I’ll keep you posted as I get further into it. I thought of you specifically while reading chapter one because there were elements of the food politics around feeding the troops during WWI (the book starts around 1914) that had me wondering, “huh, I wonder if this fed into the ‘dumbing down’ movement in our country.” Like maybe it grew from the studies they did back then to figure out the “rural evacuation” problem that threatened our food security. I know that’s not your historical niche, but you seem well-versed in a wide range of historical topics.
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I try!
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Skipping back and forth between Fuzz by Mary Roach (an entertaining nonfiction book about the legal, social and environmental consequences when nature falls into conflict with human civilization) and Landslide by Michael Wolff (a much less funny nonfiction book based on insider accounts from the final batshit-insane weeks of the Trump administration).
Between the two, I found Mary Roach’s recounting of some of the disgusting things found in seagull vomit less off-putting than Wolff’s characterizations of Giuliani.
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20% in. 900+ page book. I am not optimistic. Thus far it feels like self-abuse. Even this far in I would have to warn anyone with any sensitivities of any kind to probably just opt out. The same feeling as Blood Meridian only from the Nazi perspective in WW2, and without the stylistic flair.
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that’s kind of the reaction of anyone who hasn’t had much street experience on first reading bukowski.
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Now I have read four out of five albums of the comic Glorious Summers by Zidrou and Lafebre (featured in a recent post). The series follows the vacations of a Belgian family in 1962, 1968, 1973 and 1979 (though not in that order) plus the occasional bit of flashback or frame narrative. Outwardly, not all that much happens. They drive to France. We get to know all the family members and we see them at different ages. They have their little rituals. They face their challenges, some harmless and fun, some less so. One thing I liked was that the series stays close enough to realism that it always feels like something that could happen to a real family - or at least something that a real family could remember. Each time there are darker issues woven throughout the story and some charcaters are in on it and some aren’t.
I get that the series isn’t for everyone. One reviewer called the first volume a Lifetime Original Movie in comic form. I get where they were coming from, but I don’t think that does it justice, especially if you look at the series as a whole. Every volume adds context and complexity to the others. As a random little example that doesn’t spoil too much, in the first volume we see the oldest daughter unimpressed with a pretty bad dad joke that father makes during the trip. At the time it is only a bit of throwaway characterization establishing her as an embarrassed early teen, something we have seen a million times. In the second volume we see her four years younger and laughing her head off at the joke and suddenly we get an idea of what an emotionally significant moment that stupid joke was for him and how he was trying to connect with her.
What I am trying to say is that it is almost but not quite entirely unlike a Theodor Storm novella.
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This looks great:
Tackiness, it would seem, has always been in the eye of the beholder—a disapproving audience, real or imagined, clicking their proverbial tongues. They usually judge from the other side of some perceived divide, whether cultural, socioeconomic, or generational. “I always thought of tacky as my mother’s word,” Rax King writes at the beginning of her spirited new essay collection Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer (Vintage, $16) . She can still describe with stinging clarity the first time her mother flung the insult at her: she was eight years old, dressed in a puff-painted and bedazzled T-shirt she’d made with a friend so that they’d have something to wear when performing a song-and-dance routine at the elementary school talent show. (The song? An unnamed jig by the ’90s Irish girl group B*Witched, naturally.) “It occurred to me that being tacky was, in some sense, the opposite of being right,” King writes, reconsidering that formative moment two decades later. But even then, beneath the shame triggered by her mother’s laughter, she felt the illicit, hedonistic allure of the tacky: “Why should I put all that work into being right when the alternative was so much more fun?”
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I just got a copy of that… I heard her on It’s Been a Minute (Sam Sander’s show on NPR) and thought it sounded interesting.
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Just finished Richard Powers’ new short novel Bewilderment. Pretty good, but he really does better with the longer stories. This one is an homage to Flowers For Algernon. If you’re tired of doomscrolling I’d skip it-it manages to highlight pretty much every horrible possible scenario available, and the ending is only mildly optimistic. Usual lyrical prose and interesting characters.
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Dang I miss having Pritchett to read. Made me realize just how many mediocre writers there are out there … but someone suggested if I like Pterry, I might enjoy the Rivers of London series… and I have been enjoying it!
Also came across the Sandman Slim series, which I have also been enjoying.
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If you haven’t tried the audio version, you should. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith does a fantastic job narrating
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I’ll have to check it out. Thanks!
Neil Stephenson’s Termination Shock is a good read. Yes, it deals with climate change, yes it deals with the slide of America into a has-been country, yes it deals with China wanting to annex everywhere but the characters are great, the situations are handled well and it’s isn’t mired in unrelieved gloom. The tech stuff is nifty as well.
Hilary Clinton teamed up with Louise Penny and they wrote State of Terror, a pretty standard thriller. I’m only about 1/3 into it and as an example of the genre it’s good. It’s fun that the most competent people are all women.
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On my 
list…a couple of repeats and two new ones:
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Good piece on what we’re NOT reading, that is, nearly as many books as we used to. Most of us.
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while i don’t read at the rate i did through my 20s and 30s i still read between 40 and 50 books a year.
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I know my ability/willingness to just read for hours has deteriorated since lockdown started. I used to get through a book pretty much every day on the train, just 200-300pages or so and not much deep thinking required, but I’d have a fresh book every day when I walked into work. These days I find myself reading for half an hour then picking up the tablet and playing solitaire or checking out the bbs or FB or whatever.
On the other hand, when I just leave the iPad upstairs I can get into the book for a good long time and it always feels so good to do so. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks when I’m doing stuff in the kitchen and sometimes will listen whilst playing solitaire. A few of my friends have remarked that they also are having trouble staying focused on texts.
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Yeah, sounds familiar. Sometimes i fear it’s actually changing the way my brain works.
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I finished it, finally. All eleventy billion pages of it. I really don’t like being negative about subjective works, but this was utter, complete filth.
The incredible amount of detail included regarding the history of Germany in WW2 and the Holocaust illuminated nothing whatsoever. There are hundreds of pages of detailed, depressing descriptions of Nazi organizational politics and how self-defeating it was, but it ends up being the same explanations of their failure, only far more verbose. It seemed to be there just to give relevance to the story of the main character.
That story is a nauseating fictional autobiography of a disgusting human being that also illuminated nothing whatsoever. It could have been set in any era, it’s just the fantasies of a perverted, horrible mind. I don’t use words like “obscene”, well, ever, but this is the kind of thing the word was really made for.
If you take all that was bad about Game of Thrones, and multiplied it by 10,000, then set it in the Holocaust, you’d get this book. So, if you like a lot of murder, rape, incest, fantasies of abusive, degrading sex, coprophilia, self abuse, decapitations, semen flying everywhere amidst the entrails and gore, set in one of the worst genocides in human history, this book is for you.
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