Reading Wednesday

[yuuago]

Finished reading: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. This is probably my favourite Atwood novel so far. It was so good you guys - I really suggest reading it if you haven't already. Essentially, it's about three very different women, who are brought together by a fourth woman, who they think is their friend (or can be), but isn't, and the way the relationships form and fall apart. Personally, my favourite of these characters is Tony, the cool-headed military history professor (no surprise there).

Currently reading: Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger. I've been meaning to read more nonfiction, so I picked this one up. Most of the writing on the First World War that I've looked into has been by Commonwealth authors, so it's interesting to take a look at something by a German author. Storm of Steel is a first-hand account, put together from Jünger's diaries, and it was originally published in 1920. Reading through the translator's introduction was pretty interesting - apparently this book has undergone a lot of revisions over the years (and has been through some bad translations as well) and some versions of it were more "raw" than others. As for the book itself - so far, it's very matter-of-fact. Doesn't look much into the politics of the thing, more of just "this is what we did, we constructed our lives like such-and-such and carried them out in this way" kind of thing. Also doesn't have much of the wistfulness that I've seen in most of the Commonwealth writing I've encountered, but there are hints of it here and there.

Reading next: Not sure. Maybe another one of the books I bought in Victoria. Or maybe not. I feel like I should read some more nonfiction, but probably not more First World War stuff; too much of that all at once can get overwhelming.

Also, here's a list of the books I bought in Victoria. Most of them were used, thankfully.


Nonfiction:
-Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger
-The Guns of August by Barbara W Tuchman
-Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy by Ben Wilson

Fiction:
-The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
-What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland by W D Valgardson
-Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel. Garcia Marquez
-Unnatrual Causes by P D James
-The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
-Hunger by Knut Hamsun

Poetry:
-The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer

Comments

[straightforwardly]

Oh, I read Storm of Steel for my WWI class last fall! It was a pretty interesting read.

[dhampyresa]

What's Storm of Steel about?

[yuuago]

So far it seems to be a "daily life in the trenches" kind of thing. If there's a deeper overarching theme, it hasn't reared its head yet. :Va

[yuuago]

:) I'm liking it so far.

Ahh you got to take a whole class on WWI? Lucky lucky. Are/were you studying history? (Can't remember if you mentioned that before)

[straightforwardly]

Yeah, I did! It was a pretty great class (though, to be honest, pretty much all my upper level history classes were great). I find WW1 fascinating, and spending a whole semester on it was lovely.

And I was a history major. I graduated last fall, though, so that WWI class was in my last batch of classes. I don't talk about real life too much in my journal, so it's entirely possible that I haven't mentioned it before.