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The right day and everything
Sep. 18th, 2013 09:14 pmIf it's Wednesday, it must be time for books.
Just finished: Bernard deVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846. I really liked this: it is an entirely and shamelessly biased account of the main events of that year: the war between the US and Mexico (and as part of that, the annexation of most of the West), the exodus of the Mormons from Nauvoo to Salt Lake, and the movement of settlers to Oregon and California (including the Donner party). It’s a lively and well-written book; I feel that if a history book is described as “novelistic” by reviewers in the 40s, the reader should be ready to accept that there won’t be many footnotes but there will be a lot of imaginative reconstruction. DeVoto spends a lot of time explaining which of the characters he describes were actively malevolent, and which just stupid, which is very entertaining if, like me, you like your history writing to have a moral dimension. I particularly enjoyed the stuff about California, and the declaration of the California republic, because most of it was the work of idiots with a taste for amateur dramatics, and it all seems like such a comedy of errors. I also now know who a lot of the people San Francisco streets were named for were.
Currently reading: Sharon Penman, While Christ and His Saints Slept. Apparently, the war between Stephen and Matilda (or Maude) was really long. So is this book. I’m only about 60% through it and I’m pretty tired of their shenanigans; I can only imagine that the English people felt likewise.
In fact I’m enjoying this in a slow, laid-back way, especially because it isn’t heading toward some kind of tragic catastrophe like her books about Wales or The Sunne in Splendour, which is about Richard III. (I decided to stop reading that because I discovered that the problem with aking Richard III a nice guy rather than an evil genius is that at a certain point he starts looking like a real idiot. (It interests me that people who are into both ASOIAF and Richard III generally do not seem to be Ned Stark fans, because Ned Stark is what happens if Richard III hesitates.)
It looks like I will be reading this book for the foreseeable future, so I have no idea what I will read next.
Just finished: Bernard deVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846. I really liked this: it is an entirely and shamelessly biased account of the main events of that year: the war between the US and Mexico (and as part of that, the annexation of most of the West), the exodus of the Mormons from Nauvoo to Salt Lake, and the movement of settlers to Oregon and California (including the Donner party). It’s a lively and well-written book; I feel that if a history book is described as “novelistic” by reviewers in the 40s, the reader should be ready to accept that there won’t be many footnotes but there will be a lot of imaginative reconstruction. DeVoto spends a lot of time explaining which of the characters he describes were actively malevolent, and which just stupid, which is very entertaining if, like me, you like your history writing to have a moral dimension. I particularly enjoyed the stuff about California, and the declaration of the California republic, because most of it was the work of idiots with a taste for amateur dramatics, and it all seems like such a comedy of errors. I also now know who a lot of the people San Francisco streets were named for were.
Currently reading: Sharon Penman, While Christ and His Saints Slept. Apparently, the war between Stephen and Matilda (or Maude) was really long. So is this book. I’m only about 60% through it and I’m pretty tired of their shenanigans; I can only imagine that the English people felt likewise.
In fact I’m enjoying this in a slow, laid-back way, especially because it isn’t heading toward some kind of tragic catastrophe like her books about Wales or The Sunne in Splendour, which is about Richard III. (I decided to stop reading that because I discovered that the problem with aking Richard III a nice guy rather than an evil genius is that at a certain point he starts looking like a real idiot. (It interests me that people who are into both ASOIAF and Richard III generally do not seem to be Ned Stark fans, because Ned Stark is what happens if Richard III hesitates.)
It looks like I will be reading this book for the foreseeable future, so I have no idea what I will read next.
