Meredy's 2020 Reading Journal

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in my reading journal.

This is my ninth year of logging my library acquisitions, discards, reading, and reflections on LibraryThing. Even in a low journaling year such as the past two, I value the record, the stimulus, and especially the warm and interesting contacts I've found on LibraryThing.

Here's to a great reading year.

Meredy

Link to 2019 reading journal.

Here's where I list my reading and link to comments and reviews. I truly hope to have more of those this year than last. And I look forward to seeing the thoughts and recommendations of my fellow readers on LT.

January

• King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard (1885), 186 pages; 1/15/2020 (★★★☆).

February

• She, by H. Rider Haggard (1886), 233 pages; 2/5/2020 (★★★☆).
• The Sleeping Doll, by Jeffery Deaver (2007), 429 pages; 2/24/2020 (★★★).
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare (1596), 5 acts; 2/27/2020. I lack the audacity to rate Shakespeare with stars.

March

• Not one! Reading and still reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer (1960), begun on 2/28.

April

• Same as March. About at 44% at the end of April.

May

• Continuing.

June

• Transcription, by Kate Atkinson
• Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen; review: post 108.

July

• Same as March. About at 75% in early July.

August

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer
• Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, by David Shariatmadari
• Too Much and Never Enough: How My family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.; review: post 94.

September

• Witch Wood, by John Buchan
• A Beginning at the End, by Mike Chen; review: post 109.

October

• Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin's Spies, by Gordon Corera; review: post 107.

November

>1 Meredy: I have enjoyed your threads and will continue to follow you. I hope 2020 is a good year for your reading and all other things.

Wishing you a great 2020 with lots of enjoyable reading

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Here's hoping that you'll have time to read plenty of books in 2020! I will look forward to your comments.

I'm always happy to see that you have posted, Meredy, Happy New Year, and happy reading!

Wishing you a wonderful 2020, in life and in books!

Happy 2020. I'll be hanging out and following along.

I am still in awe of you six word reviews. They are masterful, erudite and witty.

Hope your 2020 is full of excellent reading matter!

2019 in six: Rough year, but not all bad.

Thank you kindly for your presence, friends. All good wishes to you for this possibly shaky year.

And please remember to write out 2020 in full when you sign forms, documents, checks, etc. I read a warning about how easily a simple xx/xx/20 can be altered by adding digits, and not to your advantage.

Also starring through, I read many more threads than I can comment on! Happy New Year.

>12 Meredy:
Yay! A six-word review.

>12 Meredy: Thank you, that is a useful reminder.

Here's hoping that 2020 turns out to be a better year for you.

Reflections on reading in 2019, in six:

   A lot of death and conflict.

Emerging theme:

   Hidden things being exposed: truth revealed.

>16 Meredy: It is great to see your six-word reviews coming back.

Starred. Because you are always a star in my book!!

Browsing around various pages, I've just been eyeing the Lincoln Rhyme series while trying to steer clear of spoilers. Before I launch myself into it, I'd be interested in opinions.

Mystery-wise-speaking, I love Nero Wolfe and Brother Cadfael, and years (and years) back I liked all of Agatha Christie, Gervase Fen, John Dickson Carr, Gideon Fell (I know I have authors and characters mixed there). As a youngster I read all of Sherlock Holmes, and I still reread them from time to time. I've followed Harry Dresden while kind of not wanting to (and loved him in spite of myself--thanks, @MrsLee). And I don't like that French gal who is brilliant but has to have common idioms explained to her again and again because, what, she can't remember them after twenty times? or the depressed alcoholic Norwegian guy who required not one but two really weird rare diseases in a single novel to solve a stunningly bizarre murder. I liked Rowling's first civilian mystery, disliked the second, and stayed away after that. And I loathed Amelia Peabody after the first book. So that's kind of my range, just for reference.

I also liked Carlotta Carlyle (whom I mention because I noted a newer Linda Barnes series showing up on your page, @Bookmarque) and all the nostalgic back-home trips she took me on around Boston and Cambridge, at least until she went completely into the weeds over her obnoxious "little sister."

So a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down would be appreciated before I go all in. My basic questions: well written? solid main characters? delivers on its promises? If you have an opinion on Jeffery Deaver, please share.

Well, I'll give it a go.

I've read all of the LR books and like them because they are seriously unpredictable. He gets me every time. Even when I'm on my guard and suspecting everyone...he gets me. Even when I keep notes and analyze everything...he gets me.

There's a LOT of forensic detail and physical evidence. So much so that there is an ongoing whiteboard in the text to keep track of what they find and how it's related to everything else. Hard to do in an audio I imagine so that's why I've always stuck to print.

Lincoln himself is an asshole to not put too fine a point on it. He's rude. Arrogant. Dismissive of what he does not approve. Judgmental. But he's also brilliant, dogged, loyal and wryly funny at times. In a sense you can't blame him for being short with people since he's a quadriplegic and has been through the mill, but I don't forgive him everything.

Amelia, Thom and Lon and the others find something worthy besides the forensic expert and there's a nice story arc there in the background.

The writing is up and down. Sometimes Deaver gets a wicked verbal tic and can't help repeating the same word over and over. One that sticks in my mind was datamining. All well and good, but it was about 10 years past it's OMG cool period and seemed really dated - like he just discovered it and couldn't stop saying it. But overall he's a decent writer. Good pacing, character development, plotting and from what I can tell, ordinance, forensic and police practice knowledge as well.

Funny you should bring these up because I was thinking about dipping back into the series for a certain story-within-a-story with a recurring bad guy.

The new TV show is awful.

>20 Bookmarque: Thank you so much! That's a great basis for prediction. I'll give the series a try.

When I see an author go on a rip with a pet word, though, it's the editor who gets the black mark in my book. Also there are (and have been for some time) software tools that can give you word counts so you can avoid that jarring echo effect. I've used one even on 300-page manuscripts. There are some words that stand out so much ("inchoate" pops to mind) that I think they shouldn't be used more than once in a full-length book. It's one thing for a character to have a favorite expression, however wearisome it may be, and quite another for an author to be seemingly unconscious of grating repetition.

I think I mentioned the editor letting it continue when s/he shouldn't have in my review of that book. He also fell prey to 'the criminalist said' and other dumb writing workshop fail stuff. It's not always, but I have caught it. Not everyone can be as smooth with dialog as John Sanford.

>21 Meredy: And that's why a good editor is worth her weight in silver pen nibs: it's amazing how hard it can be for a writer to see that, sometimes (ahem--or so I'm told.)

>23 Marissa_Doyle: Good point. It occurs to me that Mission to South Africa that I noted in my thread needed at least a very strict editor, if not a total rewrite.

It's been a strange reading year or two. Bedtime is prime reading time for me, and for decades I'd read for an hour or more before the lights went out. My finished list is so short now mainly because I can't last for an hour after I turn in. I used to read about thirty pages a night, on average. Now it's more like ten.

And yet I have just begun William Shirer's landmark tome (a true tome, at 1250 pages) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I borrowed a paperback copy of the 50th anniversary edition from the library and am probably going to have to renew it for five years. In three nights I've only finished the introduction.

Why am I doing this instead of a comfortable mystery or an uplifting Zen reader? I think it's more important than ever to remember this stuff. I've read a lot about North Korea and Russia, and now it's the Reich.

Wondering what they'll read about us one day.

>25 Meredy: I'd like to read that some day. I've just been intimidated by the length. I bet that is one thick paperback!

>26 Narilka: It's what I call a wrist-breaker, all right, and all the more so because I usually hold the book up in one hand while lying back on a pile of pillows. Neal Stephenson's Anathem was another one that left me with a lame paw. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've tackled a nonfiction work of this heft before, although there have been some novels. Guess this argues for a Kindle read, doesn't it?

>27 Meredy: I went on sale for Kindle a couple months back. Wish I'd snagged it. Hopefully that means it will go on sale again.

>28 Narilka: I'm still a steadfast reader of books on paper, but you can't beat a Kindle for portability and choice, especially for quick grabs on the way out the door and long sits in waiting rooms. I overcame my resistance about five years ago (and resistance happens to be one of my specialties). I don't regret it.

>29 Meredy: Oh yes, I love my kindle. It's so darn convenient. I also still read paperbacks and even the occasional hardback :)

I never set reading goals in numbers or try for a particular count; that's not what I read for. Nevertheless, since joining LT, I have kept track. In a normal year (or what I thought was normal), I used to read from fifty to seventy-five books, averaging 200 to 300 pages each. A few years ago, I logged a hundred. Last year, however, my list came to only twenty.

So far in 2020, even more of an off year for me, I'll have completed only four at the end of this quarter, one of them a very quick read (message #2).

And now I'm into my longest read in years, the Shirer, as I mentioned in #25 above. I've just passed the 10% mark (my Kindle tells me). This is going to take months.

So instead of waiting until I finish it to post any comments, I'm thinking I'll make a couple of progress reports.

Now more than ever, and today even more than a week ago, I think we have to remember what it's like when insanity grips a nation. Maybe, maybe, maybe we won't have to do it all again.

>31 Meredy: In the past I did some in-progress updates on books I was reading, mostly fiction. I found it interesting to look back at what I was anticipating at different stages of my read and how the story actually turned out. In some cases it was a record of my over thinking things; in others it was a disappointment that I had more imagination than the author. Thankfully it was the former more often than being the latter.

After nearly two months, I've just passed the one-third mark in the Shirer book. When I began it in February, none of us realized that the world as we knew it was about to pass away.

This is an especially chilling time to be reading about a brutal, relentlessly self-promoting megalomaniac with an insatiable appetite for domination and revenge, who seduced a nation with his rhetoric and his instinct for turning crises to his advantage--creating the crises himself, if need be. The crisis of our age is upon us now, and we have few leaders we can trust. Trust has been leached out of us.

If we have learned anything useful from our collective histories, I hope we remember it now when wisdom and guidance are rarer than ever.

>33 Meredy: I'm glad that you posted, as I was starting to worry about your absence.

I'm sure the book is too chilling a reminder that our nation is in a much more precarious situation than many would like to admit. (Pretty sure I started this one in my late 20s and bailed out. So kudos for sticking with it!)

>34 clamairy: Thank you. I'm grateful for your concern. I have actually been around pretty frequently, although without posting much. Some days I just don't have the steam.

If we had a function that showed date of last visit on our profiles, it would perform a nice social service, don't you think?

>35 Meredy: It would, but I suspect it would have to be optional. There are some who use the site who wouldn't want that tracked, I'm sure.

>35 Meredy: That would be an interesting optional feature. I'm more of a reader on many threads. I have sometimes wondered if they would implement the 'like' feature for thread comments, like they have for reviews.

How do you like the Shirer so far? That is one I haven't read yet, the only Shirer I've read is The Sinking of the Bismarck.

>35 Meredy:, >36 clamairy: I see what you both mean. There are certainly going to be people here who wouldn't wànt to be tracked to the extent of it being easy to identify when they were last reading on the site.

But on the other hand, when someone goes quiet, particularly in these times, one does worry.

However they may simply be reading something sizeable, and//or too busy to be reading and replying to discussion threads. Or they may be dealing with issues that they don't want to discuss here.

I have been wondering if a weekly Green Dragon "I'm still here" check-in thread would be appropriate. No discussions allowed on the thread (so as to minimise the time it takes to read), but a simple way to let other Dragoneers know that you still exist, even if not exactly OK (People have experienced bereavements, or have sick relatives and friends, so "OK" may seem too much to ask at times.)

What do you both think?

>35 Meredy:, >36 clamairy: & >38 -pilgrim-:

I would normally be apprehensive about being tracked (notwithstanding any undercover excursions or cloak and dagger assignments - there are precautions one can take for those events) but when I received my Google Timeline report in February and it showed my travelling around London on our four-day break, I found it very cheery as it reminded me of the great time we had. That trip included meeting up with my on-line friend of over 14 years from The Philippines, probably a once in a lifetime chance to meet; meeting @-pilgrim- and @Sakerfalcon; visiting the famous Foyles' Bookshop, where the aforementioned meetings took place; a lovely meal in an Italian restaurant called Bizarro (established the year I was born and still going strong); visiting The Paddington Bear Shop in Paddington Station and getting souvenirs for our grandchildren; seeing the Paddington Bear statues; meeting up with Nick Harkaway for a cup of coffee; getting to spend a few hours in The British Museum; bumping into Denis Lawson and getting the chance to thank him for all his work; visiting Diagon Alley, or should I say, "Cecil Court"; visiting Cambridge Circus, made famous as "The Circus" in John Le Carré's Smiley novels;...and buying one or two books.

That prompted me to look at my movements in 2019 and while I had four bereavements in 2019 and was viewing it as the worst year ever, my Google tracked movements reminded me of some great high points of the year, including our first family meet-up in August when about forty of my family members came together in Donegal for a day and we had a great time. I also got to meet @haydninvienna in 2019; another highlight of the year. That is twice I got to meet Richard and I hope I have many more chances.

And 2019 was the year of Worldcon in Dublin when I got to meet other LTers, including @maddz, @RobertDay, @anglemark (both of them), and @Imryl, not to mention many other friends who are not on LT. I also got to meet, quite by chance, T.J., a close friend of @jillmwo's. We surprised Jill with a photograph of the two of us on facebook messenger. Jill was very surprised. :-) That was a fantastic coincidence and now I have another friend, and I got all the background stories bout Jill. Those will see me into my retirement in the comfort and style I wish to become accustomed.

I do worry about some of my LT friends when I do not hear from them for a while. There are some who are no longer active here but are on Facebook so I can keep in touch there.

Good to see you posting @meredy. I see we are going to have to get LT to develop a feature to identify the lurkers so that we know they are still about.

>38 -pilgrim-: For a very long time we had a new weekend thread started every Friday, but these days it's only started sporadically. Not sure if a check-in thread would work as anticipated, but you're more than welcome to start one. LTers rarely behave as one would expect.

>39 pgmcc: "Those will see me into my retirement in the comfort and style I wish to become accustomed."

LOL!!

>40 clamairy: I never tended to post on the weekend threads because my weekends have tended to be very boring. I have been unable to leave the house for almost all of them for the entire time I have been on LT (First housebound after a fall, then for chemotherapy.) Since the latter mainly means spending weekend lying back, feeling crappy, it is not something one thinks anyone else wants to hear about!

That is why I suggested the check-in thread. Somewhere where boring life, or "I don't want to talk about it" is fine, but we can just let one another know that we are still here.

I'll give it a try.

>42 -pilgrim-: I think it's a great idea. I'm all for it. Why don't you start it?

>43 Meredy: Thanks for the encouragement. Since I was hoping it would work as a weekly thing, I thought I'd start it on Friday - as most convenient for both Dragoneers who use LT mainly during the week, and the weekend users.

>44 -pilgrim-: Do be sure to include your concept of short here-I-am posts...and, as clamairy says, expect variations.

>39 pgmcc: That's a clear illustration of how different things can look in retrospect from the way they looked at the time--and how a little reminder can trigger a whole chain of nearly forgotten associations. You have a wonderful store of memories to think back to.

>39 pgmcc: Now you told me if I paid up, you wouldn't spread all those stories about my unfortunate youthful behaviors. Behave yourself or I will reveal your clandestine activities to any or all unfriendly intelligence agencies.

>41 ScoLgo: Don't you believe a single story that @pgmcc spreads here in the Pub about my past. Undercover operatives are notoriously untrustworthy.

>42 -pilgrim-: I'm for updating status reports and will dutifully add my particulars. Not that my life in quarantine is any too exciting. I see my husband everyday but otherwise, I'm talking to people in virtual spaces. I haven't even been to a grocery store in recent weeks.

Me thinks the lady (>46 jillmwo:) dost protest too much. Smoke! Fire! Cart! Horse! Laurel! Hardy!

:-)

We used to have monthly threads where we could share the goods and bads from our lives. I miss those. It was a great way to get to know everyone better and not have to read through every single reading journal.

>48 catzteach: Those were good! They were called things like "Wonders and Woes" weren't they? People got very creative with the names.

>45 Meredy: I do, thankfully, have a wonderful store of memories to think back to. That helped me look at 2019 in a more balance way.

Your comment, "That's a clear illustration of how different things can look in retrospect from the way they looked at the time...", reminded me of a related idea. I cannot remember where I heard it or read it, but it is the idea that if something negative happens at the end of a period of time, e.g. a holiday, it can colour a person's view of the whole holiday. For example, if you have had a great week in a holiday location and on the last day something goes wrong, such as very bad service, a leak in your hotel room, a mugging, your memory of the whole holiday will be tainted with that. You may have had the best time ever during the week but what happens at the end negates the good times earlier in the week.

As you point out, my receiving the Google timeline e-mail was the trigger that brought me to the good things in 2019.

>48 catzteach: & >49 Sakerfalcon: There was no reason in particular why they stopped except perhaps lack of time for the folks who usually started them. So no one needs an excuse to begin posting threads like that again. :o) Just do it.

I'll do it for May. May is a Mad and Merrie Month. Also Morbid and Morose.

It was the J's that got really hard.

>52 Meredy: Yes, after a couple of years all of the good J words had been used up.

And even some of the bad ones.

Could we title them in a language other than English? Would that be easier or harder?

Sometimes we used to just skip alliteration altogether, or alliterate to something other than the month.

Hey, it's brand new all over again, so let's see what evolves.

As to the check in thread, I think Granny Weatherwax had the best title, although I'm not sure of the exact spelling. "I ain'tnt dead yet." Something like that.

>57 MrsLee: You mean like this?

It's been far, far too long since I read Equal Rites.

>58 haydninvienna: That's it!

Following up on this exchange with -pilgrim- over on Marissa's thread: I'm now looking back over my reading lists for the past year or so to pick up titles and any notes on reading in this subject area. This is the first one I hit: Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death, by Lisa Smartt. Posted review here.

Since I haven't kept up very well with my online reviews in a while, I'll check with my offline journal to remind myself what else there's been.
.

>61 Meredy: I've been working my way slowly through Herbie Brennan's Death: the Great Mystery of Life, which is interesting...I'm not done so not quite ready to review, but you might like to consider it for your list.

>62 Marissa_Doyle: Thanks, Marissa, I'll look it up.

Well, I'm taking a little break from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at 54% completion (says Kindle) after nearly three months. Last night I began Transcription, a choice BB courtesy of @jillmwo with an assist from @pgmcc. It's off to a good start.

The experience of reading Third Reich at this juncture in history has to be very strange in comparison with what William Shirer must have had in mind. I can't escape seeing disturbing parallels in the current political landscape, parallels that, despite his exhaustive research, he could not possibly have foreseen.

One of the things I didn't realize prior to reading this book was how much opposition there was to Hitler in prewar Germany--and how extensively the Western powers enabled him by their dithering and appeasement. It really is an appalling story, and one from which we seemingly have failed to take a lesson. Even though I know how it ends, I do intend to press on through. I just need a nice piece of escapist fiction for the time being.

>64 Meredy: Let us hope we don't keep going in that parallel direction. I'm very impressed you've stayed with it for so long. (I've been all about embracing escapism for several months now.)

I didn't plan it this way, but Transcription turns out to be a very fitting companion piece to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The real history of Europe going into World War II is the setting for Kate Atkinson's novel, and the events, place names, and even some of the players from that history are woven into the novel. I'm sure this work of fiction would have been engaging anyway, but my reading of the Shirer work over the past three months adds a dimension of significance.

At the same time, the depiction of the focal character in the novel, of her life and environment, brings the drama of the history into view in a way that a historical narrative just doesn't.

I've read other related works in tandem before and been quite fascinated with the way they interacted and enlarged each other, but it has never worked out quite like this.

I love it when books come together in marvelous symmetry. And serendipity is fantastic, too, as a word and as a phenomenon.

>67 Bookmarque: I totally agree, and that's why I've done it deliberately sometimes, mostly in connection with mythology: for instance, reading a book about the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Prose Edda concurrently with the epic itself, which I had to take in small doses in any case.

>65 clamairy: The real test will be whether I get back to it.

>66 Meredy: I started reading your comment about Transcription and stopped when I realised which book you were writing about as I have not read it yet. I shall come back after having read it and view your comments.

>69 pgmcc: Don't worry, there's no spoilers. Not even really any nonspoilers. Basically I just said I like it so far, and it's an interesting dovetail with the history I've been reading.

You'll probably finish it before I do, though, in which case I'll save your comments for later.

>70 Meredy: I have read post #66 now and see it contains nothing that might affect my reading of Transcription. The dovetailing with the history you have been reading sounds great; it must bring the fiction and the history to life.

I've finished Transcription and given it good marks. Now I'm back to the Shirer, which I think is going to take me forever and a half to finish.

>72 Meredy: Glad you enjoyed Transcription.

Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen: got it yesterday, halfway through it today, and wow.

I haven't read Gessen before, but Karen Dawisha (Putin's Kleptocracy), herself an expert on Russian studies, cites Gessen as an authority.

About 3/4 through the Gessen book. From now on, I'll save the word "incisive" for writing like this. Of which there isn't much.

>74 Meredy: I don't think I could make myself face this one right now, but I'm curious to read your review when you're finished.

>76 clamairy: I have to say this tentatively because I don't know what's still to come in the book, but it's oddly thrilling to read the analysis of somebody who seems to see things clearly (and I have to hedge that only because I'm not best qualified to judge) and is able (a) to convey that vision, (b) to give clear reasons for it, (c) to place it in context, and (d) to draw clear inferences from it. She sounds to me sublimely rational.

I know I just used "clear" three times in one sentence. If this were my review, I'd edit that, but it's just a comment, so I'm not bothering to fuss with the words. I just didn't expect anything exhilarating on this subject, and it almost is, just by virtue of having the ring of truth when so much being passed off these days as truth sounds like a dull dirt-coated thud.

>77 Meredy: Uh oh. It seems you have gotten me right between the eyes, just when I thought I was no longer vulnerable. (I just put the audio book on hold.)

>78 clamairy: I won't be so uncouth as to say haha. But clam, my dear, you're never not vulnerable. And you're never so vulnerable as when you think you're not.

>74 Meredy: I have added this one to my wish list for acquisition. I hadn't been aware of it before.

Last night, at the 76% mark, I reached the definitive end of the "Rise" part. Now comes the payoff as the Allies turn the tide. Time for another break.

I don't think I've ever before taken this long to read a book of this size. Been at it since February 28. I raced through Ada, or Ardor and other massive fictional tomes; even the Neal Stephensons went faster. But this, of course, doesn't read like a novel because it isn't one.

So the doors are open to a relief book. Transcription was the last one, both timely and apt. I also slid Gessen's excellent Surviving Autocracy in there as a daytime read; review imminent.

For this intermission, I've taken up Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language. It won't be a quickie, but I don't think I'll forget where I left off in Rise and Fall. And I am going to finish the thing before Christmas, I swear.

Meanwhile, this is another interesting dovetail, illuminating both Gessen's insights about language in Trumpian politics and the Third Reich's manipulation of language to control the public while getting to some nitty-gritty concepts of language itself.

I just want to thank you again for the Gessen recommendation. I'm considering giving her Putin biography a go now. My only quibble was that I listened to the audio book (narrated by her) and so couldn't highlight and share any passages.

Four books that converge on language are or have just been active on my reading list. I didn't select them for their commonality or anticipate how they would resonate. I chose them all for unrelated reasons.

Now they are calling to me to synthesize their basic concepts, which are remarkably complementary. I'd at least like to bring out the ways in which they illuminate one another.

As usual, I'm envisioning something dauntingly ambitious when a few simple lines would probably be enough. I have no gift for a few simple lines, which is why I disciplined myself with the six-word reviews for so long. They were much harder than six paragraphs.

The four books:

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer - in progress; I've made it to the Fall
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen - recently finished
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo - about a third in
Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, by David Shariatmadari - about halfway

I have notes about all of them in my offline journal.

Language shapes the air we breathe out and the products of our minds. Our eyes and ears take it in reflexively. Few things are more basic to humanity, and yet it tends to be transparent even to us readers. In some important way, insights about language deepen our thoughts and enhance our experience of the world. I hope I have it in me to share what I see here.

I've had my eye on Don't Believe a Word - please report what you think.

>81 Meredy:, >83 clamairy: Given you both expressed interest in Masha Gessen, I thought you might be interested in the following free, online event:

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/masha-gessen-with-philippe-sa...

>85 Bookmarque: I will. I paused it to finish Rise and Fall. I'm close! Hitler is going to pieces in his bunker.

>86 -pilgrim-: Thank you. That sounds so interesting.

>83 clamairy: In Putin's Kleptocracy, expert Karen Dawisha cites expert Masha Gessen. They are both worth reading if you're interested in the subject.

I have a lifelong interest in what people believe and why. It led from mythology into magic and religion, and later to politics, which in a way is all three (or four if you don't think magic and religion are essentially the same thing). Dawisha and Gessen have made substantial contributions to my understanding.

Did it! Finished it! Wow!

And on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, too.

I have to take a breath now.

>88 Meredy: Kudos to you! Perfect timing, too!

>89 clamairy: Thank you. In the oddest possible way, I miss it. It's been part of my consciousness every day for more than 5 months. I don't know what to make of this sensation. I've finished some long works before--Ada comes to mind, and the Ring trilogy--and felt a little lost for a time after leaving their world (one reason why the movie of an epic will never replace the book). But this was a horrid place to be, and only the grace of knowing it ended 75 years ago really made it bearable.

Of course, as it should, it made me feel more squeamish about the present. In some ways it never ended.

But the book. How could I miss it? Granting that the book is not the experience, and that Shirer did a masterly job with an unspeakably terrible subject, still, I feel changed in some way that's different from the usual way any real book can change you.

Currently reading Mary Trump's book on Donald. A couple dozen pages in, I added "horror" to my tags for this book in my catalog.

>91 Meredy: Bwaahaahaa!!!! I'd say 'enjoy,' but I doubt that is the correct word to use in this case.

>92 clamairy: There's a kind of perverse enjoyment in seeing something exposed for what it is. I have no independent source, other than journalism and other writings of recent years; but it "rings true," with plenty of salient detail, and makes a compelling case. Same as with the Masha Gessen work.

Upon request, I have edited the following review to place behind a "spoiler" tag anything that could be construed as a personal political opinion, beyond the opinion implied by reading, rating, and reviewing the book. If you think I've missed something, please PM me.

An uninterrupted version is posted on the book page.

I apologize if I've upset anybody with my thoughts.

--M.

---

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. (July 2020; 225 pages, including backmatter)

This narrative has the ring of truth.

If it isn't true, then it must be counted as a work of brilliant verisimilitude. If it isn't true, it's as compellingly inventive as any world-creating fantasy by a master of fiction. The voice of conviction together with the vivid detail and the latitude and longitude of analysis (despite its brevity) argues for truth.

This is not an instance of great writing, and it isn't a display of great editing either. It has some rough spots. It sounds in places as if portions were written at long intervals, without looking back, and possibly as self-contained shorter pieces that hadn't been stitched into a seamless whole. I would also guess that sections or passages have been deleted without a thorough check of continuity in the remaining parts.

For example, the author refers to her parents as Freddy and Linda through much of the book, and then suddenly they're "my father" and "my mom." A reference to Gam comes without introduction, and even though we can guess it's a grandmother, we don't know at first which one. Those are editorial lapses that should have been scrupulously addressed in a book destined to be as high-profile as this one. Some future historical study is going to have to "sic" a lot of quotes.

Curiously, the author's own blind spots contribute to a sense of authenticity that it would be hard to counterfeit. Speaking of her father's critical illness and death in 1981 at age 42, she writes of how her grandparents had generously supported two top-flight medical facilities in New York, but that when her father was taken ill, "A single phone call would have guaranteed the best treatment for their son at either facility. No call was made" (page 121). Instead, the ambulance took him to a public hospital in Queens, where he died later that night. Even while deploring the family's sense of entitlement and exemption from the constraints of ordinary mortals, she implicitly shares the expectation of privilege with which her father ought to have been treated by reason of her grandfather's wealth.

Nevertheless, if a technical critique brings out a number of shortcomings, nothing can reduce the impact of the content. This book wipes away all pretext for justifying the conduct of the monster in the White House.

I read this book for three reasons:

(1) raw curiosity;
(2) validation--a kind of grim satisfaction in seeing in close view just how bad this situation is; and
(3) a warning.

With respect to the first, I very nearly regret that urge, because, as they say, you can't unsee it. The spectacle of young Donald relentlessly tormenting his little brother Robert, the one who died just two weeks ago, with everyone else utterly powerless to make him stop, effectively snuffs any hope of kindness or decency from this warped man-thing

To the second: it turns out to be far worse than I imagined. Somewhere in my soul, I hoped and believed that this president, an American president, our president, could not be as crude and vile a character as he appeared. Something like humanity must be there to be found, perhaps by a close family member, if not by a traumatized public. Not so. There is no redeeming quality there. There is no saving virtue. There is only vice, and more of it than most of literature has ever concentrated in one character before. I am at a loss to take it in. What's more, I think it would poison me if I could.

No later than page 11, we read: "the lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications that are the sum total of who my uncle is." Mary depicts an unfathomable concavity that shouldn't exist this side of hell.

I predict a future version of Godwin's law that invokes another name.

For the third, it is that: a warning. Mary writes that her mission is "to take Donald down" (page 188). Her book won't do that directly. What it does do, has done, is to hand over the keys to Trump's psyche. There can't be a politician anywhere in the U.S., and probably not anywhere in the world, who hasn't read this or won't be reading it soon. And I imagine that even the ones who've seen Trump up close are uniformly appalled by what this book exposes.

Some will still call it a pack of lies; but then let them put forward a narrative that fits the facts better than this one.

However, I fear that there may still be too much uncomprehending optimism in the populace at large, just as there is about covid-19: can it really, really, really be as bad as they say? We don't have the yardstick that can take its measure. The Republican National Convention ended two nights ago. Yesterday an opinion writer named Mimi Swartz wrote this comment in the New York Times: Democrats who spent the last four nights watching Netflix aren’t ready for what’s coming.

I hope they will be. I hope they use the keys.

And now, for an utter and complete change of pace, I've started my sixth John Buchan novel, Witch Wood. Without a doubt, despite the departure from my recent (unplanned) political nonfiction reading list, this will prove to resonate somehow, as does all writing that is a creditable instance of its kind.

How are you enjoying the John Buchan books. I have collected most (if not all) of his novels but have only read The Thirty-nine Steps and some short stories.

>96 pgmcc: Enjoying them enough to have read five already. They're mostly imaginative adventure-spy thrillers, but quite lushly literate. I enjoyed the Richard Hannay character and his style of action, a natural antidote to a lot of the stuff I read.

This one is a bit different, though, so far. The prologue is a beautiful description of auld Scotland, but the first chapter, with the disputatious chatter of three divines around a dinnertable, is so dreary that it makes the tavern scene in Silas Marner (a book I loved, by the way) read like a high-speed car chase. But there must be some plot-related reason for that. Meanwhile, at chapter 3 it's picking up steam, so I'm happy to go on with it.

>97 Meredy: I have an omnibus edition of the Richard Hannay stories. It only has four of the five novels as it was published before the final book came out.

I enjoyed the details of the time in The Thirty-Nine Steps. The first bit I found interesting was discovering you could get a body in London for ten shillings. :-) I suspect this was a bit of an underestimate.

I have also picked up a couple of books on Lord Tweedsmuir. He had an interesting life.

>98 pgmcc: My grandfather was earning a shilling a week in the year that The Thirty-Nine Steps is set. Two and a half month's wages would corrupt a few people, I imagine.

>98 pgmcc: I remember that image as your avatar here when I first met you. It was some time before I knew who it was. It continues to bemuse me that a gentleman got up like that would be having Hannay's South African gold quest adventures going on inside his head while he signed papers in Canada.

>99 -pilgrim-: Your rough yardstick does make body snatching sound highly profitable. Certainly people defied considerable risks to do it.

>100 Meredy: Not too surprising: he was a member of Milner's Kindergarten immediately after the Anglo-Boer War and so was a high-level administrator in the Transvaal and got to know the place quite well.

>101 hfglen: & >100 Meredy:

I was introduced to John Buchan by a man whose partner was from South Africa and organised John Buchan tours to Scotland. I had only known of The Thirty-Nine Steps at that stage and my researches revealed quite a number of other books and stories he had written.

One of the things I like about the various screen adaptations is that they vary the ending. That keeps a bit of mystery.

>100 Meredy: Ironic, is it not, that the last book I that I read in August was actually a novel about the 19th century Scottish body snatchers turned murderers,. Burke and Hare. Our brains do seem to be running along similar courses recently!

For further context, my grandfather was beginning an apprenticeship at a skilled trade at the time of your book. For an unskilled labourer, digging bodies instead of ditches must have looked incredibly lucrative.

Wow, whew, I just finished John Buchan's Witch Wood. I knew nothing about it beforehand, and it was not at all what I was expecting. My reading of other Buchan novels by no means prepared me for this. I have to let my thoughts settle a little bit now (and I have got to find some light reading for a change), and then we'll have a catch-up.

>104 Meredy: Was that one of his ghost stories?

No. It's a very serious novel, and no light-hearted adventure or spooky tale. I'm not looking up any reviews or commentary until I've got mine down.

Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin's Spies, by Gordon Corera (2020): 4 1/2 stars

Six-word review: Spy vs. spy: we're not winning.

Russian "illegal" Andrey Bezrukov lived for twelve years as a Canadian citizen named Donald Heathfield and then eleven as an American while spying for Russia. His career was the model for the deep-cover Russian agents in the TV series The Americans. Asked by a class of Russian students in 2018 what it was like to be a spy, he said, "Just watch the series," adding that it was "quite close to reality, though without the killings and the wigs" (page 310). (If he also said "without the sex," it wasn't quoted.) His career in espionage ended in June of 2010 along with those of several others in an FBI roundup that was grossly humiliating to Putin's Russia, where the sleeper agents were considered heroes, the jewels of Russian spycraft. Capping the unbearable humiliation of the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the incident left Putin with an insatiable thirst for revenge.

And so we come to the election of 2016.

Today, three days before the U.S. election of 2020, I have just finished reading the book and am pondering the things that have clicked into place. Not least among them is that it affords a particular view of Russia's interest in American elections that I have not seen discussed in countless written articles by columnists and commentators in dominant U.S. media.

I have read four or five books on Russia and Putin in the past few years, but this one delved into territory I had not explored before.

Among the main ideas that I took away are
•  that even though the Cold War was considered "over" by the CIA and the UK's counterpart, MI6, which moved on to terrorism as their primary concern in international conflict, Russian spying never abated but just changed as technology changed;
•  that most American authorities stopped taking it seriously after the Cold War ended, but Russia remained "patient and persistent" (page 396);
•  that influence--among power wielders and ordinary citizens alike--became a major aim of the Russian agencies, rather than espionage per se, meaning stealing secrets; and
•  that while we in the West were still thinking about war and peace in conventional terms, the Russians were thinking about bringing chaos and destabilization to the West, unbalancing and dividing allies and populations, along with destruction of faith in their institutions and systems--a different sort of victory altogether, and one that we have sorely underestimated.

One of many points that surprised me was that fictional drama and especially spy stories actually shape how both Russia and the West think about "how the world really works and what their adversaries are up to" (page 341).

Author Gordon Corera, security correspondent for the BBC since 2004, has high credibility as a journalist with a long track record covering spy cases and investigators with the CIA, MI6, and Russia. His capably crafted and very readable narrative of the personal histories and missions of Russian spies from the Cold War to the present is backed by interviews and documented reports from numerous informed sources, some openly identified and some in sensitive positions protected.

Many names we know from news stories over the past decades appear, including FBI and CIA directors Mueller and Panetta, respectively, and those of Russian poisoning victims Litvinenko, Skripal, and Navalny. This book was published before Navalny in September 2020 became the latest high-profile victim of the Russian-made nerve agent Novichok.

Right now, in the breathless suspense of the countdown to victory and defeat in the 2020 presidential election, wild theories abound on all sides. I don't think this account is a wild theory. Skeptic though I am, I found it credible and compelling.

The book has 28 pages of notes and an adequate index. The editing seems a little lax in places, as if performed in haste.

Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen (2020): 4 1/2 stars

Six-word review: Changing the labels changes the pictures.

Karen Dawisha, the late author of Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, herself an authority on Russia and the former Soviet Union, cited Masha Gessen as an authority. I admired Dawisha's deeply researched and thoroughly documented treatment of her subject (my review). So when I saw a review of this new work of Gessen's in the New York Times in June, I ordered a copy before I even finished reading the review.

The book is recent enough to include comments on Trump's early responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Gessen's epilogue is dated April 2020.

I would call this work a brilliant analysis, almost exhilarating in its incisive depiction of the Trump regime. It is couched in terms that seem like a true reflection of what I see in reputable journalistic media, together with reasons and implications. The author pays special attention to language, which is represented as the key to decoding what we see and hear. Her detailed deconstruction of Sarah Sanders's Thanksgiving 2017 press briefing, exposing her control and manipulation in the interest of asserting power (chapter 15), is stunning.

The dust jacket blurb says:

Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence for Americans.

Gessen's work does not have the literary magnificence it would take for me to give it five stars as a nonfiction work, but I did award it an extra half star for brilliance.

However, I noted two disappointments, one of them inevitable: she did not conclude her problem analysis with a magical remedy. Rather, she issued a call for the reinvention of moral aspiration. From where I sit at present on October 30th, we are scant days away from a reckoning with that imperative.

The other, which you may dismiss as purely idiosyncratic if you like, strikes me as a lapse in Gessen's otherwise exquisite sensitivity to linguistic ley lines.

From Trump's first declaration of intent to build a wall along our southern border, I have clenched my teeth over media reports making mention of "the wall": Trump's diverting funds to build the wall, border property owners' objections to the wall, construction beginning on the wall, etc. It is not THE wall. It is A wall. "The" is a rhetorical error. It confers unwarranted status on it, granting it existential legitimacy. It can be talked about as a thing of substance with a basis in objective reality, whether actually built or not, as opposed to "a" wall, which may not have being outside an imaginary or speculative realm. Trump wants to build a wall, and calling it "the wall" advances it significantly toward realization by according it a place in the category of things-that-exist in people's minds.

Gessen steps even further afield: she distinguishes it with an initial capital letter. She writes "the Wall." Now it has a kind of paradigmatic power such as we assign when we use expressions like "this is THE place to go" and "the search for the One Ring." She pairs it with "the Muslim ban," which did actually occur, but note, she doesn't capitalize "ban." It's "the Wall and the Muslim ban," which, says Gessen, "became the litmus tests of Trumpism" (page 186).

By buying into that very notion to the extent of allowing Trump even partial, implicit, and conditional ownership of Wallness, Gessen forfeits enough of her own authority to make me wonder if the hope of "surviving autocracy" leads the way toward a salvational understanding or instead implies a state of hunkered-down surrender.

The book has ample notes but no index. Granted, indexing would have slowed release of a book that was undoubtedly being rushed to publication; but a book like this should always have an index, even if no more than a rudimentary list of names mentioned.

A Beginning at the End, by Mike Chen (2020): 2 1/2 stars

Six-word review (1): Post-pandemic survivors navigate strange new world.

or

Six-word review (2): Pretty weak, but I liked it.

The striking thing about this sounds-like-a-first-novel-but-isn't is that it is set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic--but was published on January 14th, 2020, before anyone knew what was about to come down on us (unless author Mike Chen had some advance word that most of us never heard).

That was the hook that led me to download it for my Kindle and plunge through it in between a couple of pretty heavy tomes.

(What does it say about our time that a novel about a lethal global virus and the ensuing social upheaval is escapist reading?)

This story was very amateurish-sounding right from the start, and showing no evidence of a solid edit. Either of those two things usually makes me head straight for the exit. But in the special circumstances of September 2020, I persisted.

There are some good ideas here, such as how people adapt to being survivors after 70 percent of the U.S. population has succumbed to disease and what it's like to see familiar neighborhoods morph into alien territory. People suffer from something called "Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder" and form self-help groups modeled on AA to help them cope with the upheaval of their lives, personal losses, and the changed world.

People wear masks in this story, for their own protection (remember: this came out before February of 2020, and we had never heard of the covid-19 coronavirus then). As an aside, by the time I read it a month or so ago, I wondered: why didn't the CDC just tell people that masks were for their own protection? I'll bet most people would have bought that and worn them.

On the minus side, the main characters never gain dimensions. There are two women and a man, and even though the two women are nothing alike I had trouble remembering which was which because they had so little solidity. Worse yet, there's a little girl, one so flimsy that if the others are cardboard, she's made out of tissue paper, cutesy name and all. When she gets lost, I find myself hoping they never find her. Chen shouldn't feel too bad about that, though; even Stephen King can't write kid dialogue that doesn't make you gag.

There's also a lot of clumsy exposition. It can be hard to do well, I grant you that; but then, if we can't do it, we're not ready for prime time.

I did like the way the author endowed one of the two women with some impressive survival skills, including parkour.

The major conflicts right out of Writing 101, involving guarding old secrets, just never feel genuine, and the climactic chapter is downright cloying. Chen could have used a lot of help with the moment of supposed resolution, but his friends probably told him it was just great.

One annoying pimple on the chin of this novel is the author's obvious unawareness of the meaning of some words he uses repeatedly--and the fact that no editor came to his rescue by chopping them out. An example is "smirk," which Chen seems to think is the same as a pleased smile or a grin. Actually it's an irritatingly smug sort of smile, such as you see when someone has bested an opponent, and not anything pleasant or charming; and yet we have numerous instances such as this: "Her face lit up with a smirk." Some wrong word choices lead to bizarre imagery: "Moira stood poised, ... her legs coiled and ready."

And I'll bet the author has never actually lugged a cat carrier very far, never mind trying to run with it. The cat in the box ought to have suffered a concussion, at least, if not the equivalent of being tossed in a clothes dryer.

I'm not sorry I read it, and it was uncannily timely, with some well-thought insights for a plague-ridden planet. One nicely paranoia-inducing idea was of the government's absorbing the unclaimed funds from the millions of casualties. I also liked the resurgence of old technologies such as CDs. Nonetheless, I'm glad it didn't last any longer. I can't in good conscience give it much of a recommendation, and I won't be rushing to read his next book.

Nice try, though, Mike. You get points for doing it and daring to put it out there. It's not easy. And I did, after all, like it more than I didn't like it.

Our internet connection was down all day today, Friday. So--catch-up time at last.

YAY!

Six-word reviews are back.

I have the complete Richard Hannay stories, (of which 39 steps is the famous one, but shorter than many) I enjoyed them more for their insights of life at the time than anything else. It didn't inspire me to read others of his.

>111 pgmcc:

A real favorite!

>107 Meredy: Very interesting review.

Le Carré stories would indicate the Russians take the long view. Putin was KGB before the fall of the USSR. The fact that communism is no longer the stated policy of Russia does not appear to have changed the operation of the Russian intelligence machinery. Your review is very interesting and puts this book on the radar. I will only admit to being hit by a BB if/when I buy it. :-)

Very good shooting.

>108 Meredy:

There was an article in one of the English newspapers today (I think it was The Guardian) giving an overview of progress in building Trump's wall. It stated that in the four years Trump has been in power that 15 miles of wall has been built. I do not know if this 15 miles includes or excludes the stretch of wall blown down by a storm a few months ago.

>115 pgmcc: I saw a similar article via the BBC website. It clearly states that there is 15 miles of NEW wall. And 350 miles of replacement of replacement or secondary wall. I assume the repair would be part of the latter.

>108 Meredy: You are increasing my interest in Masha Gessen (following discussion this summer). After reading both your reviews in >108 Meredy:, may I recommend Russian Politics and Society by Richard Sakwa? It does not cover the last decade, but I was reading this in the early years of this century, and it has been instrumental in my understanding of how Russia got from the Soviet era to where it now is. Rather than focusing on personalities, it starts from how Russian society functions, and thus how these personalities were (or were not) able to manipulate these patterns to their own advantage.

Nothing that I have observed since invalidates what I read there. And I found the concept of "the birthday present" as particularly useful in explaining what otherwise seemed inconsistent events.

Until now, I never would have expected to have such a thing as a reading slump. Right through all kinds of stress, anxiety, depression, even sickness, I've maintained my daily reading habit for a very long time. But for the past week I've just felt too restless to concentrate. I think it's mostly to do with the political situation, which has been so troubling and exhausting and is so far from being resolved. But I just don't have my customary resiliency either.

And now we're into holiday season. I'd like to take a nap from now until, say, January 20th. But maybe this malaise will pass before then.

>117 -pilgrim-: Sounds like one for me. Thanks. BB points for you.

>114 pgmcc: Breathlessly waiting to know if I scored a hit.

>118 Meredy: Ok! Ok! You scored a hit. But only a Kindle hit. That is a soft-nose bullet so it doesn't... Oh no! I'm wrong. A soft-noes bullet does more damage.

Aaarrrrgghh!

>118 Meredy: I hope your reading motivation comes back enough to get you through the season. Maybe you could try rereading something you like? Winter Solstice is good for the season, and doesn't require a lot of concentration. Elfrida is good at cheering people up.

>120 SylviaC: Thanks, I know, that would be a lovely choice. I should have kept my copy, but in a brief purgative moment I put it in the Little Free Library box down the street. The wonder is that in a house with about 2000 books, not to mention the uncounted virtual ones on various Kindles, so very few are cheering.

>121 Meredy: The wonder is that in a house with about 2000 books, not to mention the uncounted virtual ones on various Kindles, so very few are cheering.

This might be due to a variety of factors. (1) Non-fiction isn't always cheerful. (2) Lightweight (or genre) fiction does tend to get passed on rather than archived. (3) Covid fatigue is real.

I do hope you're managing amidst all the challenges.

>121 Meredy: >122 jillmwo: This is why I keep an “It’s better than it looks” shelf. I can add new titles only occasionally though.

>121 Meredy: Sending care to you. I have a specific shelf of books that make me happy because now and then one needs some happy to immerse oneself in. Winter Solstice is one of the books on that shelf.

Sending virtual hugs. I've had some times this year when I couldn't release my maniacal focus on the political situation to give a book the attention it required. I ended up re-reading a lot.

I sometimes find that supposedly cheering books can actually be depressing in their facile optimism.

At bad times, I have been known to read non-fiction about the grimmer periods of history. No, it's not Schadenfreude. Rather it gives a sense of perspective. I find the fact that people could, and did, survive such things with their humanity intact inspiring. And it provides a sense of perspective regarding my own troubles.

>118 Meredy: I have been having similar issues for months now. I rarely read during the day unless it is a digital newspaper, but I couldn't concentrate at night. I do most of my reading in bed on my Kindle, but my eyeballs were glued to my phone. It has gotten better. But I have to force myself to put away the small blue screen in favor of the e-ink.