH.)

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s Caddy Ever After. I’ve been spacing out the Casson family books because I enjoy them so much and want them to last forever, and this one is just as lovely so far as the ones before. I love the way McKay writes Rose, especially, because she is so very much herself, stubborn and passionate and artistic and stubborn. Very stubborn. Darling Rose!

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shield Ring, because I am about to move away from the library that has it and there’s no telling when I’ll have access to another copy.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve just discovered the Hilary McKay wrote a sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Prince, focusing on what happens at the boarding school after Sara leaves, for Ermengarde particularly. Should I read it? On the one hand, I always have wondered what happened to Ermengarde. On the other hand, sequels to beloved books are always dangerous, perhaps particularly when they’re written by a different author (although being written by the same author often doesn’t seem to help).
osprey_archer: (fandom!!!!)
Just read Peter Carlson's K Blows Top, about Khrushchev's visit to America in 1959. Best. Book. Ever!

Even the subtitle is full of awesome: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist. How could any book live up to that? So I opened it with trepidation -

Reader, the book is even better than its title.

You follow Khrushchev as he gambols through the States. He pets turkeys and mugging for the camera. He causes a riot in a supermarket, and drifts seraphically through the piles of fallen canned goods and crushed potato chips. He throws a temper tantrum during a speech in California because he had been denied entrance to Disneyland.

This is comedy gold, and Carlson milks it dry.

It's a terribly entertaining book - I kept promising myself I'd make dinner at the end of the next section, and yeah, dinner never happened - but also a thoughtful one: a compelling character study of Khrushchev, who contained irreconcilable multitudes.

There's Khrushchev, a ham with perfect comic timing who couldn't resist mugging for the press; and Khrushchev, a flesh-pressing politician; and Khrushchev, dictator with a flashpoint temper and a nuclear arsenal. Jovial, cruel, gleefullly irreverent, haunted by Stalin, pugnacious and insecure -

Carlson captures the hilarity, pathos, and terror of Khrushchev's overblown personality, and with space left over to provide delightful sketches of the people Khrushchev ran into on the way, too.

It's a fantastic book. I can't recommend it enough.

Profile

osprey_archer: (Default)
osprey_archer

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
4 5 6 7 8910
111213 14151617
18 19 20 21 22 2324
25 2627 28 293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 29th, 2025 04:02 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios