What Are You Reading?

Saving private ryan; it was a book first

That's cool, Jean-Luc Lemur! I probably got the gist of that stuff from Brian Greene's kickass The Hidden Reality, but I'm such a sucker for all that awesome shit that who knows, maybe I'll read this too.

I haven't read Lem yet but he's on my list.

I'm ambling through Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which is good but not compulsively turning pages for me. But after blasting through David Copperfield I was unlikely to read anything very quickly anyway, so it might be my frame of mind more than the book.

That book is fucking awesome, if harrowing.  My dad's one of those male Boomer WW2 buffs, and he said he couldn't read it for too long at a stretch. "That's because it's about people, Dad," I did not say, "instead of just statistics and troop movements."

My WW2 college instructor assigned it to us, as well as another traumatising book. He was ...Belgian, if I recall, and I think the class was FAR more interesting for having a European instructor.

What is with the boomer WW2 buffs? I was something of a buff myself as a kid (I had a Janes' WWII Aircraft book) due to the influence of Dad/Uncles/Grandpa. 

And that class sounds very interesting. 

So I gave up on the Honor Harrington series on the last book in the sequence! Mostly because the last 2 reversed the chronology, repeated chapters across 2 books and just generally lost the plot - literally.
To be fair, I had been skimming quite a few pages before then - mostly descriptions of missile upgrades and the ridiculously unnecessary 7 page baptism scene in book 12 - so it wasn't that sudden a decision.

What the series does well, it does very well indeed - great on showing how well-laid plans can be fucked by luck, bad or late intel and the meddling of politicians. And I like Honor herself as a character. But I won't be coming back, I think.

Next, a total shift - the Veronica Mars novel.

Jean-Luc Lemur I like Goodreads for being able to mark everything I am reading, have read and want to read. I find it useful for that purpose but I don't engage much in the wider community (though it is particularly good if you want to find a review of a fairy obscure book - want a reader's opinion of 19th century penny dreadful Varney the Vampire? Goodreads has you covered) but it is probably of most use with writers who are still alive, some of whom actually use the site.

Post-Lupin I love the Vorkosigan series so for that reason I have on and off considered Honor Harrington (particularly now that there is a film in the works.) But hen I read what everyone says about Weber as a writer and I feel okay not picking that up.

I have massive issues with Boomers being waaaaaay into WW2 and yet not being interested in having a relationship or even much of a conversation with their parents. It's like that horrible geneology website commercial, where some woman is talking about how much she misses her dad, now that he's dead, so she'd like find out more about him.      

HEY, you know how you could've learned more about your father?! 

Oh, of course you're right; if you're wanting to know more about wartime experiences specifically, chances are good they're not going to say much. And yes, you can find out more just by asking people who are not that specific veteran, but who were there. 

What seems to have happened with Boomers & WW2 specifically is that they dismissed it as a completely uninteresting event their parents were involved in for a very long time - I mean, I seriously do not remember spending more than a day or maybe two on that war in high school, and mostly that was covering Pearl Harbour, the Holocaust, and bombing Japan - and then interest in that war suddenly skyrocketed, because Saving Private Ryan.

Stay with me here: Spielberg and his generation more or less completely ignored WW2 as a subject for decades [mostly unless they were actual historians], because they thought it had nothing to do with them - and then Spielberg decided to make Private Ryan, Brokaw wrote his book, and boom, everyone leapt onto that bandwagon, now it's a super-important war time period and war, and those who lived through the time period are The Greatest Generation.  [Discounting Schindler's List as part of the influence here, because that was addressing a very personal issue for Spielberg, most of the people who saw it were not Jewish, and I myself don't recall a huge upswing in WW2 interest until Private Ryan] 

But this didn't seem to translate into how Boomers related to the actual people who were involved. It didn't make them care more about their living elderly relatives, as the rising number of nursing homes attested.  It comes across to me as venerating a generation who has been gone for decades, when at the time there were plenty of live members of that generation. 

Now of course there were always people who were into the historical angle, but nowadays, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting like twenty Boomer self-proclaimed WW2 buffs. And most of them I've met aren't interested in it to learn more about how it affected their parents, but how it affected them, and/or to impress people with their vast amateur knowledge. It's like a bunch of Greek lit majors sitting around talking about something that happened hundreds of years ago.

A LOT of my problem with that commercial is this very issue; it's written to make it sound like you can find out SO MUCH about your parents just by using X website, when in fact you could have learned more about that person - or any person - by actually having some interaction with them while they were alive, or by talking to their siblings or their friends. It really comes across to me as sort of uber-Boomer: I have decided this is important to me, but I can't be bothered to interact with people to learn more.

tl;dr: Boomers get on my last nerve. YMMV

Dang it, I hate when it won't edit previous comments like I want it to

The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment by A.J. Jacobs

I am the Football of the Sea I fucking loved Angelmaker, and Harkaway's a nice bloke on Twitter, too.

Currently rereading Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant urban fantasy/detective series, in anticipation of Book 5. Which isn't out until September, but I was due a re-read anyway. Joint second place in fave fiction about magical London, just behind Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift/Magicians Anonymous books and equal with Mike Carey's Felix Castor series.

Finished Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, and just wow.
It is insanely ambitious, with parts thrown in that are pretty much purely philosophy or social/political commentary rather than novel strictly speaking.
A very long, but gripping description of a society losing the plot, all the more impressive and readable that it is done in a very small scale. There are very few characters, and the plot strands remain quite simple. All the pontificating is its own sections (called "deterioration of values") rather than having characters clumsily expounding whatever points the author wants to make, which overall makes the novel more enjoyable and readable.
The book was written in Vienna between 1928 and 1931, and while it is not concerned directly with the political situation in Germany, it is a clear (if not in some ways prescient) indictment of the society that gave birth to it, but again not in a heavy handed manner as it is far more general. And it is not either a conservative/reactionary cry.
Really a strange and impressive beast I'll most likely be mulling over for a while and plan on re-read some day. His other novels are definitely on my reading list as well now.

Have now started Theodor Fontane's On Tangled Path as I've decided to go on bit of German lit journey, but didn't feel like tackling another 600+ pages modernist tome straight away.

I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis a couple of days ago. I knew the basic outline of why the financial crisis happened, and, of course, the entire thing is far too complicated to fully comprehend, but every page of that book just made me angrier and angrier over how the Great Recession happened, and especially how entirely avoidable the entire clusterfuck now seems. It also made me a little upset that I wasn't a billionaire in 2006 and I didn't buy some credit default swaps.

Yesterday I started and finished Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour? An enjoyable breeze, full of his usual humor, but I feel like it's too much of a novella, even for YA, to deserve to be hogging that much of my shelf space.

Now I'm reading Summer of '49, David Halberstam's classic of baseball history.

A book whose name escapes me about the New York City Zodiac Killer of the early nineties. Not the best crime book I've read and it includes my least favorite trend of true crime books: its author was a journalist who covered the case as it transpired and he finds as many opportunities as possible to insert first person references to himself into the story.