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Lily Fairbairn
Gondolin
Thu, 3:36pm
Post #1 of 2
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It's the occasional reading thread!
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There's only one more month to go until the fall equinox and just maybe cooler, wetter weather. Yes, some of us WANT cooler and wetter!!
But there are always books to read and enjoy, and thank goodness for that.
Fair Play by Louise Hegarty starts out awkwardly, evolves into a rather cliched murder mystery weekend at an Air BnB which ends in a real death, and then.... Well, my son the literary author thinks it's a brilliant work of meta-fiction, perhaps the best book he's read this year. I, the genre author (and editor), think it's a pretentious bit of claptrap that might well have started life as a practical joke played on a publisher who bought it hook, line, and sinker.
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman, author of the Thursday Murder Club series, is less of a clever and fast-paced mystery like the Thursday books and more of a clever and fast-paced thriller, with very broadly painted characters and situations. I have to ask, though, when did the over-the-top famous female author become such a stock character? I've seen multiple variations on this theme recently.
There's a lot of flying in private planes and many, many characters rushing about, and many deadpan one-liners.... Well, I enjoyed it, and admired the skill of the author, but am not sure right now if I'd read another. It was very entertaining but almost too much.
Which leads me into a discursion. (Moi? Discursive?) Somewhere recently---probably on Facebook---I saw a short essay about the LotR movies, about how they're so good because they're played perfectly straight, even earnestly. (Like the books, in other words.) No one makes a speech about doing the right thing and then turns to the camera with a nudge-wink like so many movies, TV shows, and books do these days.
Both the books I mention above fall into that nudge-wink trap. This can be enjoyable to a certain extent, as it is in Murders. But my patience with this fourth-wall cuteness has run very thin, one reason I strongly disliked Play.
(Yeah, I know using "these days" marks me out as a old f**t. But I've earned that title honestly!)
Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World, by Victoria Finlay. This is a thick paper book with multiple illustrations which is exactly as the title says, the history and cultural significance of barkcloth, cotton, wool, silk, and so on. I'm thoroughly enjoying Finlay's writing and her adventures doing her research. I see she has an earlier book about the history of colors which I plan to get, although I'm thinking a paper book might work better than an audio version 
Speaking of audios, I listened to The Vanished Bride, by Bella Ellis. The conceit is that the Bronte sisters solve a mysterious disappearance, which gives them ideas for their famous novels. It's not badly done, but boy, did all the passages of modern feminist jargon jump out at me!
I also listened to The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors, by Dan Jones. Jones does a good job of sorting out a very confusing period of history, made even more so by so many of main characters having more or less the same name or title. It doesn't turn away from the ghastly violence of the time period (I kept waiting for some ambitious lord to try raising an army only to find all the likely soldiers had already been slaughtered in the last battle) and by the end of fifteen hours of listening time I was getting weary, hence my turn to the next two books.
(I must say that I rolled my eyes at Jones describing the wounds Richard III sustained in his last battle while never mentioning that he only knew the nature of the wounds because of the quixotic but successful quest some years back to uncover Richard's remains. Perhaps this is because Jones is squarely on the Richard-as-villain side of the controversy while Philippa Langley, who directed the quest, is squarely on the Richard-as-maligned-hero side.)
Anyway, to leaven both the violence and the cynicism of some of my recent reading, I turned to Frances Hodgson Burnett. First I read her novelette The White People, written in 1917 about an orphan living in a remote Scottish castle who discovers she can see ghosts, hence the pallid people of the title.
Then I listened to her classic, The Secret Garden, written in 1911. This is a full-length novel about an orphan born to a British officer in India who is sent to live with a maternal uncle in a mansion in Yorkshire. The garden of the title was closed off ten years previously, when her cousin was born and his mother died, and the story is about them working with a local lad to bring it back.
Garden in particular suffers from its time period, with moments of casual racism, classism, and child-neglect. But the writing in both stories is lovely and they're are ultimately positive and hopeful.
Finally, I enjoyed the new Rivers of London novel, Stone and Sky, so much I indulged in the most recent of the series of tie-in graphic novels, Here Be Dragons, about an incident referred to in the novel. I'm too fast a reader to be a huge fan of graphic novels, but the skill of the artist was most enjoyable, especially in illustrations of Peter and Beverley's twins and Abigail's fox.
Whew!
So what have you been reading?
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow....
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squire
Gondolin
2:34am
Post #2 of 2
(32 views)
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'Behind the Urals' by John Scott (1942)
[In reply to]
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I found this at the local book-exchange at the city dump.
It's a fascinating first-person account of the construction, basically from scratch, of the huge industrial city of Magnitogorsk (City of Steel) in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Scott was an American of leftist sympathies who, with some slight skills as a welder, traveled to the USSR to help build the Communist future. He records the suffering, the valiant efforts, the corruption, the agony, the industrial expertise, the conflicted struggle of the Soviet peoples to rebuild, from scratch, an industrial proletariat and managerial class in a country that had just liquidated all of its professional experts during the Bolshevik revolution and civil war of 1917-1922.
It's not necessarily "objective" but it is first hand primary testimony of what it was like to work in Magnitogorsk and its environs in the 1930s.
It's very well written, vivid, and full of character and emotion - never mind the politics. Scott knows his audience, bourgeois Americans who want to know more about their new ally, the USSR, during World War II. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and made tremendous advances towards the traditional power centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and the Ukraine in his first year of war. But Stalin, foreseeing the danger fifteen years earlier, had moved his country's industrial center 1000 miles to the East, "Behind the Urals" during the 30s, and so the Soviet Union was able to resist the Nazi onslaught and eventually come back to victory.
Scott anticipates all this in his narrative of just how hard it was to do that in 1932 or 1937 - how many people suffered, froze, starved, or were unjustly imprisoned - to realize Stalin's strategic imperative for national survival.
OK, rant over I suppose. It's just a darned good history book if you like that kind of thing!
squire online:
Unfortunately my longtime internet service provider abandoned its hosting operations last year. I no longer have any online materials to share with the TORn community.
 = Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.
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