What book are you reading, ιf' - Iff you read books

[Valka D'Ur]

I finally finished that Highlander fanzine.

And now (randomly grabs a 'zine from a box)...

Hm. Doctor Who. The Console Room, No. 8, vol. 2, published in May 1993.

Looks interesting. I have a huge collection of print 'zines and haven't actually read most of them. This is Classic Who, well before the nuWho era. Looks like the first story has Sarah Jane Smith meeting Dodo Chaplain, on Earth.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished How to Stay Married, a memoir about a man who discovered his wife was having an affair, and how they worked through it despite their shared sorrow and despair. It's really about two broken people trying to put themselves together again. Funny and gut-wrenching at the same time.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Still working my way through Codex Seraphinianus.
The Voynich manuscript should be a breeze after that.

Spoiler example :

 

[Quintillus]

Please tell how that is.

Wow, how is it March already? It's already been a month or so since I finished The Cloud Roads. I enjoyed it though. The beginning is a bit slower than Murderbot as she sets the fantasy world parameters, but after that the pacing, action, and plot development are of a similar quality. Some court politics/whodunnit elements as well. Overall I think I still prefer Murderbot, but I'll likely read the second part in the Raksura series later this year, and would have picked it up from the local library if they'd had a copy.

----

Instead, I picked up three books, but the one that has me turning pages is The Spy Who Loved, which is one word short of being a Bond film title, but is non-fiction. It's the story of Christine Granville (née Krystyna Skarbek), a Pole who worked as a spy for the British during WWII, and who had a nearly insatiable appetite for danger and adventure. Prior to the war, this had been channeled into relatively safe pursuits such as skiing in the High Tatras and, in 1939, accompanying her husband on a new diplomatic posting to Africa. But when the war emerged (while they were in Africa), she felt compelled to serve her country, soon joined Section D (later the SOE), and by the spring of 1940, was thankful for the "opportunity to experience adventure and real danger"; her Polish colleagues did not all agree on the glass-half-full outlook.

It's well written and has a fascinating subject. Skiing back into occupied Poland multiple times, sneaking Allied news and propoganda in, and microfilm gathered by Polish intelligence out, helping countless Poles, Slovaks, and captured British pilots evacuate to still-neutral Hungary, and dealing with numerous close calls. There are love polygons, escapes from Slovak and Hungarian police, and plenty of slivovitz, the Hungarian plum brandy. As many of the other characters are also spies, there are also intentionally-conflicting versions of events, which the author does a good job of reconciling and noting in the footnotes.

Now I kind of want to fly to Poland, rent some wooden skis, and see those mountains for myself...

 

[Birdjaguar]

Wow, how is it March already? It's already been a month or so since I finished The Cloud Roads. I enjoyed it though. The beginning is a bit slower than Murderbot as she sets the fantasy world parameters, but after that the pacing, action, and plot development are of a similar quality. Some court politics/whodunnit elements as well. Overall I think I still prefer Murderbot, but I'll likely read the second part in the Raksura series later this year, and would have picked it up from the local library if they'd had a copy.

----

Instead, I picked up three books, but the one that has me turning pages is The Spy Who Loved, which is one word short of being a Bond film title, but is non-fiction. It's the story of Christine Granville (née Krystyna Skarbek), a Pole who worked as a spy for the British during WWII, and who had a nearly insatiable appetite for danger and adventure. Prior to the war, this had been channeled into relatively safe pursuits such as skiing in the High Tatras and, in 1939, accompanying her husband on a new diplomatic posting to Africa. But when the war emerged (while they were in Africa), she felt compelled to serve her country, soon joined Section D (later the SOE), and by the spring of 1940, was thankful for the "opportunity to experience adventure and real danger"; her Polish colleagues did not all agree on the glass-half-full outlook.

It's well written and has a fascinating subject. Skiing back into occupied Poland multiple times, sneaking Allied news and propoganda in, and microfilm gathered by Polish intelligence out, helping countless Poles, Slovaks, and captured British pilots evacuate to still-neutral Hungary, and dealing with numerous close calls. There are love polygons, escapes from Slovak and Hungarian police, and plenty of slivovitz, the Hungarian plum brandy. As many of the other characters are also spies, there are also intentionally-conflicting versions of events, which the author does a good job of reconciling and noting in the footnotes.

Now I kind of want to fly to Poland, rent some wooden skis, and see those mountains for myself...

The Sierra Nevada just got 10 more feet of snow and they are quite a bit closer and higher than Poland's High Tatras. I recently saw a (Netflix?) show from Poland that featured those mountains. As I recall it was pretty good and the mountains spectacular.

 

[Quintillus]

The Sierra Nevada just got 10 more feet of snow and they are quite a bit closer and higher than Poland's High Tatras. I recently saw a (Netflix?) show from Poland that featured those mountains. As I recall it was pretty good and the mountains spectacular.

Oh, nice! I have been considering an end-of-season trip but am aware that having natural snow makes a big difference. It has been icy here recently and that is rough to ride on. Probably an order of magnitude tougher on the joints, I need a bit of a break now! I'm pretty far from the Sierra Nevadas though, if I can find somewhere in WV/PA/NY (the latter of which, I hear, has been even less snowy than Ohio, oddly enough), that would be much more economical. Also the reason that wanting to go to Poland is "kind of" rather than "book the next flight".

The specific resort that's a recurring location in The Spy Who Loved is Zakopane. The other thing it has made me realize is missing in Ohio is the apres-ski culture. Which sounds appealing to me, and turned out to be quite useful in terms of connections for a future spy...

 

[Birdjaguar]

Oh, nice! I have been considering an end-of-season trip but am aware that having natural snow makes a big difference. It has been icy here recently and that is rough to ride on. Probably an order of magnitude tougher on the joints, I need a bit of a break now! I'm pretty far from the Sierra Nevadas though, if I can find somewhere in WV/PA/NY (the latter of which, I hear, has been even less snowy than Ohio, oddly enough), that would be much more economical. Also the reason that wanting to go to Poland is "kind of" rather than "book the next flight".

The specific resort that's a recurring location in The Spy Who Loved is Zakopane. The other thing it has made me realize is missing in Ohio is the apres-ski culture. Which sounds appealing to me, and turned out to be quite useful in terms of connections for a future spy...

The Lake Tahoe area has several ski areas that just got dumped on.

 

[EnglishEdward]

On Tuesday I finished reading a paperback copy of the:

Grantchester Grind

by the late British author

Thomas Sharpe

Copyright 1995

It is a, now old fashioned, comedy about an old Cambridge college Porterhouse.

I rather enjoyed it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

The Irish in Baseball: An Early History.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am reading the Father Brown stories, in chronological order in their collections, but it seems most of the ones I had read were already in the first collection. Already 3 in the first 5: The Secret Garden, the Queer Feet and the Invisible Man.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

112 Gripes about the French
A 1945 handbook issued by the United States military authorities to enlisted personnel arriving in France after the Liberation. It was meant to defuse the growing tension between the American military and the locals.

112 Gripes About the French - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Example 3: The French don't invite us into their homes.
Answer: They don't have the food. (The Germans took it.)...

Example 105: You wouldn't think they'd even been in the war the way a city like Paris looks.
Answer: No, you wouldn't. You can't tell what the war cost France by a stroll down the Champs Elysees, just as you couldn't tell what the war cost America by a walk down the Atlantic City boardwalk.
You can't in Paris see the 1,115,000 French men and women and children who died, were wounded, were in concentration camps, or were shot as hostages.
...
You can't see the increase (300-400%) in tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, infantile paralysis.

And the most remarkable..

Example 35: The French do things differently than we do. That's what I don't like.
Answer: ...The story is told of an American soldier who saw some Chinese putting rice on the graves in a Chungking cemetery.
"That doesn't make sense", the American said with a smile. "When do you expect the dead to eat the rice?"
"When your dead return to smell your flowers", was the answer.

Wow! What an unexpectedly brilliant comeback line! That's one Paul Erdős would say, "is one for the Book".

It's an excellent companion piece to the remarkable A Welcome to Britain, 1943 US Army advice film for soldiers stationed in England and fronted by Burgess Meredith (aka The Penguin in the 1960s Batman series) and also featuring Bob Hope.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World


"Eat, Poop, Die" should be a market alternative to "Eat, Pray, Love".

 

[Takhisis]

On Tuesday I finished reading a paperback copy of the:

Grantchester Grind

by the late British author

Thomas Sharpe

Copyright 1995

It is a, now old fashioned, comedy about an old Cambridge college Porterhouse.

I rather enjoyed it.

I presume you must have read Wilt at some point?

 

[EnglishEdward]

Not sure, I might have read a borrowed copy 40 years or so ago, I don't have a copy of Wilt on my list.

 

[Takhisis]

You definitely should (re)read it.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Still struggling with Swann's Way

Doesn't help that it's full of sentences like this one:

But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was 'fully qualified' to be received by any of the 'upper middle class,' the most respected barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had ever set eyes—that would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would, when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or—to be content with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray—as the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.

 

[Takhisis]

Oh, come on, there are entire short stories that don't take up as much space.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I've just started reading Max Boot's The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018), about how he parted ways with the Republican Party and with American conservatism more generally. It's maybe a little out of date, but not too badly, and anyway the early parts of the book are kind of a memoir, about how he came to be a conservative in the first place. In places, I can almost see what drew him to it, given who he was at the time and where he'd come from and what was going on in the world; but then, in some places it's as if he's arrived in our world from an alternate reality, such as when he describes the GOP and American conservatism as representing optimism and inclusiveness. In particular, as he names the people - politicians and writers, mainly - who shaped his early thinking, I can't help but notice that they're about 97% male. I'd have to go back and take a head-count to be sure, but I think he's named about 30 people who were influential on his thinking through his mid-20s, and I think only 1 has been a woman. And I would guess they're 100% White. There's a podcaster and YouTuber I listen to, who once said something like, "you should take an inventory of the people you get your news and analysis and opinions from, and if they're all men, you might have a problem."

 

[Josu]

Ended The poppy war by R.F. Kuang. Good stuff. I will follow up R.F. Kuang closely
Set aside M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati. I was not enjoying it

Started The hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Umpteenth try.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Ended The poppy war by R.F. Kuang. Good stuff. I will follow up R.F. Kuang closely

I recommend The Grace of Kings (2015), by Ken Liu.