What Are You Reading

[Tiki Tom]

Great review, FF. I note that The Wheel Spins was published two years after Murder on the Orient Express. I love the British mystery on a train sub-genre. It is a unique window into a world that has disappeared. Ah! Aristocrats traveling by train during the inter war period. You can’t get much more golden age than that! Thanks.

 

[Fading Fast]

Great review, FF. I note that The Wheel Spins was published two years after Murder on the Orient Express. I love the British mystery on a train sub-genre. It is a unique window into a world that has disappeared. Ah! Aristocrats traveling by train during the inter war period. You can’t get much more golden age than that! Thanks.

Thank you for the kind words. I'm a sucker for a good golden-era train book, too. I was really impressed with this one.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Not golden-era or a soft bedtime read, but an important book nonetheless.

Published March 2024. I have the ebook, in hardback it’s 400 pages. Great detail.

Nuclear weapons were created in the twentieth century to save the world from evil & now in the twenty-first century they are about to destroy it. Jacobsen starts by explaining the buildup of nuclear weapons post-WWII & how it became overkill. Today there are nine countries with stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons in launch ready status that have more than 4000 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The nine countries & their number of launch ready nuclear missiles (not including stockpiles of nuclear warheads) as of 2024 are:

US — 1770
Russia - 1675
China - 500
United Kingdom
France
India - 165
Pakistan - 165
Israel
North Korea - 50

Jacobsen thoroughly describes so the reader understands exactly what happens during “a bolt out of the blue” as the US Nuclear Command & Control refers to a first strike scenario; the US Launch on Warning policy; that an ICBM with a 1-megaton nuclear warhead travels at Mach 5 & the President has only a 6 minute window to decide which weapons & how many to launch in return; that we are closer today to having a nuclear war even by accident, than at any time during the Cold War; that North Korea is the loose cannon (an ICBM launched from North Korea would take just 33 minutes to reach the eastern US); & no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in Armageddon. A single nuclear weapon is a weapon of mass extinction. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

I could go on. A compelling read.

 

[Monte]

Just picked up Frankenstein at a thrift spot. Excited to read it sometime soon. Fairly interesting author backstory and circumstances that lead up to penning.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Re: Nuclear War. You win! I thought I was capturing the crown for the summer’s most depressing reading, but I think you win. I just finished reading “The Devil’s Garden” by John R. Cencich. On the cover it says “A war crimes investigator’s story.” It is basically about the team of international cops (under U.N. auspices) who investigated the war crimes committed in the Former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The author himself mainly focuses on Croatia, but an overview of Bosnia, etc, is also given. Very depressing, but a wealth of procedural and tradecraft information. Amazing the insane cruelty that humans can inflict on each other. If there is a bright side, it’s that Ratko Mladic is now safely behind bars.

Re: Frankenstein. Please write a review when you finish it. Frankenstein is on my list of classics that I need to get around to. I’ve made a dent in the list, but it’s endless. Anyway, at this point I’m mostly fascinated by Shelley’s link to the so called “romantics”.

Right now I am reading SPQR by Mary Beard. All roads lead to Rome!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Franz-Olivier Giesbert "A dictator for dessert" (2013 F, 2016 D)

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Very depressing, but a wealth of procedural and tradecraft information. Amazing the insane cruelty that humans can inflict on each other.

Among the world powers with nuclear weapons there is a gentleman’s agreement to never target a nuclear power plant. On the Pacific coast in CA sits the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. If North Korea (a mad king with a nuclear weapon) were to strike that plant & the fuel rods overheat, the continental US & western Canada would become uninhabitable as far east as eastern Colorado.

If this mad king believes there can be such a thing as a limited nuclear war, & he wants to puff his chest out he has the ability to easily strike Hawaii, with the large US military presence there.

A very unstable individual.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region by David Alff, published in 2024


Despite its ambitious title, the book's length of only 225 pages (before footnotes) tells you this is not going to be a detailed history, but a breezy survey of the country's busiest rail corridor, whose roots stretch back to the country's original Indian footpaths.

That is also the modern corridor's handicap as it's not a single route planned for today's high-speed trains, but an amalgam of footpaths, canals, short train lines and engineering limitations spanning 400-plus years. It's impressive, but not what would best serve the country today.

Author Alff does a good job speeding the reader through the early years of Indian paths, settler expansions and canal building, which preceded the railroads. The unified railroad we know today started in the 1800s as several small lines trying to solve local transportation issues.

It wasn't until the end of the 1800s that a few of the larger railroads - the Pennsylvania and the New York Central - started to consolidate and build out much larger interstate systems. Still, the massive Hudson and East rivers surrounding New York City were formidable obstacles.

Another obstacle was the challenge of running steam engines through long tunnels, which was solved with electricity. Yet even to this day, amazingly, trains switch current from AC to DC at points along the Northeast Corridor because of legacy systems still in use.

The early 1900s is also when some of the huge and architecturally beautified Beaux-Arts and classical railroad stations and terminals started to be built. Later, Alff takes us through the painful series of decisions that led to the demolition of New York's impressive Penn Station.

The demolition of Penn Station was a late sign that the golden age of passenger railroad in America was ending. Economics, by the end of the 1960s, necessitated a government takeover to keep intercity rail service alive.

The birth of Amtrak - the government agency that took over all intercity passenger rail service in 1971 - isn't pretty, but despite regular funding battles, it still limps along today.

Alff devotes nearly a third of the book to the, now, fifty-plus-year travails of Amtrak, including the just-noted funding struggles, the demands of maintaining a far flung rail empire and, of course, never ending technological changes and challenges.

Starting with the discussion of the footpaths, but especially during the Amtrak years, Alff's textbook liberal political views are revealed, as debatable historical points are all seen through a prism that sneers at capitalism, but forgives government failures.

It's Alff's book, so he presents his interpretation of history. His view, though, is only one view, with many historical and present-day statements presented as facts that are not so. Hoover, for example, was hardly a laissez-faire president, as Alff states.

Toward the book's end, Alff drops any pretense of objectivity. He lets his inner liberal antipathy to Ronald Reagan and the second President Bush rip. Political defenders of money-losing trains are heroes; those who argue for budget restraint and cost-benefit analysis are villains.

A more surprising flaw, for a book about a train corridor covering a large part of the east coast, is that there is only one insufficient map located before the title page. Unless you know the region very well, you will be Googling frequently to get a visual of where things are happening.

The Northeast Corridor also suffers from a choppy narrative that never settles on using either a timeline structure or chapters based on themes, so the book can sometimes feel like a brain dump of facts and anecdotes versus a well-structured historical account.

For newbies to rail history, there are better starting points, but for someone basically familiar with the history of the Northeast Corridor who is looking for a refresher with several very good vignettes - and who can tolerate the political bias - The Northeast Corridor is a quick, easy read.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Just finished “SPQR, a history of Ancient Rome” by Mary Beard. 536 pages. It covers roughly the first thousand years of Roman history, until roughly the early 300s CE. The book is well written and easy to read, with plenty of interesting illustrations. On the other hand, it is a history book. Fair warning has been given.

In short, the story of Rome calmed me considerably as we enter our own summer of discontent.

For starters, Ms Beard tells how our own founding fathers studied the ancient Roman historian Polybius and learned how the Romans used checks and balances to foster something that resembled systemic stability. In the first 200 years CE, Rome only had 14 emperors. Some were bad, some were good. Beard says they might as well have been interchangeable. What was important was that they all followed the Augustan template of governance and Rome enjoyed its golden age.

Also, overall, ancient Rome lasted for 1,000 years. You can be sure that during those Centuries there was plenty of trouble and drama, violence and dirty tricks. But no matter who was in power, Johnus Q Publicus was mostly not affected. He muddled along, continuing to enjoy good roads and relative safety. It kinda puts the chaos that I’ve been observing for the last 50 years into context. As long as the overall system does not collapse, we will most likely muddle along fine.

I will keep SPQR on my bedside table for the next few months. There is something comforting about taking the long view of history. (Until, of course, another Dark Ages suddenly drops out of the sky. ) Overall, it was a pretty good book and offered some interesting factoids and fun bits of ancient gossip.

 

[Davidchee5]

On the third Lord of the rings, one of the most beautifully writing works I’ve ever read.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Pleasure of His Company by Bernard Glemser, originally published in 1961 and based on a play by Samuel A. Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner.


Some books are art, while others, maybe not rising to the level of art, offer deep insight into the human condition. Some, though, are just fun page-turners that create engaging characters, even if you know they are archetypes and not real people.

The Pleasure of His Company is entertaining in the same way that many modern TV shows are entertaining: the characters are intelligent, attractive and speak off the cuff with unrealistically perfect sharp barbs, witty observations and smart-sounding philosophical bromides.

No one in real life, perhaps other than Oscar Wilde or William Buckley, speaks like these characters. Still, it's entertaining to see a world where words and sentences are fired off like heat-seeking missiles, here, in service to a mild family feud.

First up is the incredibly named Biddeford Poole, nicknamed Pogo, who is that mid-twentieth century marvel: a man of independent means who travels the world living an exotic life that is captured on the society pages. He's rich, charming, cultured, handsome and social.

Today, he'd be on the board of a few charities – one with "green" bonafides would help – and he'd have to, occasionally, dress like a forklift operator to show his "common man" touch, but in his day, living a life of self-indulgent luxury with style was acceptable.

Two decades earlier, Poole was married to Kate, who is now a happily remarried San Francisco housewife. She and her kind and calm banker second husband, Jim, live in a large pretty house overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

Kate's life is charity lunches, shopping and cocktails. Her life is also seeing her beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, get married this upcoming weekend. Despite being Poole's daughter, Jim and Kate have raised Jessica together since Jessica was five.

That's the setup that sees Poole, who hasn't seen Kate or his daughter in fifteen years, show up unexpectedly - he was invited, but no one thought he'd come - the week before Jessica's wedding.

The rest of the story is Poole pushing Kate's buttons, buttons that he knows too well, while she does the same to his. Poole also forms a seemingly genuine bond with daughter Jessica who has hero-worshiped her society-page-famous dad from afar.

It's all Noel Coward drawing-room banter with an American edge. It's entertaining as heck if you're in the mood for sharp barbs, with no real purpose. It's smart people saying a lot of entertainingly snarky things.

There is a plot of sorts as Poole wants Jessica to ditch her 'boring' rancher fiancé to travel the world with him for a few years. He, of course, presents it as wanting to 'save' his daughter from a sheltered life of boredom.

Kate, of course, doesn't want her ex-husband to derail the pending nuptials, so they, mainly obliquely, fight it out by undermining each other. Poole plays on Kate's insecurity that maybe her life with Jim is boring versus her prior life with him.

Kate retorts that "Pogo," for all his outward nonchalance, needs a muse to hero-worship him or he becomes restless and morose. Her life might be boring, but his life is really a shallow one that is feeling even more shallow as he ages.

There are plenty of fun scenes and mid-century San Francisco atmosphere to make this short, smartly written, but ultimately fluffy book fly by. It's a book you read for a few days while you decide the next "real" book you're going to read.

The final part of the fun equation is that after you've read The Pleasure of His Company, you can check out the not quite as fun, but still good 1961 movie version of the story starring Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds and Lilli Palmer.

Comments on the movie here: #31,561

 

[Fading Fast]

Girls in Their Married Bliss by Edna O'Brien, first published in 1964


By the time you are reading Girls in Their Married Bliss, you are two-thirds of the way through Edna O'Brien's noted trilogy, The Country Girls, which means Kate and Baba, O'Brien's protagonists in all three novels, are two girls you know well.

You want to start the trilogy at the beginning, as the first book, confusingly titled The Country Girls, introduces you to Kate and Baba experiencing very different but interlinked childhoods in the country, which includes a brief shared experience in an unpleasant, but not cruel convent.

In book two, The Lonely Girl, the best friends and sometimes frenemies, the latter because Baba can be brutally selfish, are now late-teens living together in Dublin trying to grow up. This has sincere Kate looking for love, while avarice Baba is looking for a rich boyfriend.

Book three, Girls in Their Married Bliss, is ironically titled, though, as it is an angry book. The first two books are more balanced. In them, Kate's and Baba's lives are often unpleasant, but mixed in is also some fun, joy and hope for the future. Book three, however, is pretty dour throughout.

Kate's marriage, which produced a son, began crumbling at the end of book two, is in full drain-circling mode at the start of book three. Told from Kate's perspective, she and her husband intensely dislike each other's personality and character. It's hard to come back from that.

Baba's marriage to a wealthy developer, a man with a massive insecurity complex that he covers, textbook like, with a huge ego, is only better than Kate's because Baba is more calculating than Kate and doesn't want to lose her luxurious lifestyle.

The thin plot is mainly the dissolution of Kate's marriage, which sees her on her own and leaning on inconsistent Baba for help. Both Kate and Baba also explore new sexual relations, Kate while separated and Baba as an extra-marital affair.

For the day, the books were risqué as the girls are pretty nonchalant about their affairs in what was still a heavily Catholic country. These young men and women are "liberated," but groping their way forward sexually as the sexual revolution they are starting hasn't educated them yet.

These books are not really plot driven. Their value lies in how they touch you: in how O'Brien has you experience life through the girls. Whichever one is narrating—Kate or Baba, as it switches back and forth—O'Brien has you seeing and feeling life as each girl does.

You viscerally understand Kate's loneliness when she leaves her husband and son and is living alone. When Baba has an affair and has to twist the truth to save her marriage, you are almost rooting for her as O'Brien has you experiencing the world through Baba's often selfish eyes.

Kate is an unreliable narrator because she's honest, but driven by emotion, so there's little perspective. Baba is unreliable because she is a liar, but she's honest with herself, so by proxy, she's honest in a way with the reader. This, oddly, makes her more reliable than Kate.

The other value in the books is O'Brien's talent for putting you in a time and place – Ireland in the early 1960s – with details like the different types of cigarettes and how they conveyed social status, which give you a true sense of the nuances of the culture.

Girls in Their Married Bliss is not fun or easy reading as these are bad marriages in which everyone is at fault, but it is hard for anyone to fully walk away. It's like watching a very slow-motion train wreck that no one can stop.

The Country Girl Trilogy is a valuable time capsule of Ireland in the early sixties seen through the lives of two girls whom the reader grows up with over three books. The books' easy-to-read style makes the stories move along quickly, even in the less-than-happy third entry.


Comments on Book One of the Trilogy, The Country Girls here: #9,093

Comment on Book Two of the Trilogy, The Lonely Girl here: #9,129

Ms. O'Brien just passed away on July 27 of this year at the age of 93.

 

[Fading Fast]

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns originally published in 1950


There is a genre, maybe it's a style, of novels where a person writes a very passionate story about their own early adulthood as a roman à clef. Every generation has its share of these books.

In the 1980s, Jay McInerney, in Bright Lights, Big City, spun his version into literary gold and, for a moment, earned him the tag "the next Hemingway," then calmer heads prevailed.

Back in the 1950s, Barbara Comyns did the same thing in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths with her early adult life in 1930s England. It's the ultimate version of "write what you know."

Comyns' roman à clef starts with her doppelganger, Sophia, in her early twenties. Sophia married an artist, Charles, who paints with a passion, sells almost none of his work and, by default, expects his new wife to support him.

Two-thirds of this short novel is Sophia trying to manage her marriage during the Depression when she had no skills, but a need to earn money. Sophia, presented here, is clueless to life, but sincere in her attempts to keep her marriage alive.

Theirs is a bohemian life. They move through a series of shabby flats, depending on if they have some or no money at the time. They're often behind on rent, food and utility bills, but almost always have money for painting supplies for Charles.

At times, their poverty is almost quaint as it's a badge of honor in their milieu. Yet when Sophia gets pregnant – something Charles and his arrogantly obtuse family blame on Sophia – the poverty becomes gruesome as Sophia has to give birth in a public hospital.

Author Comyns notes in one of the title pages that the hospital scene is true. It will make you happy you aren't giving birth in a public hospital in 1930s London. Caring for the baby, too, is all left up to Sophia who earns a little money modeling.

Even when these two inherit some money, enough to live comfortably for a year - they don't save it, but live comfortably for a year and then return to poverty. Rational readers will want to shake the book at the budgetary insanity of these two.

Affairs follow – meaningless ones for Charles and a meaningful one for Sophia. Their marriage disintegrates as another child comes and Charles simply wants out of the responsibility. He's either mean or unawarely selfish - the latter seem more likely.

Sophia ends up as the cook for a quirky upper-class family that treats her nicely; they even pay to have her son privately schooled. Despite their kindness, because they see her as the help and not one of the family, she feels lonely.

What follows are a few years of Sophia living with and working for this offbeat family while she regains her center after the chaos of her married years. Then her life takes one more turn in the book's climax.

Presented by Comyns, Sophia is unsophisticated about life, slapdash about practical things, kind in general and attracted to the artistic world. She does not plan anything, but responds to situations only when they reach a crisis stage.

Despite leading to serial disasters, it takes many years for Sophia to learn to plan and save. It's a 1930s version of what today we call "adulting." Sophia shows that, even then, many kids didn't "adult" until they tried very hard all through their twenties not to.

Comyns knows her characters well because they were the people in her life. She also has a writer's eye for the details that define a person or situation. Her observations about flats, furniture, cooking and the like are, today, fun time travel to 1930s England.

You can read a lot of social commentary into Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and twist it into modern arguments over healthcare, childcare, child support laws, and whatever else you wish, but that is our obsession, as the book isn't really about that.

Sophia didn't wind up in a public hospital because she and her husband tried to do everything right - get jobs, save, plan, live within their means - she ended up there because they did the opposite of all of that.

It's Comyns' keen observation about one young woman who was, effectively, an artist/bohemian groupie – which one assumes Comyns was as well – that is the heart and soul of this short poignant tale about, well, maturing and facing life rationally.

These types of novels - fictionalized stories of a person's passionate but chaotic early adulthood - are fun because they are so real. Youth experiences life in a way and with a zeal that few of us do as we get older.

Even when starting out as adults, most of us color reasonably within the lines, but the Comyns, McInerneys, and their ilk don't. Yet they do then spin their wild young lives into engaging novels that are best if, as is Comyns', they are brief.

 

[Bfd70]

Piece of Cake Derek Robinson. RAf pilots in 1940

 

[Tiki Tom]

Piece of Cake Derek Robinson. RAf pilots in 1940

I will have to add “Piece of Cake” to my list. Ripping WWII RAF Battle of Britain novel. Most of the reviews that I read were very good. Unfortunately I‘m having trouble inserting a link in this case (keeps rolling over into ads.)

Anyway, PoC Fits right into the interests of the Lounge. Thanks!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Murder Scene Harbor - "Death at the boarding bridges" (2024), by Andreas Kästner/Angélique Kästner.

A classic crime movel, but this time placed in the Water-Police, Hamburg. Andreas Kästner himself was a Water-Policeman.

"Wasserschutzpolizeikomissariat 2" (WSPK 2, Steinwerder)

 

[Fading Fast]

Mariana by Monica Dickens, originally published in 1940


Fiction can often seem trivial. After all, how important does the story of a middle-class girl growing up in 1930s England sound?

Surely we have better things to do than to learn about a fictional character's minor trials, tribulations, and triumphs with all the demands on our time today.

Except that what Ms. Dickens has accomplished in Mariana, with her main character, Mary, a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the author herself, is as close to time travel as one can get.

Mariana richly captures the atmosphere of pre-WWII England through the personal journey of growth and exploration of a young, middle-class girl navigating the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

There is nothing shocking here – it's just Mary growing up. She goes to school when whispering in class was considered a discipline problem and no one thought of being truly disrespectful to the teachers.

At home, her pragmatic single mom, who owns a modestly successful dress store – Mary's dad passed away when she was an infant – and Mary's bohemianism actor uncle raise her in an atmosphere of love with the occasional worries about money.

As an adolescent, the pinnacle of Mary's life is school holidays spent at her grandmother's rambling, a bit disheveled but filled-with-cousins country home, a joy to only-child Mary. Throw in some puppy love with her eldest cousin, Denys, and Mary's summers are idyllic.

Eventually, though, school ends, grandmother passes, the country house is sold, and life goes on, which for Mary includes a begged-for year studying drama only to discover an actress she'll never be.

A painful breakup, a year abroad in France, a new love and a quite quick, but maybe not right engagement follow. There's more in the climax, but this is really a journey story.

Author Monica Dickens – yes, she is Charles Dickens' granddaughter – shines in capturing the small details that make a situation feel alive, as here, when she has Mary explain the wonderful smell of her grandmother's beloved home:

"It was the smell of clean sheets that reminded Mary of what, when she was a child, she called the Chardbury Smell [her Grandmother's house]. It was...an indefinable potpourri of all the fragrant things in the house – roses, wood-smoke, polished floors, bread, and lavender kept old linen."

Dickens also has a talent for capturing those big moments in one's life when everything pivots.

Here, you can feel the coldness of this nonchalant, short breakup note Mary received from her boyfriend – a boyfriend with whom she thought she had an "understanding" (i.e., they'd be married), but whom she caught cheating on her:

"Mary dear,

What can I say except that I'm sorry and I hope we'll always be friends. I'll understand if you'd rather we didn't meet again."

Dickens explores that turning point as a brokenhearted Mary leaves by train:

"With the beginnings of a new determination, she tore the letter up into very small pieces, and watched them flutter backwards out of the window as the train gathered speed."

Of course, it took much longer for Mary's heart to heal, but who hasn't made a gesture of determination like that, even if it took much longer for the real turn to come?

In portraying Mary's personal journey, Dickens also captures England at that moment. It is the 1930s, and England is a country whose middle class is so comfortable in the security of the Empire and so confident in its place in the world, that its focus is on living its life, not politics.

Wrong as history proved it to be, Dickens shows a middle-class England worried about houses, clothes, sports, food, wine, and vacations, but not geopolitics or an angry man with a funny mustache over in Germany.

Dickens indirectly but powerfully emphasizes this historical naïveté by telling the story as one long flashback bookended by Mary, early in WWII, waiting for news of her husband, a naval officer whose ship has just been torpedoed.

Mariana is an easy read as the pages just turn while you are engrossed in Mary's personal journey, so much so you almost incidentally absorb the richly captured atmosphere of pre-war England.

Fiction that explores an eternal aspect of the human condition – a young girl's inner thoughts and outward struggles as she matures – while transporting you to another time and place like England in the last peaceful moments of its Empire is fiction that is anything but trivial.

 

[Trenchfriend]

My actual crime novel needed 2/3 to become thrilling, Jeesus.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Finished my actual crime novel. Meh.

And now proceeding with "A dictator for dessert" (2013) by Franz-Olivier Giesbert. It's about the Armenians and the genocide.
Rose is 105 years old, lives in Marseille and is now ready to write her memoirs.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Really good!