What Are You Reading

[Harp]

I've got a few in various stages of being read:



The bitter taste of victory : life, love, and art in the ruins of the Reich / Lara Feigel

Dietrich & Riefenstahl : Hollywood, Berlin, and a century in two lives / Karin Wieland ; translated by Shelley Frisch

These two look interesting.

 

[Hercule]

These two look interesting.

Thus far the Feigle book (I'm not so far in, I keep getting distracted) is following Hemingway and his wife Martha Gellhorn as they accompany the troops (and snipe between themselves) into Germany in the final months of the war.

I haven't really started the other one yet but it's quite thick and dense.

 

[Fading Fast]

Finished a couple of books over the last few days.

"The Summer Before the War" by Helen Simonsson. Fictional account of a small village in England in the months before and then during WWI. We follow a few families from the Gypsy "outsiders" to the most prominent to see how they lived and the social rules and boundaries they all followed before the war to how that changed during the war. This is a good 200 page book trapped inside a 400 page one. After a decent start where you become engaged with the characters in the village - and their problems and challenges - the middle drags through too much detail and mundane day to day, only to pick up again for the last 100 pages as the war brings many story lines together and to conclusion. Liked, but didn't love it.

"The Doll House" by Fiona Davis. Historical fiction set in the Barbizon Hotel in NYC that flips back and forth between modern day and the early '50s as a young report and Barbizon resident discovers a story about the hotel that connects to a long-time resident. The author crafted a good story but was weak on the execution as the characters came off flat and the narrative felt like you were being told a story not experiencing it. The best part is the Barbizon Hotel itself which is a 1927 stunning piece of conflated architectural styles - Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish - that was originally a women-only hotel for single woman - with rules, curfews, matrons, etc., and today is a condominium (like everything else). I looked at an apartment there when we were looking for apartments - the building is impressive, almost fortress like, but because it was originally a hotel, the apartments feel off as they are a bunch of small rooms strung together in odd layouts as they tried to convert the hotel rooms into modern and larger floorpans.

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished a couple of books over the last few days.

"The Summer Before the War" by Helen Simonsson. Fictional account of a small village in England in the months before and then during WWI. We follow a few families from the Gypsy "outsiders" to the most prominent to see how they lived and the social rules and boundaries they all followed before the war to how that changed during the war. This is a good 200 page book trapped inside a 400 page one. After a decent start where you become engaged with the characters in the village - and their problems and challenges - the middle drags through too much detail and mundane day to day, only to pick up again for the last 100 pages as the war brings many story lines together and to conclusion. Liked, but didn't love it.

Well, that's disappointing. I was looking forward to this one! Still, I may give it a go - will probably get it at the library instead of purchasing it, though.

 

[Fading Fast]

Well, that's disappointing. I was looking forward to this one! Still, I may give it a go - will probably get it at the library instead of purchasing it, though.

Needed better editing to cut out at least 100 pages and, also, some of the plotting and characters were too transparent - you knew early on where the plot and they were going. Still, a lot of good stuff in it as well, but overall, I was disappointed.

 

[greatestescaper]

Lately I've been itching for some classic science fiction, and so I'm reading the first I could get my hands on, H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds.

 

[Fading Fast]

I started "The Big Sleep" yesterday as I figure it might help me understand its movie that I could never fully follow. Also, nothing wrong with a Raymond Chandler read.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Lately I've been itching for some classic science fiction, and so I'm reading the first I could get my hands on, H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds.

For more recent classics, I recommend almost anything by Larry Niven from the Sixties or Seventies: Neutron Star (short stories), novels A Gift from Earth and Ringworld. The last especially will send your mind soaring. Imagine an SF story inspired by The Wizard of Oz, except that the Yellow Brick Road is 600 million miles long. . . .

 

[Benzadmiral]

I started "The Big Sleep" yesterday as I figure it might help me understand its movie that I could never fully follow. Also, nothing wrong with a Raymond Chandler read.

The story goes that Chandler himself didn't know how all the story threads wound out. When Faulkner and Leigh Brackett were adapting the story -- or maybe it was the director, Howard Hawks -- they asked Chandler who had killed a certain minor character in the book. He thought about it and at last admitted he didn't know.

 

[Fading Fast]

The story goes that Chandler himself didn't know how all the story threads wound out. When Faulkner and Leigh Brackett were adapting the story -- or maybe it was the director, Howard Hawks -- they asked Chandler who had killed a certain minor character in the book. He thought about it and at last admitted he didn't know.

So far, about 50 pages in and really, really enjoying it. I've already noted some differences from the movie as I'm paying very close attention to the story and its details on the off chance that I can follow it to the end. That said, if the author is confused - ugh.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Just finished the Harry Potter play, HP and the Cursed Child. A little slow in the first half, with some dialog that made me wince (Character A says something, and Character B repeats it, as if the audience/reader were considered too dense to get it the first time), it improves in the second half.

Now I'm trying the latest in Craig Johnson's Longmire series, An Obvious Fact. I had no idea that the crime series was set in the modern West, nor did I know it features some humor (and very welcome it is!).

 

[Benzadmiral]

So far, about 50 pages in and really, really enjoying it. I've already noted some differences from the movie as I'm paying very close attention to the story and its details on the off chance that I can follow it to the end. That said, if the author is confused - ugh.

It's a very minor character, as I recall, and that doesn't spoil the story. It's not like it was a classic mystery in which a sloppy author pins the crime on somebody who walks onstage in the last 3 chapters, or something. And as you said, nothing wrong with Chandler!

 

[Fading Fast]

It's a very minor character, as I recall, and that doesn't spoil the story. It's not like it was a classic mystery in which a sloppy author pins the crime on somebody who walks onstage in the last 3 chapters, or something. And as you said, nothing wrong with Chandler!

From today's perspective, a completely alternative view of "The Big Sleep" is that it is one long tobacco advertisement wrapped inside a film noir novel. Everybody is smoking or lighting a cigarette or lighting a cigar or putting out a cigar or talking though a haze of smoke or blowing out smoke or breathing in someone else's smoke or tossing someone a cigarette or a "light -" it's amazing they had time to do all the other bad, tawdry things they did with all the smoking they had going one.

 

[Fading Fast]

Building on the theme in the above post, this is how Marlow put a cigarette out in his own apartment (his living room / murphy bed bedroom): "I threw my cigarette on the floor and stamped on it." What the heck - was that a thing, people just threw their cigarettes on the floor of their own homes?

Besides the fire hazard, it wouldn't take long for that floor to just get nasty. I'm still leaning to the view "The Big Sleep" is basically a long-form advertisement for everything tobacco - cigarettes, cigars, pipes, blowing smoke in, out, inhaling your, others - that's what the book is basically about - oh, and there is a very good noir detective story tucked in amidst the haze of tobacco smoke.

 

[Hercule]

Could you just be overly sensitive about it? Smoking certainly was part of the culture back then. How did that line go in Now Voyager - "Shall we smoke a cigarette on it?"

Never smoked myself and can't even remotely stand cigarette smoke (maybe odd as I worked in tobacco as a kid? - but a good cigar or pipe is another story), but twenty years ago when I played around with writing a sequel to Casablanca, you know what figured priominantly? - Smoking. (I can't help but wonder how nasty it may have been for Bogart's leading ladies to kiss him given how much he smoked) Look at all the movies from the period, smoking was pervasive. Why not in literature too.

 

[Fading Fast]

Could you just be overly sensitive about it? Smoking certainly was part of the culture back then. How did that line go in Now Voyager - "Shall we smoke a cigarette on it?"

Never smoked myself and can't even remotely stand cigarette smoke (maybe odd as I worked in tobacco as a kid? - but a good cigar or pipe is another story), but twenty years ago when I played around with writing a sequel to Casablanca, you know what figured priominantly? - Smoking. (I can't help but wonder how nasty it may have been for Bogart's leading ladies to kiss him given how much he smoked) Look at all the movies from the period, smoking was pervasive. Why not in literature too.

No question - I am so put off by it that I notice it more. Other than my genuine surprise about Marlow throwing a lit cigarette on his apartment floor and stamping it out (that truly seems crazy to me, even for the time), all the smoking going on is just what was done. I grew up in the '70s and there was a still a ton of smoking, so I caught the tail end of that world - a friend of my grandmother would light each new cigarette with the end of the last one (she was basically a fully functioning, always-on chimney).

The point I was trying to make - a bit tongue-in-cheek - is that when looked at from today's perspective, the amount of smoking that was normal for the period was a lot by any objective measure. I agree, too, that if you want to write a period piece, a lot of smoking has to be part of it.

Interestingly, I just saw Woody Allen's "Cafe Society" set in '30s and, while the movie was painstaking in its period details (beautiful to see), no one or almost no one smoked. There was such an absence of smoking that it had to be a conscious decision by Allen to leave it out.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Statistically, smoking reached its peak in the US in the early 1960s, when between 40 and 50 percent of adult Americans were addicted to tobacco, and by some estimates close to 80 percent of adult men. There was never a time when a majority of American women smoked, although the Boys did their damndest to make it appear otherwise.

It's been suggested, with considerable statistical support, that the single biggest factor in addicting American men to tobacco in the 20th Century was the issuance of cigarettes in ration packs beginning during WW1 and continuing thru Vietnam. Big Tobacco and the US military had a very cozy relationship for a very long time, and it could get ridiculous. It was common to listen to a baseball broadcast in the 1950s and hear "that home run by Snider means another thousand free Luckies to the patients at the Brooklyn VA Medical Center." Smoke em if you got 'em -- lungs, that is.

 

[Fading Fast]

I just read (somewhere) recently that the FDA had banned companies from giving free cigars to soldiers.

I kinda feel mixed on that one. I'm all for less smoking (hate it passionately), but adults can make choices and I doubt there is a person left on earth that doesn't know smoking is bad for them.

All that said, how funny that some version of the same thing is still going on and being fought over today.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

I'm making my way through The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, classic tales of rugged individualism, and The Stories of John Cheever, depictions of suburban ennui in New England that were a big inspiration for Mad Men.

 

[Fading Fast]

Statistically, smoking reached its peak in the US in the early 1960s, when between 40 and 50 percent of adult Americans were addicted to tobacco, and by some estimates close to 80 percent of adult men. There was never a time when a majority of American women smoked, although the Boys did their damndest to make it appear otherwise....

See bolded above: Chanlder did his part as well - every character in this book smokes, wants a smoke, is blowing out smoke, is lighting up, is playing with bits of tobacco from his or her cigarette, is stomping their cigarette out (apparently, it's acceptable to do that inside in film-noir world), is talking through a haze of smoke or (when bound up - which happens regularly to people in film noir land) is craving a cigarette - not freedom per say, just the ability to smoke.

Yup, I'm going back to my original comment - this is either a noir detective story (and a darn fine one) or a long tobacco advertisement. The majority of the population never smoked; well then, the majority of the population never lived inside a Raymond Chandler novel.