labfs39's Literary Peregrinations: Chapter 1

Currently Reading

Anthology:

Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region

Nonfiction essays:

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko

Books Read in 2023:

January
1. The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (TF ebook, 4*)
2. Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky, translated from the Russian by various poets (TF, 3*)
3. No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel (NF, 4*)
4. So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar, translated from the French by Betsy Wing (TF, 3*)
5. A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa, translated from the Japanese by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown (TNF, 4*)
6. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (NF audiobook, 3.5*)
7. Love's Shadow by Ada Leverson (F, 3.5*)
8. Hiroshima Diary by Michihiko Hachiya, translated from the Japanese by Warner Wells (TNF, 4.5*)
9. Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld (GF, 3.5*)
10. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf, translated from the Swedish by Velma Swanston Howard (TF ebook, 4*)

AFRICAN BOOK CHALLENGE

January - North Africa: Saharan Sands (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco)
1. The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai* (Tunisia)
2. So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar* (Algeria)
3. Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region*

February - Lusophone Africa

March - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Buchi Emecheta

April - The Horn of Africa

May - African Nobel Winners

June - East Africa

July - Chinua Achebe or Ben Okri

August - Francophone Africa

September - Southern Africa

October - Scholastique Mukasonga or Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

November - African Thrillers / Crime Writers

December - West Africa

* means translated

The Baltic Sea theme read
1. Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky
2. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf

Graphic Stories
1. Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld

Holocaust Literature
1. No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel

Nobel Laureates
1. Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky
2. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf

Book Club
January: The Double Helix by James Watson

Remembering Rebeccanyc

In 2022 Monica/Trifolia set up a thread challenging us to honor Rebeccanyc/Sybil by collectively reading the books she had on her "Hope to Read Soon" list when she passed. It is a robust list of over 600 books. Last year I read two from the list and one more that she had recommended:

The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

I have the following on my physical shelves:

79. Camus, Albert. The Stranger
137. Besieged : life under fire on a Sarajevo street by Barbara Demick
190. Foster, Thomas C. How To Read Literature Like a Professor
215. Gogol, Nikolai. Taras Bulba
373. Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind
388. Myśliwski, Wiesław. Stone upon Stone
409. Pavić, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars
455. Rufin, Jean-Christophe. The Abyssinian
462. Rytkhėu, Yuri. The Chukchi Bible
472. Saramago, José. The Stone Raft
493. Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary
553. Teffi. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea
576. Tsypkin, Leonid. Summer in Baden-Baden
577. Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

TIOLI Challenges

January
Challenge #1: Read a book set in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, or Numazu (Hiroshima Diary)
Challenge #2: Read a book in the public domain (Love's Shadow, Wonderful Adventures of Nils)
Challenge #3: Read a book that came into your possession in 2022 (The Ardent Swarm, The Double Helix)
Challenge #16: Read a book with the three letters of "one" in the title and/or the author's name (Nativity Poems, No Pretty Pictures, Revenge of the Librarians)
Challenge #17: Read a book by an author born in North Africa (So Vast the Prison)
Challenge #18: Book related to an ending (River in Darkness)

Reading Globally

Books I've read in 2022 by nationality of author (a tricky business):

Algerian: 1
American: 1
English: 1
Japanese: 1
Japanese (Korean): 1
Polish: 1
Russian: 1
Scottish: 1
Swedish: 1
Tunisian: 1

Check out my Global Challenge thread, labfs39 reads around the world, for a look at a cumulative list since around 2010. And I've broken out the US by state in my Labfs39 tackles the states thread.

Book stats for 2023:

I am trying to promote diversity in my reading and, for the lack of a more refined method, am tracking the following:

books total: 10

9 countries
6 (60%) translations

6 (60%) fiction
4 (40%) nonfiction

4 (40%) by women
6 (60%) by men
both (anthology)
other

4 (40%) nonwhite and/or non-European/US/British Commonwealth

Welcome to my 2023 thread!

My name is Lisa, and I love to read literary fiction in translation, WWII history and memoirs, and a smidge of everything else. My goals this year are very challenge oriented, a new trend for me. We'll see how it goes.

My January Plans (subject to abrupt change):

Book Club: The Double Helix by James Watson

African Challenge:
Akhenaten, dweller in truth by Naguib Mahfouz or
Autumn quail by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt, also Nobel)
The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai (Tunisia)
So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar (Algeria)

Baltic Sea: The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (also Remembering Rebeccanyc and Nobel)

Holocaust: No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel (also Baltic)

>1 labfs39: The Ardent Swarm
The bees grabbed me. Happy New Year!

>10 qebo: I think The Ardent Swarm is going to be interesting, although I feel my lack of knowledge of African history. The author studied science and had this to say about this book:

I wanted to write a book about the fragility of the democratic experience that Tunisia was living after the Arab Spring, but I didn’t want to write only about men. I always thought that men is not the main subject, but men among nature is the main subject. For months I was blocked because I didn’t find the axis that would allow me to write about this democratic experience in Tunisia and nature. I was on my couch one night looking to the National Geographic channel, and I saw a documentary about the bees and how they behave when they were attacked by giant hornets and how they can defend themselves against those attacks. It was a kind of revelation for me.

Instantly, I was inspired to write this book because I found the allegory that will permit me at the same time to speak about men and speak about nature and to tell that the most important is not the war between us—between the right wing, the left wing, the progressives against the nationalists and all those things—but our main concern should be our home, the bees, the nature around us. And those things are really in danger. We are struggling for things without real meaning while our home is burning.

—From an interview on Literary Hub

Happy New Year! I disappeared for most of last year but I hope to do better this year…

>12 rachbxl: Ha, I just snuck onto Cushla's thread to say hi to you. Life has a way of interfering sometimes, doesn't it? I had a year when I didn't make it to LT at all. I'm just glad to see you now. Happy new year!

Happy New Year, Lisa. Good luck with your reading challenges. Once again, I look forward to following your reading; I always get great ideas from you.

Happy new year, Lisa!

>14 BLBera: Thanks, Beth, the feeling is mutual.

>To you too!

And that wraps up Day 1 of 2023. I made a decent start in my new book, The Ardent Swarm. I wasn't sure I would like it in the beginning, but I'm loving it now. And it's an e-book, so I'm on my new Kindle, which I also am enjoying. One feature that I find fun, is the vocab builder. I like being able to instantly see definitions, and then be able to go back and review the words I didn't know. I'm getting better at highlighting. At first I would be flipping pages or getting definitions, I would highlighting too much or not enough. LOL. It's an art.

The kids are back tomorrow, so my luxurious weekend spent reading and on LT is coming to a close. Great way to start the year though. I hope all of you are having an equally pleasant start to the year. Happy reading!

Hi Lisa, needless to say that I'll be following your thread this year. I wish you a Happy New Year and a lot of inspiring books.

I love the way you're settling in to using your new Kindle! Looking forward to following along with your reading this year.

Happy New Year! Glad to hear you’re enjoying your new e-reader.

Happy New Year, Lisa. I wish you good luck with your reading. Dropped a star. :-)

Hi Lisa, I am glad to read that you are enjoying your new kindle and that you started the new year reading! I was sorry to hear about all the difficulties with covid etc. in your last thread and hope that everyone in your family is better now.

Oh, and can you believe it: My husband gave me The Mountains Sing as a Christmas present, without me ever mentioning it! We are thinking about traveling to Vietnam this year (nothing booked yet), so he was looking for Vietnamese novels and came across it. It was such a happy surprise because it was so high up my wishlist and we had just written about it in your thread!

I hope you have a wonderful 2023 and best wishes for your reading! I'll be following along, no doubt adding many books to my wish list!

Happy new year! ook forward to following your reading again this year!

The ardent swarm looks intriguing Lisa. Look forward to following your reading adventures this year.

I'm back on after most of the day spent with the kids, and wow! things exploded. Trying to catch back up...

>18 Trifolia: As always, book twin.

>19 ursula: Thanks, Ursula. I think I'm going to like using an e-reader, especially for books I would have otherwise borrowed from the library.

>20 FlorenceArt: Bonne année, Florence!

>21 Ameise1: Thanks, Barbara, you too!

>22 MissBrangwen: How lovely to get The Mountains Sing for Christmas, Mirjam. What a nice hubby. I hope you like it. A trip to Vietnam would be lovely. Another reason to follow your thread!

>23 stretch: Hey, Kevin, same here!

>24 markon: So far I am really enjoying The Ardent Swarm. I like the blend of nature writing, humor, and allegory. I haven't been able to read yet today, but hope to get back to it before bed.

lisa I used to know this but apparently I don't How do I put a bookcover on a post?

>26 cindydavid4: There's probably a wikihelp page that will explain it better than I, but basically:

1. Go to your book page and make sure you have the cover you want. I try to use member uploaded covers as they are more stable than Amazon ones. If you need to change your cover, click "Change cover" on left sidebar.

2. Right click on the cover image and copy image address.

3. Return to your post and type open bracket img width=140 src="" close bracket, and paste the image address that you just copied between the quotation marks. Note: designating a width (and you can play around with the number) prevents the picture from being too large in your post.

Hope this helps!

Happy new year from one Lisa to another! I've been enjoying hearing about what you're reading—it's always interesting.

>29 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa.

I finally finished my review of my last book of 2022, which I finished New Year's Eve. It was excellent, and you can find the review here. It was an excellent way to end the year.

I love that I'm reading this soon after you did - library serendipity! It had a ridiculous number of holds on the e-book copies here - I put in a reserve on it many months ago. I'm only up to the part in Shanghai but am really enjoying it too.

How's the snow? (Sitting here in tshirt and shorts at 6.45 am...which is quite weird for Wellington.)

>30 labfs39:, >31 cushlareads: Now I’m even more intrigued, having read your review, Lisa. Unlike Cushla I won’t have to wait too long - I only put the hold on it today (thanks to you two on Cushla’s thread) but I’m second in line.

>31 cushlareads: I knew nothing about life in Shanghai during the 30s or the White Terror, so I learned a lot. Macintyre's such good writer.

No snow, which is quite weird here. We've only had two storm so far this season, one very early and one which was followed by rain. It's strange to have bare ground in January.

>32 rachbxl: I hope you like it too, Rachel. It's practically a buddy read.

>30 labfs39: I just downloaded this book on my ereader.

>35 Trifolia: LOL it's a Club Read bestseller!

well, about time I made it here. Great intro to your new book ( >11 labfs39: ), and nice last 2022 review. The African challenge really appeals. I cannot do it... but now I want to. Wish you a happy new year.

>37 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. The nice thing about the African Novel Challenge is that you can pop in and out as you wish. Read one from each country, one a month, one a year—it's all good.

Happy New Year! The Captive Mind looks really interesting. I look forward to your review: I've never read Miłosz but have been meaning to - it might be the nudge I need.

>35 Trifolia:>36 Well, actually, siomething strange happened. I actually downloaded the book but it's invisible when I'm trying to find it on my ereader, tablet or smartphone. Maybe agent Sonya has something to do with it???

>39 Dilara86: I've read a few things by Milosz and like them all. The Issa Valley is a beautifully written, semi-autobiographical novel about his childhood in a corner of the world that has belonged to Poland, Lithuania, and Russia at various points. I've also read his History of Polish Literature and some of his poetry.

>40 Trifolia: That's weird, Monica. I'm too new to the world of e-readers to have any suggestions.

On to my first review of 2023:

I read this one now because the author is Tunisian, and it fits into the African Novel Challenge for January. It is the first book I've read from Tunisia, and is the first e-book that I've read cover to cover on my new Kindle.



The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Originally published 2017, English translation 2021, 195 p., 4*

Sidi is a beekeeper in the village of Nawa, Tunisia and passionate about protecting "his girls." As the novel opens, one of his hives has been destroyed by massive hornets of a type he has never seen before. He vows to learn about the intruder and not only protect his hives, but breed bees that can defend themselves against the hornets. Sidi is also extremely leery of the new democratic elections, the first after the overthrow of The Handsome One, and the Party of God officials that have come to the village with handouts in exchange for votes. He worked for a time in Saudi Arabia and is aware of the hypocrisy of the zealots. The two plot lines merge as one serves as an allegory for the other.

Yamen Manai was born in Tunis and is a scientist as well as writer. In an interview he said he was watching a National Geographic program about how Japanese bees defend themselves against the giant Asian hornet and had the inspiration that led to his writing this allegorical novel set in Tunisia after the Arab Spring. His writing incorporates both the political situation and environmental concerns, yet is often funny. Manai credits Arabic poetry and the oral tradition with influencing his writing.

Note: I found the prologue off-putting, but it had little to do with the subsequent story and could easily have been cut.

To read more about how Japanese honeybees defend against the Asian giant hornet, see this National Geographic story.

>42 labfs39: I have a copy of this one and saw that you were reading it. I've been very drawn to fictional books about bees lately. Glad this one was enjoyable!

>44 Yells: Which other books have you read about fictional bees, Danielle?

I read The History of Bees by Lunde last year. It sounded great: three different threads (past, present and future) about people who are heavily involved with bees (or dealing with the loss of bees), but overall it didn't come together very well. I liked each story individually though, and I learned quite a bit about bees.

>42 labfs39: I’m not sure I know anything about Tunisia other than Dido and Hannibal. Sound like a nice window into it.

>42 labfs39: I saw this one somewhere, thought the bee story line sounded fascinating, but was leary of the mixing of the political storyline. Glad to hear that they are intergated into something interesting. Added to the TBR.

Fascinating about the bees. We live across the road from a commercial beekeeper who has thousands of hives dotted around the countryside. Our garden can be full of bees. When the asian hornets built a giant nest in our barn the bees were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had better things to do.

>40 Trifolia: did you find it yet? Maybe it’s accidently marked as read?

>46 Yells: Hmm, maybe not one I need to rush to put on my wishlist then.

>47 dchaikin: It was a nice introduction, Dan. At first, I panicked because I don't know anything about Tunisian history, and the prologue seemed like I might need to. But once the story started, it became almost fable-like, and I only needed to google a couple of things.

>48 stretch: It's light on both science and politics, Kevin, but I enjoyed the writing on the microscale and his humor. I highlighted (a neat feature of the Kindle) many sentences that sounded nice. Plot-wise, the allegory was stretched a bit in places. I don't want to oversell it, in other words, but I enjoyed it.

>49 baswood: Evidently only a dozen of the giant Asian hornets can kill a hive of 30,000 bees in mere hours. Then they eat the honey and take the larvae back to feed their own young. Most honeybees have no defense against them. What did you do about the hornet nest, Barry?

>50 dianeham: Yes, I hope you find it, Monica.

I've started two new books, but both are going to take a while. One is The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz. In it he tries to explain the allure of totalitarian Soviet communism to East European intellectuals in the wake of Nazism. After a personal introduction, each chapter is literary criticism of a prominent EE writer and his work. The first chapter is about Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Insatiability. Interesting, but slow going.



My second book is Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky. I've been inspired by the Poetry thread on Club Read to try and read some poetry, not one of my strong suits. Does anyone have a suggestion of a "how to read poetry" tutorial?

I think I'm going to start some fiction on my e-reader before my brain explodes.

>52 labfs39: I thought Break, Blow, Burn was a good entry to poetry analyses. There is also How to Read a Poem (recommended by Lois)

The Captive Mind sounds fascinating.

I’ve found poetry reading guidelines a little elusive. They don’t get me to the mindset or mindsets I want to learn to be in. It might be annoying when someone says that reading poetry teaches us how to read poetry, but it’s still true. I did read How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi. And while I liked it and found it helpful, it wasn’t a life changer. My favorite “instructor” was the Poetry Magazine’s 75th anniversary (from 1987. Link to work here: https://www.librarything.com/work/6536486/book/89321467 ) because the editor selected poems with a consistent aspect that appeals - in this case 1940’s-1970’s poetry with especially strong rhythmic aspects and clean structures. So i grew to appreciate these aspects of poetry. And, reading other poetry, learned how difficult that is to achieve.

Brodsky is tricky because he had to change languages. So you either get Russian poems translated or English poems that probably aren’t as good as his Russian ones. I read a memoir of some sort by him and he talked about poetry, and I remember it was terrific. But I don’t remember anything else except I had to look up what a caesura was.

The Ardent Swarm sounds great; I'll add it to my WL, Lisa.

Regarding poetry. I always told my students to read each poem at least three times, and at least once out loud. You are a reader and thinker; don't let the form intimidate you. I find that you just need to take your time.

You can also think about who is speaking; don't assume it's the poet. What is happening? Is it a lyric poem, one about emotions? Or is it a narrative? Does it tell a story? Sometimes it's a combination of things. Enjoy.

>51 labfs39: I called in a man (and it was a man) who specialises in exterminating hornets and wasps. I attempted first to poison them myself but it got a bit too risky. The structure they built was quite incredible, hanging from a wooden beam. The barn is attached to our house and it shelters the side entrance, which we use sometimes, so the hornets had to go.

>52 labfs39: if you have to work at understanding it, its not poetry So says I, who got a C in my poetry class in college, because I didn't understand the professors poems YMMV

>53 ELiz_M: Thanks, Liz.

>54 dchaikin: The Captive Mind is interesting, but rigorous reading. He wrote it in 1951, the year he was forced into exile. Very au courant time to be writing about disillusionment with the puppet regimes.

You're probably right, in that reading poetry will teach me a lot, but it's a catch-22. If I don't enjoy it, I won't read enough to get good at reading it and deprive more pleasure from it.

Translated poetry seems an oxymoron, but Brodsky translated some of these poems himself, so...

>55 BLBera: Thanks, Beth. Good advice. I feel awkward reading aloud. I'll read to the dog.

>56 baswood: I'm glad you called in an expert, Barry. It sounds like they can be deadly. I've read that the nests can get very big too.

>57 cindydavid4: I don't mind working at my reading, but if I don't find it rewarding after putting in the effort, I drift toward other things. This is a good time for me to give it another go.

The dog will love it! :)

Here's the first stanza of a Brodsky poem entitled "December 24, 1971":

When it's Christmas we're all of us magi.
At the grocers' all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

—translated by Alan Myers with the author

I like the "human assault-wave" and "his own king, his own camel."

>60 labfs39: it’s terrific

>59 BLBera: Fortunately the dog is spared Russian poetry in translation as he is with my daughter in Seattle at the moment :-)

>60 labfs39: Thanks, Dan. I'm trying! Fortunately this collection is small.

Happy New Year! I'm finally trying to check in on some Club Read threads and finding myself already 60-70 posts behind all over the place! As always, I'll be looking forward to following your fascinating reading during the year. I also noted your link to the Global Challenge group, which somehow I'd never known about. For years I've been posting yearly threads in the Reading Globally group that would really have been much more appropriate in the Global Challenge. Well, live and learn! I'll be starting my own Global Challenge thread soon and stop cluttering up Reading Globally (not that the gracious folks over there ever complained).

>63 rocketjk: :)

>63 rocketjk: You can always post in more than one place!

I finally made it to your thread, Lisa. I’m so far behind already getting to everyone’s threads.

I loved Agent Sonya, as I have all of Ben Macintyre’s books that I’ve read. I’m so glad you enjoyed it too.

>65 SassyLassy: Sure. I think maybe I'm going to do that, as the manner in which I'd keep track are not the same on the two thread.

Hi Lisa - finally managed to find you and have you starred. Happy New Year, I look forward to following your reading again this year.
I've decided not to do Paul's African challenge as I was so dismal at keeping up in his Asia challenge last year.

I have started volunteering at a local library because both of their librarians have left in the space of a couple of weeks. Volunteers and trustees are trying to keep things afloat until someone can be hired. It's particularly bad timing because they are in the midst of migrating their catalog, which requires re-barcoding all of the books. So long story short, I am just getting around to the threads tonight, and my have they piled up!

>63 rocketjk: Thanks, Jerry! I was happy to see that you started a thread on the Global Challenge. It's a fun way to track our international reading for those of us into that sort of thing.

>66 NanaCC: Hi Colleen, Happy New Year! Ben Macintyre, and Agent Sonya in particular, seems to be popular here on Club Read. Have you read Rogue Heroes? It and AS are my favorites so far.

>68 avatiakh: It's nice to hear from you, Kerry. You've had a lot going on, so it's understandable that doing an additional challenge was too much. I just found your thread on 75 Books and will catch up later tonight. The 75ers sure are a chatty group!

Edited to fix post number

>69 labfs39:. I haven’t read Rogue Heroes, Lisa. I’ll have to look for it. Agent ZigZag is a favorite.

>70 NanaCC: I own, but haven't read, Agent Zigzag. Good to know that it's another winner.

I picked up this book of poetry because it fit many different interests of the moment: Brodsky is a Nobel Laureate from Leningrad (Baltic Sea) and was a poet (poetry thread). I purchased it at a library sale over the summer, and it's the only Brodsky I own, but was probably a poor place to begin. I love the cover of a snow scene in Leningrad.



Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky, translated from the Russian by various poets
Collection published 2001 (poems written between 1962-1995), 113 p. 3*
Note: this was a bilingual edition with the Russian and English on facing pages

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940, survived the Siege of Leningrad as a small child and suffered some medical issues as a result of famine. At the age of fifteen, he quit school and held a number of odd jobs, from working in a morgue to being a geologist assistant. He also began writing poetry, and by age eighteen was starting to be known. In 1960 he became the protégé of Anna Akhmatova. He taught himself Polish so that he could translate Czeslaw Milosz and English so he could translate John Donne.

Brodsky fell in love with a young painter named Marina Basmanova and their relationship continued even after his exile. Unfortunately Basmanova had another suitor, who is probably the one who denounced Brodsky. In 1963 Brodsky was harassed, interrogated, put in a mental institution twice (a common practice with Soviet dissidents), and then arrested. At his trial he was sentenced for "social parasitism" for not having a proper job, but having delusions of being a poet. He was sentenced to five years hard labor in the subarctic. The eighteen months he spent there were actually fairly good ones for him, as he was able to live alone in a tiny cottage—privacy being a luxury in Soviet Russia. His sentence was commuted in 1965, thanks in part to becoming a bit of a cause célèbre in the West.

In 1967 Brodsky and Basmanova had a son, Andrei. In 1971 Israel twice invited Brodsky to emigrate, but he wished to stay in Russia. Finally in 1972 Soviet agents physically put Brodsky on a plane to Austria with orders not to return. W.H. Auden helped Brodsky get asylum in the US, where he eventually became a US citizen. He worked as a professor at many prominent colleges, was awarded the Nobel in 1987, and became Poet Laureate of the US in 1991. After the collapse of the USSR, his son, Andrei, visited and they resumed their relationship. Brodsky died in 1996 of a heart attack at the age of 56.

Although born into a historic Russian Jewish rabbinic family, Brodsky always felt himself to be Christian. In an interview included in Nativity Poems, he says he would probably be Calvinist, because of the focus on judging oneself. Every Christmas season, he tried to write a poem. This book is a linear collection of these poems from 1962-1995. They were translated by a variety of poets, including Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. In them, Brodsky explores themes of time (starting at a fixed point—the birth of Christ) and space (moving in until you are in a "cave"). I thought that the poems became more sophisticated over the years, reflecting his growth as a poet. The collection as a whole did not hold a lot of interest for me, however, as the poems deal exclusively with Christian Gospel images.

Edited to fix touchstone

The biography info on Brodsky is fascinating. Interesting choice even if it didn’t work perfectly for you.

>71 labfs39: I haven’t been disappointed in any of Macintyre’s books, Lisa. I have a couple on my kindle that I’ll try to get to this year.

>50 dianeham: >51 labfs39: Well, yes and no. Apparently it was a glitch in KoboPlus (my e book subscription from Kobo). Publishers can withdraw books from the Kobo Plus catalogue but the download button is not removed simultaneously but a few hours to some days later. This was the case with this book which I tried to download in that twilight zone. But along with the explanation, I also received a gift card and apologies. I then checked Cloud Library and downloaded it from there (and doublechecked :-))

>69 labfs39: It's wonderful that you volunteer at the library on top of everything else. Kudos!

>73 dchaikin: I liked learning about Brodsky more than the poems :-)

>74 NanaCC: Same here, Colleen. I own Double Cross and Agent Zigzag but haven't read them yet.

>75 Trifolia: I'm glad you were finally able to download the book, Monica, but sorry it was such a hassle. At least they were nice about it. Have you decided what you will get with your gift card?

Great comments on the Brodsky poems, Lisa.

>72 labfs39: Fascinating biography indeed! I don't think that I would enjoy reading these poems, but I read your post with interest.

I'm completely losing track of whose threads I've visited and whose I haven't. I thought I'd dropped off a Happy New Year ages ago, Lisa, but apparently not, so sending best wishes now for a great year filled with lots of enjoyable reads.

>78 BLBera: >79 MissBrangwen: Thanks, Beth and Mirjam. I found his biography more interesting than the poems unfortunately.

>80 AlisonY: No worries, Alison. Januaries are always crazy on the threads. Last year's reading ended with a great book, which gave me nice momentum into the new year.

No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel
Published 1998, 193 p.
4*

Anita Lobel is known for illustrating children's books, often in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Lobel of Frog and Toad fame. What I didn't know was that she was a very young Holocaust survivor. This memoir is written for a younger audience, or perhaps it just feels that way because she writes from the perspective of her childhood self. No reflections from her adult self on what she went through or about the war. Instead it is a wonderful glimpse into what it must have been like for a very young child to witness and experience the horrors of war and the Shoah.

Hanusia, as she was called by her family, was five years old when the Germans occupied her hometown of Krakow. She and her parents and younger brother lived in a small apartment, along with her nanny. Her father disappeared one night, and it wasn't until after the war that she learned he had been sent to the Soviet camps. Her mother was able to secure fake documents and spent the war living and working as a Catholic Pole. Fearing for the safety of the children, it was agreed that the nanny would take the children first to the village where family lived, and then to the nanny's tiny village. They disguise her younger brother as a girl, because he could be identified as Jewish the moment he used a public bathroom.

After five years of hiding, the children are caught and taken first to a prison and then to Płaszów concentration camp. Because their nanny was Catholic, they were taken away without an adult. They were ten- and eight-years-old. After stints in several different camps, they are liberated and taken to Sweden. There they spend two years in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, until they are finally reunited with family. Five years later they emigrate to the US and the story ends.

Lobel's story is heartbreaking, yet not emotionally fraught or graphic, in part because she was so young that her memories are at times innocent, and in part because she became emotionally numb to everything except wanting to stay with her brother. She never names her family members, except by diminutives like Mamusia (for Mama), and her brother is never named at all. For their privacy? Or perhaps to maintain the childlike perspective? She includes many photographs from before and after the war. I highly recommend this short memoir for its unique perspective from a very young child survivor.

How does a child process all that? I remember Frog and Toad Are Friends, but I didn't remember that it was library book we picked up somewhere along the line (in 2009 when my kids would turn 5 & 3). Perhaps we also owned a copy and I didn't record it. Anyway, nice review Lisa.

A belated happy new year, and thank you for the lovely note in the holiday card exchange! We do share a fair amount in our reading, and I was intrigued by the "books you should borrow" list too (though some of them I have actually read, they just aren't in my LT library).

No Pretty Pictures sounds like a good one as well.

>83 dchaikin: I wanted to know more about how her brother handled being a girl for so many years, and then a boy in the camps. It was sad how she felt as though the adults in her life were failing her, and when she got to the sanitarium and finally felt taken care of, she threw herself into Swedish life, only to have another tearing away when she had to emigrate to America.

>84 bell7: Hi Mary, thank you for stopping by my thread. It was my first year doing the card exchange, a fun way to meet some new LT people.

My January Africa book is from Tunisia too, Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi. I thought it was a memoir, but Amazon says it is an autobiographical novel. It's a coming of age st/ory of a young Jewish boy in Tunis (his mother is a Berber), and the book is about the boy "finding" himself within all the cultures in his background.
This won't help Monica, but on occasion if I couldn't get a Kindle book to download, I go to the book's page on Amazon and Amazon says "You bought this on such and such a date. Would you like to download it now?" And when I say yes, it downloads. Very technical. If worse comes to worst, I contact Amazon help and they download it for me.

>86 arubabookwoman: That's good to know, Deborah. I will probably run into download problems at some point, but so far so good.

I'll look for your review of Pillar of Salt. I'm currently reading So Vast the Prison by Algerian Assia Djebar. Have you read anything by her?

I was volunteering at the library today, and after several hours at the computer, decided to tackle the donated books in the basement. Wowzer, what a mess. But I did bring one book home as a reward for my labors. It's a dual language collection of Chinese myths. The cover caught my eye, and the short format of the works would make it easy to dip in and out. Only one other person in LT has this work:



Chinese Myths and Fantasies compiled and translated by Ding Wangdao.

>82 labfs39: This sounds excellent, Lisa. Onto my WL it goes. Great comments.

I have been volunteering at my library and one of the jobs I am learning is sorting donations -- there are so many. I guess people are cleaning out the old with the old year.

>88 labfs39: oh that cover is lovely! I hope the book well be as well!

>89 BLBera: I was sorting donations today too. I filled three boxes with books to go to the dump. Several that had been chewed by an animal, I assume a dog. Others that had broken spines and were scotch taped together. What a mess. And since our little library doesn't have a dumpster, someone will have to take them to the dump.

>90 cindydavid4: The cover is very nice. The pages are very thin, Chinese on one side and the English translation facing. I think I'll be doing a lot of googling as I read them, since I know very little about classical Chinese literature, and most of the stories are taken from famous classic works.

>91 labfs39: I hate it when people think the library would possibly want their trash. I volunteered at a clothing bank for homeless families and I often ran into donationsof filthy disgusting torn clothes I sorted through . Why do people think if they dont want their junk others would?

>89 BLBera: I certainly have a tall stack earmarked for donation to the library booksale. I'm waiting for the current renovations to be finished to drop them off. I swear that they are all in very good shape!

>92 cindydavid4: It's so odd to me. People throw away so much in this country, yet they try to donate things that clearly should be thrown away?

>93 RidgewayGirl: I'm sure they are, Kay! I have found so many treasures at library book sales, thanks to generous donors. I shouldn't carry on so about the dross.

So today, I don't have the kids (who are in Hawaii for another week) nor do I volunteer at the library (it's closed), so today is a reading day. Yay! I need to buckle down. I'm reading The Captive Mind, which I've looked forward to for years, but is proving a bit of a slog, and So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar. After reading No Pretty Pictures, which was a Holocaust memoir written unemotionally, So Vast the Prison feels like I'm wallowing in trivial emotions. Not much has happened other than the emotional excesses of a woman infatuated with a younger man. I understand that it represents the emotional repression of women in Algeria and how everything was internalized, but the contrast is huge and not altogether pleasant. This may be a case of wrong book at wrong time, but I do want to finish. Here goes!

I will look forward to revisit the Assia Djebar through your review! (will call you later today...)

>95 labfs39: enjoy your day. Perhaps Djebar’s novel will grab you expectedly.

>72 labfs39: I never really clicked with Brodsky, but I appreciate the bio... some of it I knew, some not.

>82 labfs39: Good lord, it confounds me how children survive what they do. Does she talk at all about resilience, either her own or that of the other children around her? This is pure conjecture on my part, but the Frog and Toad books are so kind and gentle, I wonder if having a compassionate partner helped her navigate life (if in fact he was—I know better than to conflate the work with the author, but in this case it's tempting).

>92 cindydavid4: >94 labfs39: Another similar story: At the first school where I worked, a colleague dropped several boxes of books donating them to the students' library. Unfortunately, most were very old text books and teacher manuals that nobody would ever use, let alone high school students. The librarian had to take everything to the dump. It was such a bad thing and it was obvious that the colleague just wanted an easy way to get rid of her old books, but nobody confronted her.

>96 avaland: Did you read So Vast the Prison, Lois? I don't see a review from you.

>97 dchaikin: From Dan's mouth to the book god's ear: Lo and behold, the endless narrative about a platonic love affair has ended. Part 2 of the book seems to be short biographies of famous historical personages. First chapter was Thomas D'Arcos. Not sure how this ties in, but I'm enjoying the change.

>98 lisapeet: Right? To have survived the march from Płaszów to Auschwitz alone is astonishing. Then Ravensbrück and what was probably typhoid. I can't imagine.

Anita Lobel doesn't discuss resilience or other adult-perspective topics. She does talk about how much she loved learning Swedish and wanting to be a Swede. When she is reunited with family, she is bitter at this intrusion from the past and less cosmopolitan ways. I think she feels that they failed her, and now that she is doing well, they show up again. Interesting.

As for Arnold Lobel, they met while she was studying art at the Pratt Institute. They had two daughters together, but in 1974, he announced that he was gay and moved to Greenwich Village. Other than that I don't know anything about their relationship. Her memoir ended with her move to the states.

>99 MissBrangwen: So it's not just an American phenomena. Yesterday I threw out some study guides for taking Microsoft certification exams from the early 2000's. And building code guides from thirty years ago. Why would they think the library wanted such things?

I just looked out the window, and it is snowing furiously. So much for the prediction of freezing rain, although I prefer the snow to it. I'm glad I don't need to go anywhere today. I have my tea, my books, and a warm blanket. Happiness is...

>92 cindydavid4: “I volunteered at a clothing bank for homeless families and I often ran into donations of filthy disgusting torn clothes I sorted through.”

Your comment reminds me of something I read in a National Geographic article about the Mekong River area during the Vietnam war. Some rich folks had given clothing to poor country people. They were excited by this gift: they would have nice clothes. Upon opening the donated boxes they found old rags, the sort of stuff you sorted at the clothing bank.

The journalist reported one of them saying: “The Communists tell us about people like that.”

>89 BLBera: I am training myeself to think we are providing a service by helping people clear the clutter out of their houses. Because if they actually looked at the stuff and asked whether they could use it, they would chuck it.

>95 labfs39:, >101 labfs39: Hope you had a lovely day of tea and reading Lisa! I am looking forward to some reading this weekend as I haven't had the bandwidth for anything but Terry Pratchet rereads this week after work.

>100 labfs39: Read before LT, So long ago. I had a thing for her work (I think I have 6 or more of works here on a shelf).

Lisa, I hope your reading day is going well! I'm having a similar thing -- my husband and daughter are off to visit my MIL, and so I've got a house to myself and a stack of books.

Lisa see now Im in a quandry. Just got much needed new hearing aids that are very recent. Id like to donate my old hearing aids (that are now discotinued, along with lots of tech devices that go with them) Wanted to get them to the audiologists at my old school dstrict, and youve got me thinking Can they really use these? Can they refurbus them? Probably need to ask,,I certainly dont want to waste their time. I know they;ll appreciate the hrg aid chargers, batteries and other supplies. If they dont take them Im not sure who will

>107 cindydavid4: Give them a call (or email) and ask. It's the best way to find out. My newest discovery is that vet offices and shelters are very excited about old towels.

>100 labfs39: From Dan's mouth to the book god's ear: Lo and behold, the endless narrative about a platonic love affair has ended. Part 2 of the book seems to be short biographies of famous historical personages. First chapter was Thomas D'Arcos. Not sure how this ties in, but I'm enjoying the change.

Ok, first that's really funny. But second, yay!

>102 dypaloh: So this isn't a new phenomenon. Sad. Thanks for stopping by, Steve.

>103 markon: I am training myself to think we are providing a service by helping people clear the clutter out of their houses. That's a nice way of looking at it, Ardene. I'll try to take that attitude in future and gripe less—right after rewriting our donation acceptance guidelines.

>104 markon: Thank you! It was a nice day, although because it snowed, I had to shovel. Since my book isn't gripping I also found myself popping up to do little chores around the house. I'll try again this afternoon.

>105 avaland: Wow, I didn't realize you were such a fan of Djebar. This particular book is divided into parts, and each is written in a very different style. It's a bit disjointed, but gives me a sense of her range.

>106 RidgewayGirl: I hope your reading time is more productive than mine. I'm tempted to start a book that I can dive into and lose myself. Neither of the books I have going now is of that ilk.

>107 cindydavid4: >108 RidgewayGirl: I agree with Kay, give them a quick call. I know locally the Lions Club does a brisk exchange in eyeglasses, medical equipment, etc. I'm not sure about hearing aids though.

>109 dchaikin: So the second part was linked biographies about the Europeans that discovered the stele in Dougga (North Africa) that contained bilingual text in Punic and a Berber alphabet, proving that a written Berber language has existed for centuries and was still used by some Tuareg tribes fairly recently. It was very interesting, and I could have read more like this happily. The third part (so far) is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of her mother's attempts to visit her brother in a French prison during the Algerian War.

The snow turned to freezing rain overnight, and my driveway is a glare of ice. I have an appointment at 10am, but then I'll be nestled back in my recliner with a book for the duration.

>91 labfs39: I in theory *do* know about classical Chinese literature, since it was part of my degree.... so feel free to ask me any questions and I can dredge through the recesses of my memory :-)

Thank you, Margaret, I may take you up on that offer when I get to it.

Although I've owned this book since 2011, I didn't pick it up until the African Novel Challenge inspired me. I had never read this author before and have read only three other books by Algerian authors: The Last Summer of Reason, The German Mujahid, and The Swallows of Kabul (which was set entirely in Afghanistan). I find this cover very eye-catching.



So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar, translated from the French by Betsy Wing
Originally published 1995, English translation 1999, Seven Stories Press, 3*

If I had to describe this book in a single word, it would be "gaze." Assia Djebar, a filmmaker as well as writer, is always aware of sightlines and who is gazing at whom. Women, whose gaze is restricted to a slot through their veils, are like camera lenses, with an intense, directed focus, but one that is too frequently shuttered. Perpetually aware lest they fall under a man's gaze, the women try to remain invisible. Yet there are strong women in the book, who defy their imposed limits, often through language: Zoraide, who passes notes to the Captive Captain in Don Quixote; Tin Hinan, mother of the Tuareg, who brought the Berber alphabet to the desert; the narrator/author's own writing.

The book is divided into four parts, each with a very distinct style. Part 1, What is Erased in the Heart, is an emotional, non-linear account of the narrator/author's platonic love affair with the younger man she calls The Beloved. The narrator says that, "It is not fiction I desire. I am not driven to unfurl a love story of inexhaustible arabesques," and yet that describes it perfectly. Part 2, Erased in Stone, is the story of the discovery by Europeans of the stele at Dougga, written in both Punic and a Berber alphabet. Each chapter in this section is a short biography of one of the men who was instrumental in bringing the knowledge to Europe that the Berbers had had a written language much longer than scholars knew. Part 3, A Silent Desire, alternates chapters that describe the life of the narrator/author's grandmother and mother, with chapters about making her first film, "The Arable Woman." The title of the film is taken from an Arabic lament, recited at the death of her mother's sister:

O my other self, my shadow, no one so like me,
You are gone, you have deserted me, left me arable,
Your pain, a plowshare, turned me over and seeded me with tears.

Part 4, The Blood of Writing, is short, almost an essay, on writing and Algeria's bloody history.

I had a hard time getting through the first part. I understood that it represented "the daily wretchedness of the women of this city of invisible lusts and repression," but the swirl of emotions was hard to navigate. I much preferred the sections on the history of the language and her family history. It is hard to say how much of the novel is fiction, clearly much of it is about her and her family. It is, perhaps, of a shared style with the oral tradition she describes, of illiterate women whose memories are a history rarely shared. A history told in the female voice, outside the scope of the scribes and clerks who record men's history, less factual and more impressionistic.

Happy New Year, Lisa. I kept meaning to track you down and drop a star, but I continuously get side-tracked. Retirement is grueling. Grins...Hey, I found now. I hope your reading is off to a fine start.

>113 labfs39: terrific review, and interesting book structure. I would like to read Djebar some day.

I had mixed reactions to Djebar's books I read. My favourite was Women of Algiers in Their Apartment because there was some diversity to women's characters, some were openly rebellious. I get despondent when it's just descriptive misery because I've seen plenty of that and little else in my Near Eastern childhood.

>110 labfs39: lions club used to be one of our go to groups when we needed hearing aids for kids. Not sure if they are still doing that; Ill ask

Hi Lisa, and happy new year, reading and otherwise, if it is not too late!
I am slowly settling in CR2023, and your thread is one of the last ones I visit, not because it lacks interest (on the contrary!), but because it's so busy that the number of unread posts is overwhelming...

But now I'm up to date and will be able to follow your readings, as I always enjoy doing so.

You've had a great start this year, and you are already very active in the African challenge (I have not started yet).
You were talking about bees... You might want to check The Grey Bees by Andreï Kourkov, set in Ukraine. It was written before the current war in Ukraine, but is set in an already war-torn Dombass (and other Ukraine areas). It’s a grey book, if this means something, and I really liked reading it last year.

Edited to fix touchstones

I wanted to take this time to catch up, Lisa, and wish you the very happiest of reading in the new year.

Your embracing of the African Novel Challenge is much appreciate and I will follow closely what you read and will try to share some of those reads along the way. x

>114 msf59: Hi Mark, Glad you found me. Thanks for stopping by the Graphic Stories thread too. I'm hoping it keeps going.

>115 dchaikin: Lois has convinced me to try another Djebar, more of a linear story. She left tons of sticky arrows in it, so I'll have the benefit of seeing what caught her attention. It was an author I was unaware of until the African Novel challenge, despite having one of her books on my shelves.

>116 LolaWalser: Where did you grow up, LW? So Vast the Prison was not unremitting misery, imo, and she covered topics like the history of the Berber alphabet and her thoughts while filming her first movie. But between the subjugation of women and the Algerian War, it had its moments.

>117 cindydavid4: I hope you find a good place to donate them, Cindy.

>118 raton-liseur: Welcome, racoon! I appreciate your visits whenever they come. Januaries are always a bit insane on LT.

Thanks for the reminder of The Grey Bees, I remember your review last year. I had Kourkov's Death and the Penguin on my wishlist, but I will look for this one too.

>119 PaulCranswick: Hi Paul, thank you for organizing the Africa (and last year's Asia) challenge. I enjoy all the new authors that these challenges bring to my attention.

I just returned from New Hampshire and a wonderful visit with Club Read founder, Lois/avaland and Michael/dukedom_enough. I love their house of books. It snowed 4 inches overnight, and I headed back this morning in a nasty snow/freezing rain mix, but that didn't deter me from making a pit stop at the Toadstool bookshop in Nashua, NH. With one eye on the time, I didn't linger, but did pick up Broken April by Ismail Kadare.

Saturday night I started A River in Darkness and was mesmerized, reading half the book in one sitting. I switched to an audiobook for the long drive and chose The Double Helix, which is my Book Club book for January. It was a good book to listen to, I like the narrator, but wow, was Watson a misogynist. Not only was the way he denigrated Rosalind Franklin obnoxious, but the way he spoke about women in general. It should generate an interesting conversation next week.

>121 labfs39: I’m quite envious!

Crazy weather, nice LT meet up. A wonder if reading the book will be affected by the weather it was purchased in, or the meetup. Interesting about The Double Helix.

>121 labfs39: Absolutely one of my favourites and the book that started me reading Kadare, and other Albanian writers when I can find them.

>123 rachbxl: it was my first “trip” since Covid. We had takeout, chatted, and I browsed their shelves and shelves of books. An ideal mini-meet up. Someday I would love to visit Belgium again. That would be a fun LT meetup

>124 dchaikin: I will for sure think of the day when I read the book. Have you read any of the books about the dna helix discovery?

>125 SassyLassy: I thought of you when I bought the book, Sassy. Your name came up a lot during our visit. We want to lure you down again someday.

>122 labfs39: wow, was Watson a misogynist
His (more recent) opinions on race are no more enlightened. I read Rosalind Franklin and DNA in high school, shortly after its publication in 1975 (!!! I wonder how it holds up now?), and I've viewed James Watson with suspicion ever since.

Eeeeee how lovely that you had a meetup! And a bookshop trip on your way home. Excellent!

I'm barely keeping up here but for once you have got a book OFF my TBR pile. I had So Vast a Prison out of the library (as an e-book) for the Africa Challenge, but I sent it back after reading your review. My brain just isn't up for sadness at the moment. And the James Watson book sounds like it'd wind me up in a big way!

That sounds like a great meetup, minus the trip home... though you're probably used to driving in crappy weather. I've lived on the east coast most of my life and just never got OK with driving in snow. Obviously easier to be a wuss in a place like NYC, which has a lot of public transportation options.

>123 rachbxl: me too! sounds like fun

you all know that Phoenix is relatively warm in the wimter (tho it got down to 51 today and I dressed like an eskimo) if you are ever down this way, its a great place to warm up and we've got great book stores! just sayin

Very jealous about your meetup. Like sassy, Broken April was the first book I read by Kadare and I liked it very much.

>126 labfs39: Rosalind Franklin has come up a lot in my reading, but I don't remember all the places. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee went into some detail, although it left me wanting more on Franklin. (She of course famously got a very bad rap at the time she was making her photos and was left off the prize, even though she her photos were the critical clue. It would nice to get some commentary from someone who knew her and actually liked her. That hasn't come up in my reading yet.)

Just adding my voice to the pro-Kadaré chorus :-)

>129 lisapeet: I've lived on the east coast most of my life and just never got OK with driving in snow. Same here. You'd think, given that I've done pretty much all of my driving in MA, that I'd be used to it by now, but no. Luckily, I work from home now, and can have groceries delivered if need be, so when it snows, I just stay in. :)

>131 cindydavid4: you all know that Phoenix is relatively warm in the wimter (tho it got down to 51 today and I dressed like an eskimo) if you are ever down this way, its a great place to warm up and we've got great book stores! just sayin Someday, when I have the money to travel, I'd love to get to Phoenix.

Your meet up sounds fun, Lisa. And what restraint to come away from the bookstore with one book. It sounds like a good one, too.

>133 dchaikin: It would nice to get some commentary from someone who knew her and actually liked her.
Anne Sayre, the author of Rosalind Franklin and DNA was her friend (and was the wife of crystallographer David Sayre so had access to the science and scientists). Rosalind Franklin died of cancer in 1958, so there's something of an either/or of biographical information.

>137 qebo: thanks!

>127 qebo: His comments about women in general might be due in part to a 1950s mindset, but he never really changed his tune with the times. His treatment of Rosalind Franklin was atrocious. He and Crick obtained her data through underhanded means and never attributed her contributions, even though, among other things, she told them the backbone had to be on the outside, not the inside as they originally thought. And the way he talks about her in the book is awful. He does in an afterward backtrack a bit and say he didn't understand then what it had been like for her to be a woman scientist treated poorly by her male colleagues.

>128 cushlareads: I agree with your decision to return So Vast a Prison. Unless you are a Djebar completist. I think she has other books that might be better entry points. I may try another one of her books, because I do think she's an author with worthwhile things to say as an early African feminist.

>129 lisapeet: I grew up in Maine, so driving in bad weather was a necessity. In Seattle, we would get into bad weather when we went up into the mountains, but it's been a while since I've had to routinely drive in bad weather. The drive yesterday wasn't too bad, just tiring because I was hyper-focused.

>130 cindydavid4: It's nice to have an illustrious Club Reader only a few hours away. :-)

>131 cindydavid4: I've been to Phoenix several times (not in summer) and quite enjoyed it. Exploring the desert was a new experience for me. The desert museum in Tucson is awesome.

>132 arubabookwoman: I was hoping to be able to meet up with you this week, Deborah, but my dad has postponed going down there until his wife's blood pressure issues are sorted out. Maybe someday I'll get to visit you in your new digs. I read Chronicle in Stone and Doruntine back in grad school, but wasn't blown away and remember very little of either.

>133 dchaikin: Even before reading The Double Helix, I have wanted to read The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix by Howard Markel, touted as "An authoritative history of the race to unravel DNA's structure, by one of our most prominent medical historians." It came out in September 2021, so is recent, and includes not only the three scientists mentioned in the title but Wilkins and Linus Pauling as well. Pauling was very, very close to solving the structure at the same time and had made some important discoveries (such as the alpha helix) which were instrumental in furthering Watson and Crick's ideas. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox, might also be interesting and supposedly relies on Franklin's correspondence as well as interviews.

>134 Dilara86: I'm looking forward to reading Broken April, especially after this outpouring of positive comments by Club Readers.

>135 Julie_in_the_Library: I can stay in when the weather's bad as well, and the little town grocery store is practically across the street. Unfortunately this last two storms have been very wet, heavy snow, so I've had to shovel rather than use the snowblower. I'm building up back muscles that I haven't used in a long time!

>136 BLBera: It was an okay bookstore with a large history section, but it was snowing, so my mind was preoccupied. Plus Lois had lent me some, and I had purchased a lot of books in December, so I felt nearly sated. My Thingaversary is coming up in March though!

>137 qebo: I have wondered if Franklin would have been included in the Nobel nod if she had still been alive, after all Wilkins was. Is it common for science Nobel's to be given out so long after the event? The discovery was in 1953 and the prize was given in 1964.

>140 labfs39: 1962, which actually doesn't seem such a long time. Even if a discovery is of obvious hypothetical importance, it'd have to be established in practice.

The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix
Hmm, at 576 pages this seems an ideal candidate for an audio book. I got through The Family Roe (672 pages) and am halfway through The Empire of Pain (560 pages) in 30-60 minute increments while walking. I don't seem to have the necessary focus in the evening when I normally read.

Just as a tangential fyi, Walter Isaacson gives a pretty good outline of how terribly Watson treated Rosalind Franklin in his biography of Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. The biography, which I liked overall, does have its flaws, but Isaacson is quite clear about the lousy Franklin/Watson/Crick dynamics.

Hi Lisa!

>141 qebo: Ah, maybe an audiobook would give me the impetus to walk in my neighborhood after work. Now to get some comfortable earbuds!

>143 markon: I usually listen without ear buds, though I have a single ear thingy for when I don't want to be holding the phone out in winter wind. My main walking route is low traffic, not much audio competition.

>123 rachbxl: We live in a beautiful world, Lisa. All the way to New Hampshire to buy a book about an honour killing in Albania!

>143 markon: Now to get some comfortable earbuds! Have you considered headphones? I find over-the-ear much more comfortable.

>141 qebo: I suppose that's true, qebo. I had never thought about how long it would take to prove the importance before the award could be given. Interestingly Watson was only about 25 years old when he and Crick published their paper, and I think that's his one claim to fame, isn't it?

>142 rocketjk: I haven't read The Code Breaker, Jerry. Was the race to edit the gene as heated a competition as to determine the DNA structure? I was amazed at how many different scientists contributed ideas that made the discovery possible and how competitive it was at the same time.

>143 markon: >144 qebo: >146 Julie_in_the_Library: I listened to the Double Helix as an audiobook in the car while driving. It was my first audiobook in years. I was surprised at how enjoyable it was to listen to it. I may have to try another as well.

>145 PaulCranswick: All the way to New Hampshire to buy a book about an honour killing in Albania!

LOL, Paul. Indeed. Although to be honest, it is a half hour to the nearest bookstore anyway, so unless I have a book delivered, it's a jaunt. And Lois/avaland used to work at the Toadstool when it was located in Milford, so I wanted to check it out.

I purchased this memoir recently after a review by Kristelh on the Asian Book Challenge Korean thread. I've read four other memoirs by or about North Koreans, as well as Barbara Demick's excellent Nothing to Envy.



A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa, translated from the Japanese by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown
Originally published 2000, English translation 2017, 159 p., 4*

During the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945), Koreans were conscripted as laborers or emigrated to Japan in search of jobs after losing their land to the Japanese. By 1945 two million Koreans lived in Japan. These Zainichi found conditions to be little better for them in Japan, due to intense discrimination. Beginning in 1956, the Japanese Red Cross began repatriating ethnic Koreans to North Korea. The Communists wanted labor, and the Japanese wanted to get rid of a potential source of social unrest. The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan convinced many that life in North Korea would be a paradise of socialist humanitarianism and that returnees would be home again (despite the fact that most were from the southern part of Korea). Between 1960 and 1961 alone, 70,000 Zainichi were shipped to North Korea. Masaji Ishikawa was one of those.

Ishikawa's father was Zainichi, but his mother was Japanese. He was thirteen years old when he left Japan with his parents and two younger sisters. From the moment they landed in North Korea, however, they learned that everything they had been told was a lie. North Korea was far from paradise, and, equally devastating, the Zainichi were treated as badly in North Korea as they had been in Japan. His family was ostracized for being Japanese, and from the moment they arrived, they never had enough food. When Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 and his inept son took over, hunger became starvation. In 1996, Ishikawa decided that the only hope for his family to survive was if he escaped back to Japan, got a job, and sent them money until he could bring them to Japan as well.

I found this memoir mesmerizing from his descriptions of life in 1950s Japan to his life under the harsh North Korean regime to his reception after his escape. His writing is straightforward and plain, but his words pack a punch. It's not an easy book to read as things go from bad to worse, but it is invaluable for it's depictions of the Zainichi in North Korea.

>147 labfs39: "Was the race to edit the gene as heated a competition as to determine the DNA structure?"

Yes, it was indeed. And also, Doudna still had to battle against the bias against women in the sciences.

>148 labfs39: looks intense. It’s crazy that the 1994 famine was mostly avoidable if the government opens itself up to international aid. ( I also find it crazy that, at the time, I had no idea. I’m not sure many Americans were aware.)

>149 rocketjk: Unfortunate that women in science are still fighting for room at the lab table.

>150 dchaikin: I think there were a lot of reasons behind the famine, and South Korea, the US, and China all sent tons of food throughout the 90s. Unfortunately, the NK distribution system is terrible, and there is rampant corruption. According to Wikipedia, it wasn't until 2002 that NK stopped humanitarian food deliveries. Food stability is still an issue, but not at the level of the 90s.

I was a little down after reading A River in Darkness, so I scanned my shelves from something lighter. I love the Bloomsbury Group covers, and this hot pink one caught my eye. It's the first novel by Ada Leverson, who (according to the back cover) Oscar Wilde called "the wittiest woman in the world." Sounds like the perfect thing for my mood.

>110 labfs39: Actually, through the whole discussion of donations, I was thinking of Pollyanna - speaking of nothing new! The crutches they get in a shipment of donations are an important factor several times in the story.

RE: earbuds vs headphones - my sister recently got a pair of bone conduction headphones. She loves them, because while she can hear everything clearly, unless she really cranks them up someone nearby can't hear - and better yet, they don't cover or block her ears. She can hear what's going on around her as well as what she's listening too. Sounds like a really good idea for walking. They hang over her ears and transmit sound through her cheekbones.

These are hers. There are a lot of others, but I've no personal experience except with these.
https://www.amazon.com/Conduction-Headphones-Bluetooth-Wireless-Waterproof/dp/B0...

are you talking about bone conduction hearing aids? never heard them called headphones. They certainly are life savers for people w/o an ear canal, or something else that makes it difficult to hear normally. Tho with your description I guess they are headphones if the sound is transmitted though her cheek bone. With the hearing aids, the sound is transmittd through the bone just behind your lower ear

personally I use ear buds for my music, tho lately I just got new hearing aids that work with blue tooth, so I can stream without the need for either; the sound goes straight through my hearing aids

>151 labfs39: I certainly didn't know that. Thanks. And, >152 labfs39: , curious what Ada Leverson had to say.

>153 jjmcgaffey: Ha! I had forgotten that. Nothing new under the sun.

Those headphones sound interesting. My daughter has noise cancelling headphones and earbuds, and they work very well. I had never thought about ones that did the opposite: allow outside noise as well as the streamed audio. You're right in that it's probably a good idea when walking.

>154 cindydavid4: No, these are headphones, Cindy. My dad loves that he can stream audio through his hearing aids. He has his phone go directly to his hearing aids, as well as when he watches things on his phone. He watches TV with headphones though, as he doesn't want to keep pairing his hearing aids from his phone to the tv and back again. I wonder if they make ones that can have simultaneous pairing?

>155 dchaikin: If you are interested in North Korea, Dan, I would highly recommend Nothing to Envy. So far Leverson is quite funny—a nice break.

>156 labfs39: I have read Nothing to Envy (but missed or forgot or misunderstood that explanation☺️).

>157 dchaikin: And it may not have been in there, I just think it's a great book and shameless promote it whenever I can. :-)

>158 labfs39: agreed!

>155 dchaikin: curious what Ada Leverson had to say

Here's a smattering of humorous tidbits:

She was feeling rather tired. She had spent several hours in the nursery that day, pretending to be a baby giraffe with so much success that Archie had insisted upon countless encores, until, like all artists who have to repeat the same part too often, she felt the performance was becoming mechanical. —Chapter 6

'Very ingenious,' said Sir Charles.
'I am ingenious and clever,' said Anne. 'I get my cleverness from my father, and my economy from my mother. My father's a clergyman, but his wife was a little country girl—a sort of Merry Peasant; like Schumann's piece, you know. Peasants are always merry.'
'I fancy that's a myth,' said Cecil. 'If not, I've been singularly unfortunate, for all the peasants I ever ran across seemed most depressed.'
'Of course, if you ran over them!' said Hyacinth.
'But I didn't exactly run over them; I only asked them the way to somewhere. They were angry! Now I come to think of it, though, they weren't peasants at all. It was only one man. He was a shepherd. I got to know him better afterwards, and he was rather a good chap. Shepherds don't have a bad time; they just wear ribbons and crooks and dance with shepherdesses, you know.' —Chapter 7

Cecil was still young enough to wish to be different from other people, while desiring still more, like all Englishmen to appear as much as possible like everybody else.—Chapter 8

>160 labfs39: Oh yes, it's so Oscar Wilde-like!

>160 labfs39: That sounds like one I would love! Great quotes, Lisa. It looks like a good choice for a light read.

This is the selection for January in my new book group. At first I was disgruntled at having to read it, as I knew of Watson's treatment of Rosalind Franklin. I considered reading The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix instead, but I'm new to the group, so stuck with the plan. I'm glad I did.

Despite having bought a copy of the book, I ended up listening to it as an audiobook, which was excellent. I then went back to the book to see the photographs.



The Double Helix by James D. Watson, narrated by Grover Gardner and Roger Clark.
Published 1968, 226 p., 4h 8m, 3.5*

James D. Watson was 24 years old when he and Francis Crick published their paper announcing the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later they would be awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Maurice Wilkins. This memoir is Watson's account of his life and work in 1951-53.

I have attempted to re-create my first impressions of the relevant events and personalities rather than present an assessment which takes into account the many facts I have learned since the structure was found. Although the latter approach might be more objective, it would fail to convey the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty. Thus many of the comments may seem one-sided and unfair, but this is often the case in the incomplete and hurried way in which human beings frequently decide to like or dislike a new idea or acquaintance. In any event, this account represents the way I saw things then, in 1951-1953: the ideas, the people, and myself.

Watson was a newly minted PhD student when he was sent to Copenhagen to learn chemistry. Having no interest in this, he ends up at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. There he meets Francis Crick, and the two begin talking about genes. They want to work on the structure of DNA, but that area of study is already staked-out by Maurice Wilkins and his junior colleague Rosalind Wilkins of Kings College, and it was considered impolite to barge in on someone else's work. Watson and Crick are ambitious and eager to prove themselves, however. They decide to attack the problem using models, and after obtaining Franklin's x-ray crystallography data through an unofficial source, begin to make progress.

One of the things that surprised me when reading this memoir was the extent to which Watson and Crick were building on the ideas of others. Without Franklin's data and her insistence that the background of the structure had to be on the outside, rather than the inside; her measurement of water within DNA; and her discovery of A and B forms of DNA, Watson and Crick would have been up a creek. I was also surprised at how close other scientists were in making the discovery. Watson writes that he thinks Linus Pauling at Cal-Tech would have beaten them to it within a week. Certainly Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix and use of models heavily influenced Watson and Crick's own thinking.

As expected, Watson is harsh in his treatment of Rosalind Franklin. He faults her for not wearing lipstick and caring about her appearance, for her unfriendly demeanor, and for her sloppy science. In his epilogue, he offers an explanation, if not apology, for his initial impressions as represented in the book:

Since my initial impressions of her were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements...(he lists several that I mentioned above)...By then (late 50s) all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking...

Overall, I found the book interesting as a personal look inside a 1950s lab and a colorful, if not always fair, description of the scientists working on the puzzle of DNA.

>163 labfs39: Thank you for the excellent review, Lisa. It is certainly one that I will go and look for.

>163 labfs39: very interesting. It strikes me that that’s not much of an apology in his epilogue.

>160 labfs39: these are fun, thanks!

>163 labfs39: What is your new book group like? Is there a gender bias? and have you discussed The Double Helix yet?

>161 raton-liseur: >162 BLBera: Yes, the Leverson is the perfect book for lightening my mood. In some ways it's hard to believe it was written in 1908.

>164 PaulCranswick: I'm not sure if it's the best book for the history of the double helix, but it was a very listenable book for insight into what the times were like.

>165 dchaikin: No apology at all. I realized that my phrasing could be interpreted other than how I intended, so will correct it.

>166 dchaikin: She's very funny, like raton says, Oscar Wilde like.

>167 baswood: The core of the book group has been going since 1996, but I just discovered them a few months ago. I have a spreadsheet of all their past books, and it's decent. Not all selections are ones I would like (such as December's), but enough so that I'm game to try the group. One of the members is a scientist, another is a professor and author. I'm not sure about everyone. I have met only one male member, a retired Jewish chap. I will go to my third meeting on Monday to discuss The Double Helix. The woman who suggested it is the scientist, so I'm interested in her perspective and why she chose this book. I'll report back.

I woke up to 6.5 inches of fresh snow and another band to come through later this morning. Snow day, no school! Another storm is slated for Monday, this one a nor'easter. Then again Thursday. Mother Nature is making up for the mild winter all in one week. Good reading weather—when I'm not out with the snowblower.

>169 labfs39: Definitely a bonus reading day - enjoy! We have no snow here and other than a dumping at Christmas, it's been rather green around here. It figures as we decided this year to finally buy a snowblower.

>170 Yells: The weather has been so weird. We had temps in the high 40s last week. In January! But we are getting dumped on this coming week. At least this is light fluffy snow today, and I could use the snow blower. I've had to shovel the nasty wet stuff that kept falling, freezing, and melting all last week.

Good luck with the snow: it's pretty to look at, but shovelling's no fun...

Some Club Readers have lists of authors whom they follow, reading anything new that they write and trying to read their past titles. I had the impression that I rarely read the same author twice in a year, but I wanted to look at some data.

In 2022 I read 7 author more than once, usually because they were parts of series:

Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series = 7
Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series - 3

or multipart works:

Eduardo Halfon - 2
Galsan Tschinag - 2
Kevin Kwan - 2

Two authors I read multiple standalone works by:

Atiq Rahimi - 3
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim - 2

In 2021 I only read half as many books, and the numbers correlate.

multipart works:

Ali Smith - 2
Octavia Butler - 2
Hilary Mantel - 3

and multiple standalone titles:

Alina Bronsky - 2

So I guess I read more works by the same author than I thought, though I am rarely a completist. That begs the question, who are those that I do read in full? I will have to start a list...

>173 labfs39: That above is for 2021 and 2022, right? Or did you invent time travel and this is showing up from the end of 2023? :)

>174 AnnieMod: Whoops! Thanks, Annie, I'll fix

After reading A River in Darkness, I needed something light, and my eyes landed upon this bright pink book. I purchased it last year because it is part of the Bloomsbury Group titles with distinctive matching covers by British authors such as D.E. Stevenson and Joyce Dennys.



Love's Shadow by Ada Leverson
Published 1908, 225 p., Bloomsburg Group, 3.5*

Ada Leverson was an author known for her wit and friendship with Oscar Wilde. He stayed with the Leversons when he went on trial for his homosexuality, as no hotel would accept him, and Ada was there to greet him when he was released from prison. Love's Shadow is her first novel, and the first in a trilogy known collectively as The Little Ottleys.

Edith Ottley is married to the pompous and boring Bruce. His self-absorption and self-importance make for some very funny scenes, with more than a touch of social parody. Edith's friend, Hyacinth, is in love with the handsome Cecil, who is infatuated with the older, widowed Eugenia. Hyacinth's guardian has more than a passing affection for his ward, as does her ladies companion, Anne. Filled with witty dialogue and tongue-in-cheek humor, this was a light, but not frivolous, romp. My favorite character was Anne, with her unrequited, unseen love for Hyacinth and her no nonsense manner.

Oh, my. I just downloaded my first epub files from Project Gutenberg to my Kindle: Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Story of Gosta Berling both by Selma Lagerlöf. I can see how this could become addictive.

>177 labfs39: Welcome to the dark side! (Uhm, I mean... isn't it fun? Nah, I mean the dark side) :)

More seriously though - have fun! :)

>177 labfs39: Oh, the beginning of a new adventure! Access to free ebooks, it's an incredible feeling and it's incredibly addictive, yes!
I loved The Story of Gosta Berling, which was my first Lagerlof book, I hope you'll enjoy!

ETA: To temper your enthusiasm, though, I download less translated work than I did at the beginning. For a translated book to be in the public domain, both the author and the translator must have died decades ago (from the top of my head, 50 years in the US and 70 in France). Hence, translations are old and are sometimes not up to our current standards for translation. So if there is a book I really want to read, I first check if there is a more recent translation and then prefer to buy it when it has been translated again. That's why I bought Middlemarch or The Death of Ivan Ilitch last year for example (not to mention notes and commentaries you might have in some not-free book, if you are interested in them).

>179 raton-liseur: Excellent point, raton. It was the search for a better translation that led me to the e-book, as the edition I owned was a revision of the earlier translation. Revised to dumb down the language for a juvenile English-speaking audience. I seem to only find translations by Velma Swanston Howard. For those of you who've read The Story of Gosta Berling in English, who was the translator of your edition?

>180 labfs39: I read the penguin classics paperback, which was translated by Paul Norlen.

>160 labfs39: Love those quotes! I checked Kobobooks and several editions of Leverson's works are available as part of my Kobo Plus subscription. I downloaded Love's Shadow.

>181 japaul22: Thanks, Jennifer

>182 FlorenceArt: I hope you enjoy Leverson, Florence. I have downloaded a couple of her other novels to have on hand when I need a laugh.

I've been helping out at our little library while they are without staff and helping them prepare to switch catalogs. As I rebarcode books, I am also weeding. Their classics sections was ratty and had to be drastically thinned. I felt bad and so purchased a few new ones for them:

Pride and Prejudice (they only had an abridged edition—horrors!)
Emma
Persuasion
Tale of Two Cities
Scarlet Letter

and a large print edition of The Dutch House (the only LP they had).

While there, I also found a little something for myself:

1944 Diary by Hans Keilson, an account of the nine months he spent in Delft hiding with the Dutch Resistance. I think I now own everything that he's written that's been translated into English.

I didn’t recognize Hans Keilson, but i have his The Death of the Adversary on my wishlist with a brief comment. Seems in 2010 i read a review in the nytimes.

>185 dchaikin: I have that one on my shelves as well, Dan. I have read Comedy in a Minor Key, which is my favorite, and Life Goes On.

Weather update: 8" on Friday, already 6" today and it's snowing heavily. Limerick actually made the local news for the heavy snowfall. Not blizzard conditions, but a decent amount of snow. More due Wednesday night/Thursday. Three storms back to back. Today will be a snow blowing, reading, snow blowing, shovel, shovel, shovel, reading sort of day.

Wow... we've gotten exactly no snow in NYC. I know that doesn't bode well for climate change effects, but I'm not missing it this year. Plus we're able to have our house re-roofed in the middle of winter.

Good luck with this shoveling and snow blowing in the midst of your reading.

>187 labfs39: was wondering about you New Englanders while watching the Buffalo playoff game.

>177 labfs39: Although I bought a Kindle in 2012 (but never used it), I started downloading ebooks in December, and over the past six weeks I have finished reading free 16 ebooks.

>188 lisapeet: That's rather unbelievable, Lisa. My ex was born and raised in Manhattan, and until his mother passed, we used to go there quite often. The problems of snow removal alone were huge. I guess I'm glad for you, but yeah, climate change...

>189 markon: My daughter and I cleared the driveway once, about 7", but it's still snowing heavily. I'll need to go out again in a couple of hours. On the upside, it's a very pretty snow, and I'm glad to have it rather than the sleet that is falling on the coast.

>190 dchaikin: I'm very glad to have a snug, warm house, all-wheel drive, and a snow blower.

>191 edwinbcn: Interesting, Edwin. What made you start reading e-books after such a long pause? Although I still love paper books, I am loving the Kindle too. Being able to pop online for a different translation, accessing old books that are difficult to find or expensive, being able to read in different levels of light—so many pluses. I'm very happy to have gotten it, me, who thought I would never use an e-reader.

We got about 6 inches on Wednesday. It's nice to get snow instead of freezing rain.

>193 BLBera: We have hit a foot of new snow, on top of Friday's 8", and it's still snowing heavily.

Our winter storm here in Illinois is forecasted to begin Wednesday. If I get to stay home and warm, which I am very much planning to do, I'm in favor of it. If I run out of time to get to the store tomorrow, I will not be in favor.

We are forecasted to get more snow Wednesday and Monday. Four storms in ten days.

Have you seen this, Lisa? It came out today - This Other Eden.

>197 dianeham: That looks excellent, Diane. Thanks for the head's up.

Wait, one of my fav books is this other eden by the comedian Ben Elton. obviously completely different books Curious why the author chose this title

>176 labfs39: (et seq.) Speaking of free, Love's Shadow is free for Kindle today, so I "bought" it.
>184 labfs39: I've read and loved Comedy in a Minor Key and have Death of the Adversary waiting patiently on the shelf.

I purchased this book at the end of the year after hearing about it from Kevin/stretch. I have also read Hiroshima, Black Rain, and, most recently, The Crazy Iris, as well as things like Barefoot Gen and Burnt Shadows.



Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945 by Michihiko Hachiya, translated from the Japanese by Warner Wells
Originally published serially in a small medical journal, English translation by an American doctor who worked with Dr. Hachiya published in 1955, 238 p., 4.5*

Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was home when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He lived roughly a mile from the hypocenter, near the hospital where he was director. He and his wife were injured by debris, but made it out of their house before it collapsed. They headed for the hospital, but it was on fire. Colleagues saved them, and he underwent surgery. While recuperating in the burned out hospital, he began a diary, which he continued for the next seven weeks. In it he records his experiences, both as a patient and a doctor, as well as the stories of his colleagues and patients. It is a remarkable document both for its content and tone.

As Dr. Hachiya recovered, his scientific curiosity returned, and he began working with his colleague to discover who was dying and why. Some patients recovered from horrible burns, while others seemed fine at first but then succumbed rapidly. Without a microscope, he first postulated dysentery, because of the prevalence of diarrhea, and even germ warfare. But once they began doing autopsies and had a microscope they discovered the internal hemorrhaging and extremely low white blood cell and platelet counts, as well as damage to red blood cells. I found the evolution of his thinking in just a few weeks to be fascinating.

Equally interesting were his views on the Emperor, Japan's military leaders, and the American occupiers. But these larger issues take the backseat to his interest in his patients' stories and the details of life. His diary is foremost a warm tribute to his colleagues and friends, whose work throughout the disaster he admired, and to the triumph of life over death. His pleasure in small successes and little luxuries (a clean bathroom, tea, a letter delivered) offsets the grim horrors that surround him. Highly recommended reading.

>201 labfs39:

Another famous Japanese physician during the war, but based in Nagasaki, is Takashi Nagai and you can read his memoir The Bells of Nagasaki.

>199 cindydavid4: Not sure

>200 arubabookwoman: Filling my virtual bookshelves is becoming almost as enjoyable as my real ones. I hope you enjoy Love's Shadow if/when you get to it. It was a nice "between" book, as Jerry/rocketj says.

It's interesting that we all have Death of the Adversary in the queue, but it's the one we haven't read.

>202 lilisin: I have heard of The Bells of Nagasaki, and it was mentioned in the introduction to Hiroshima Diary along with Hiroshima and Black Rain. Have you read it?

>201 labfs39: Glad to hear you like it. Was nervous that my interest in the bombings from the Japanese prespective may have clouded my judgement.

>202 lilisin: Keep forgetting about the The Bells of Nagasaki, wirting it down this time to try to find a copy.

I am glad to read that you like your kindle!

And I must say that while of course I knew that there are so many different climate zones in the US, and that there are areas where there is a lot of snow in winter, only joining the LT forums and reading posts about the weather made me truly realize the extent of it. For about a decade or so there has been hardly any snow in the north of Germany and reading your reports feels like a different world to me.

>204 stretch: I thought it was excellent, Kevin. I think you also recommended one by a Japanese fighter pilot, I need to go back through my wishlist. I too want to read Bells of Nagasaki

>205 MissBrangwen: I am enjoying the Kindle, Mirjam.

Maine gets less snow now than we did when I was a kid. This winter we had had only two storms before this latest batch, and January was unseasonably warm and unusually snow-free. This week's snowfall is catching us up to normal, but coming all at once. But then today it warmed up enough for some melt. The heavy wet snow and coating of ice was too much for a Douglas fir tree on the corner of my property and it lost many big limbs into the road, knocking down a wire and blocking the road. My neighbor lost power because of it, but mine stayed on. Sorry Mr. Kemp! More snow forecasted for Sunday night and Wednesday.

I borrowed this anthology to supplement the novels that a am reading for the African Challenge. Although it is arranged chronologically, I am choosing to read all the selections from a particular country together. I started with Tunisia.



Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region
Published 2009, 428 p.

"I am a Christian" by Saint Vivia Perpetua (203 CE, translated from Latin)

Perpetua was martyred, killed in the ring by wild animals, for refusing to renounce her faith. She was 22-years-old and had just born a son. Her writings from prison recount how her father tried to convince her to save herself and two dreams confirming her resolve.

Poems by Mahriyya Al-Aghlabiya and Khadija Ben Kalthoum (9th and 11th century, Arabic)

This is the first poem:

O, if I only knew how
to express my pain!
After spending so many nights
fasting and sleepless
following my beloved's exile
from home and
from the loved ones.
O brother!
My love is such
that it can but
drive me mad.
As the earth eats away
the dead, so
does sorrow eat loving women away.

Honoring Dr. Tawhida Ben Cheikh by Behira Ben Mrad (1937, Arabic)

A speech introducing the first woman doctor in Tunisia upon her return from studies abroad. This was especially important because women were not allowed to be examined by a male doctor, or even discuss female ailments.

The Gramophone by Amina Arfaoui (1987, French)

A short story about a woman who, unable to confront her husband about his mistress, for fear of being renounced, asks to meet her instead.

Take My Bracelet and Other Songs by anonymous (1992, Arabic)

These five songs were sung by five different woman incarcerated in Dar Joued prison for adultery. The songs were written earlier, prior to the 1970s, when women were imprisoned in Dar Joued by their husbands for any number of reasons, including a display of sexual desire. The husbands paid to have them humiliated and punished, such as by withholding food.

Why Was My Son Assassinated? by Naima Boucharef (1994, French)

Boucharef's son was a military officer and was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists at a checkpoint while on his way to the airport. His wife and young son were in the backseat and saw everything.

Breaking Silence by Moufida Tlati (1994, Arabic)

Two scenes from one of Tlati's films in which the plight of a woman in a modern relationship is compared to that of her concubine mother.

Duo by Azza Filali (2003, French)

This was my favorite piece. It's about a Tunisian couple shortly after the country's independence in 1956. Although women now have legal rights, social change is slow.

He speaks, she stops speaking: It's the rule. It was years later that she understood it, this rule. If she speaks, he speaks more loudly, more violently. He spits words and they are bitter, so she stops speaking...

He speaks and it means nothing. Anger bursts out for no reason. For no reason, and on a quiet day. Nothing. In this nothing, he spews painful words, words that shock without reason, malevolent without cause. Every single day of the calendar, he vomits his tiny bit of daily anger.

...He speaks, she stops speaking; she has learned how to stop talking. It took her a long time, but she has finally learned how to. Patiently, as days go by, she wraps herself in silence, an invisible and protective veil. She is now entirely within the veil. Neither his words nor his useless anger can reach her any more.

Inside her silence, she laughs...

>202 lilisin: lilisin: I have heard of The Bells of Nagasaki, and it was mentioned in the introduction to Hiroshima Diary along with Hiroshima and Black Rain. Have you read it?

I have read all of these except for the memoir you've read, although I have now added it to my wishlist. Next time I go back to the US I'll order it off abebooks to avoid the 40 dollar price from bookdepository. I still have quite a few WWII books as relates to Japan on my TBR but it has been a while since I've read into the topic as I read a lot at a certain period of time.

>207 labfs39: Painful reading!

>208 lilisin: Are there particular books about WWII that are popular in Japan? I would be curious as to whether they are the same books or different.

>209 baswood: A bit, but I have yet to find a book by an African women that isn't painful. It was interesting to read snippets (and that's all these were) over time. I'll try to read those from another country before February when the African focus shifts to Lusophone Africa.

Mark/thorold introduced me to a new chart in the Charts & Graphs section of LT. It's a comparison of the genres of your books vs the site as a whole. Here's mine:



No surprises there.

ETA: Well, except for Children's Books. It says I have 57 books and I have 790.

>211 labfs39: Maybe from Your Library only?
I checked this chart for my books and unsurprising the largest outlier is science & nature.

>212 qebo: That was it, qebo. When I changed it to All Books, not much changed except Children's Books shot up.

After seeing a review of Cyrel/torontoc's thread for this book, I had to request it from the library. I had seen some of Tom Gauld's cartoons on the Goodwill Librarian, but didn't realize until later that he also wrote the graphic novel Mooncop, about which I had read many good reviews. I found the lockdown cartoons funny.



Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld
Published 2022, Drawn & Quartered

A collection of cartoons about books, novelists, and bibliophiles, Revenge of the Librarians was a fun collection to browse. His artwork is colorful and simple, and I enjoyed all the literary references. I was a bit disappointed that there weren't more librarian jokes, given the title. Many of the cartoons are about novelists and the writing/publishing process.

>215 labfs39: that cartoon is just so perfect! no wonder we all have bulging bookshelves!

>215 labfs39: I also thought this was a fun read. One of our bookclub shared the same cartoon in our group chat and it was a popular addition.

>216 cindydavid4: >217 rhian_of_oz: Tom Gauld is fun. Here's one for all the librarians out there:



(from Instagram, not the book)

>215 labfs39: So funny (and so true!)

Revenge of the Librarians sounds fun. I will look for it.

>207 labfs39: Great review/overview of the Women in Africa volume!

>219 raton-liseur: >220 BLBera: You can see some of his cartoons online with a search of his name.

>221 avaland: Thanks, Lois. I'm considering purchasing the other volumes, unless you find yours! ;-)

I have had a copy of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils on my shelves for a long time. Since this book fit both the Baltic Sea and Nobel Laureate theme reads, I finally started it. I quickly became disenchanted with the translation, it was a revision of the Velma Howard translation and very watered down and bland. Simplified for children, probably, but in the worst way. So I found a copy of the original translation on Project Gutenberg. I kept the book handy for the map and illustrations.



The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf, translated from the Swedish by Velma Swanston Howard
Original publication 1906 and 1907 (two parts), later combined. English translation 1907, Project Gutenberg 2004, 4*

In 1902 the National Teachers Association of Sweden commissioned Selma Lagerlöf to write a geography book for students. She spent several years studying bird and animal life before writing her internationally famous book about the boy who travels across Sweden with a flock of wild geese.

Nils is a naughty child, and his parents despair over his cruelty, caprice, and laziness. One day, when his parents are at church, Nils captures a tomten (an elf-like creature that looks after the welfare of the farm) and threatens it. As punishment, the tomten turns Nils into one as well. Nils runs outside and discovers he can understand the speech of the birds and animals. When a flock of wild geese fly overhead, a tame gander flies after them, carrying Nils with him.

Thus begins the adventures of Nils as he flies north to Lappland with the geese on their summer migration. His adventures are accompanied by descriptions of the Swedish countryside, often interlaced with legend and tales that make it easy, even for a non-Swede such as myself, to remember. In addition to the topography, Lagerlöf includes information about the habits of animals, the types of plants that grow in each habitat, and information about the types of industry common to each area. The result is a wonderful mix of fact and fiction that reads like adventure but imparts a tremendous amount of information. And Nils returns home a wiser and much nicer little boy.

Originally published as two books, I read them back to back, as the English translation was published as one volume.

>223 labfs39: cool find. And persistence.

>210 labfs39: Are there particular books about WWII that are popular in Japan? I would be curious as to whether they are the same books or different.

As far as I can tell, the Japanese really don't read much about WWII if anything at all. A book here and there (like the one I'm reading right now) might have an elderly character who briefly mentions it but there really aren't books coming out every year about the subject. There was one book that came out about 8 years ago or so that was about pilots and that was really popular but it was the love story that was the popular bit. Otherwise, people definitely like their standard mysteries here.

>224 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan.

>225 lilisin: Interesting, Lilisin. The US is still fixated on WWII, lots of books, movies, etc come out every year, as you know. One of the lines that struck me in Hiroshima Diary was when they are waiting for the American occupiers to arrive and are afraid that the Americans will behave as the Japanese did in Manchuria. The doctor clearly knew of the atrocities in Manchuria and was pleasantly surprised at how nice and "gentlemanly" the Americans were. And yet he is living in a bombed out city treating patients with radiation sickness. I would like to learn more about the Japanese mindset.

>226 labfs39:

Shohei Ooka talks a lot about the gentlemen Americans when he was a POW, in his memoir Taken Captive. A book that was a major shock to the system after reading My Hitch in Hell by an American POW of the Japanese.

I think America's obsession with WWII comes from their position as the "hero" and the general hero complex the country seems to suffer from. While Japan is supposed to be apologetic for their aggressive stance during their war.

>227 lilisin: I have Taken Captive on my TBR shelf. As someone who has lived in Japan for a while, do you have a sense of the roots of the origins of Japanese attitudes toward prisoners/civilians in WWII? I was shocked by the brutality of everyday life in 1930s Japan as represented in Barefoot Gen and in the military as represented in Kamikaze. I also have a book on the samurai history and myth on my TBR. Perhaps these things were factors?

I am also astonished at the lengths the US went to to create the heroic image after the atomic bombings. The US suppressed all news reporting of the effects of radiation, going so far as to confiscate medical records and data, prohibit scientific articles, etc etc. They emphasized the power of the bomb and hypothetical lives saved and tried to hide the devastation. I plan on reading Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World soon.

>227 lilisin: and >228 labfs39: There's three books I suddenly need to read!

>229 stretch: Glad to help!

>228 labfs39:

When I'm on the train I sometimes play the game of looking at someone and imagining what they would have been like during WWII. Could this person in front of me turn into a horrible agressor? It's an interesting game that really makes you think what are the steps required to convert someone into a human without morality.

Personally I think that in those days Japan hadn't really lost yet so they didn't fear repercussions and enjoyed feeling superior to the supposed superior bigger bodied foreigner. When there are no repercussions it's quite normal to want to test your sense of morality and values. The extent of the depravity they inflicted on POWs and innocent women (such as bystanders in the Philippines) goes to a level beyond imagination but it's not impossible. After all every civilization has a brutal past and this was Japan's chance to inflict it on other nations as previously they had remained so insular.

>231 lilisin: That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about the implications of isolation and the role that might have played.

what are the steps required to convert someone into a human without morality

I find this an endlessly fascinating question, although I tend to focus on a macro scale. I am more interested in what makes large groups act as they do as opposed to individuals.

I continued reading through this anthology, this time focusing on the selections from Algeria. Tough reading.



Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region
Published 2009, 428 p.
All are translated from French

"Visiting a Dead Mother" by Blanche Bendahan (1930)

One of the first authors to write about Maghrebian-Jewish women, Bendahan also touches upon the division between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. This is an excerpt from her novel Mazeltob.

"Alienation" by Djamila Debeche (1955)

In the 1950s, when male writers were writing about alienation under French colonialism, Debeche wrote about the double alienation of women, "the colonized of the colonized." In this excerpt from her novel, Aziza, her protagonist feels alienated from both the French and her own people.

On one occasion—toward the end of the 1944—I had to go to the Maritime Health Service in order to take care of some formalities for my passage to Marseilles, where I wanted to visit some relatives. The place was crowded and it was announced that the travelers should split into two groups: the Europeans on one side and the Muslims on the other. I naturally joined my female companions wrapped in their white veils. Unhappy with what he took to be an error, a young male nurse began heading toward me. "Come on Mademoiselle! Go to the other side. Can't you see that this side is for the Muslims?"

I handed him my identity card.

He read my name and left without comment. My compatriots, on the other hand, scrutinized me, but with great surprise rather than sympathy. I was overwhelmed by a strong feeling of embarrassment. I belonged in neither of the two groups.

"Sentenced to Death" by Baya Hocine (1957)

Hocine is the youngest recorded freedom fighter in the Algerian War of Independence. She was seventeen when she was arrested and sentenced to death. Her sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but she was freed with the signing of the Evian Accords when Algeria won its independence in 1962. This is a letter that she wrote to her mother after receiving the death sentence.

"There is No Exile" by Assia Djebar (1959)

This short story by the famous Algerian feminist author and filmmaker features a young woman who is in exile with her parents and siblings. She is divorced and her children are dead. On this day, the neighbors receive word that their son has died, and they are in mourning. The same day, she receives a marriage proposal from the women of another family.

"You can tell they're not Algerian," she said. "They're not even accustomed to being in mourning."

"Testimony of Torture" by Djamila Boupacha (1960)

Boupacha was another Algerian freedom fighter. She was arrested at age twenty and subjected to horrible torture. When brought before the magistrate, she refused to confirm the confession she had made under duress and, further, demanded a medical examination to prove the abuse. Her case was taken up by a famous lawyer and by Simone de Beauvoir. With the blanket amnesty provided by the Evian Accords, none of her torturers could ever be brought to account. Her testimony is brief but graphic.

"Two Prison Poems" by Zbor Zerari (1960)

Zerari was also imprisoned and tortured. Her poem "My Brother" is about a young man who was shot trying to hoist an Algerian flag. "The School of Freedom" references the French textbooks that were required in Algerian schools and glorified French history.

"Outcast" and "Exile" by Fadhma Ait Mansour Amrouche (1968)

Amrouche was a member of the Berber Kabyle people, who were at the center of the resistance to colonization. She was treated cruelly as a child for being illegitimate and even worse at a Catholic convent school. The first excerpt is about her childhood and is taken from her autobiography, My Life Story. The second is a poem she wrote when her own daughter left for education in exile. Her daughter became a famous poet.

"Why Some Women Write Poetry" by Tassadit Yacine and Nouara (1995)

Yacine is a sociologist and anthropologist of Berber culture. She wrote a book about Nouara, a self-taught Algerian woman who had been living in France for two decades. There is an excerpt from Yacine's book, which discusses why Noara was unable to move forward even after leaving the patriarchal situation in Algeria. Also included are two of Noara's poems.

>231 lilisin: Ive always heard about the Japanese atrocities but didn't really know till I read Ted Chiangs book short stories that included one about Unit 731. I just had no idea; I cried when I read it (cant remember the name of it. I thought it was the end of history but cant find it.) the incident was also used in the poppy war . The Holocaust was happening in Japan as well; I can better understand now the reason our country used the atomic bombs (tho that was also a travesty of history.) One would think the world would have learnd its lessons, but its sort of flunked that class

Wow, your thread already exceeds 200 posts.

>192 labfs39:

In 2011 / 2012 I asked a colleague to buy me a Kindle on his homevisit to the States and bring it to me in China. I read two or three ebooks on the Kindle, and basically concluded that the "reading experience"(as separate from the material book) was essentially the same, but since I was sitting on a 12,000+ collection of paper books, I would mainly continue reading those.

Back home in the Netherlands, I still had a stash of about 1500 books, and I sent over about 1500 books from China, enough to keep me going for a couple of years.

On the way back to Holland, I found my Kindle had somhow died. I cannot recharge it.

With or without the natural gas crisis in Europe this winter, I doubt the attic where I sleep can be heated much above 12 degrees Celsius in winter, and most of the time it has been between 7 - 9 degrees Celsius. This makes sitting upright above the bedcovers to read a book very uncomfortable cold, so I started reading on my mobile phone under the bedcover.

My mobile phone is pretty big, and load what would probably be half a page in a paperbook for ePub, so that's a pretty good amount on a page.

Since you follow my thread quite regularly, you know that my reading preferences are broadly between 1750 - 1960, so most of what I read can be downloaded for free, although I then have to miss out on introductory essays and critical editions.

I also find that I have to search for works across various website, since even the vast collection of Project Gutenberg is limited. So I am quite happy with the Internet Archive.org

I also enjoyed your review of Ada Leverson and will later pick up some of her work.

>234 cindydavid4: People everywhere are capable of great cruelty. The Japanese treatment of POWS and civilians, especially women, was particularly brutal.

>235 edwinbcn: January is always a chatty month. :-) I'll start a new thread tomorrow.

>236 edwinbcn: Two bad about your Kindle. In the decade since you bought yours, the technology has improved. You might have a different experience with a new one. I got mine on sale on Black Friday and am very happy with it. Now that Kindles can handle epubs, it's much easier to access public domain works (from what I understand). I'm discovering different sources for ebooks, and so far have not felt constrained or that I need to buy books.

>237 edwinbcn: I downloaded a couple of Leverson's novels from Project Gutenberg to have on hand for when I need some witty levity.

January was a successful reading month for me, partly because of the wave of enthusiasm a new year brings and partly because I had an empty house (kids on vacation and daughter in Seattle).

Surprise find: The book club book, The Double Helix, was much better than I anticipated, if you read it as a personal impression, not a history. Our group met last night, and it was very interesting. The person who selected the book is a plant biologist and worked down the hall from Watson when he was at Harvard. She had knowledge of the publishing process (Harvard didn't want to publish it, Crick protested, the epilogue was negotiated, etc) and brought in DNA model components and other visual aids (including bio info on Linus Pauling and his two Nobel Prizes). A very enjoyable evening.

My regional challenges continue to broaden my reading horizons. I read my first book from a Tunisian author and two new-to-me Nobel laureates from the Baltics. My highest rated book was Hiroshima Diary.

The one book that I am still struggling to finish is The Captive Mind. I am finding it difficult to stay focused on these essays. It also feels dated.

>233 labfs39: These sound like some pretty grim stories, Lisa. Still, it seems like a good anthology. I'll look for it.

>239 labfs39: What a great start for 2023! I enjoyed your reviews and found some interesting books. I am currently reading Le Dernier Eté de la raison/The Last Summer of Reason after you mentionned it. I did not know about this author at all.

>233 labfs39:

I'm also interested. Did I understand correctly that the entries are complete, not shortened?

>240 BLBera: >242 LolaWalser: The four-volume Women Writing Africa series is a collection of writings from ancient times to the present by region. Sometimes the complete work is included (poems, short stories, letters), others times it's an excerpt from a longer work (novel). The appendices include a list of works by country, by author, and complete citations. There is a lengthy introduction (60 p.) that discusses that region's literary history and common themes for each era. Every work is introduced by a 1-2 page biography of the author and description of her major works, as well as background of that particular work. I found this to be very valuable. Most works are between 1-5 pages long. I had borrowed volume 4, the Northern Region, and have placed an order for two of the other volumes. I am choosing to read the works chronologically by country, but they are arrange chronologically (by the region covered in that volume). Many of the works are short, Lola, which is sometimes a downside. On the upside, a lot of authors are covered, and the intros include other works, so it will be easy to follow-up.

>241 raton-liseur: Thanks, raton. I liked The Last Summer of Reason, and the author's fate (assassination) is so unfortunate. I see that there is a BBC documentary about him, called "Shooting the Writer," introduced by Salmon Rushdie (ironic).

And on the eve of the new month, I'm off to a new thread and a fresh start. Join me for Chapter 2!

>243 labfs39:

Thank you very much, the whole set sounds desirable!

I love those Tom Gault cartoons.

On a much more serious note, I know Japan much less well than Lilisin, but a couple of points to add. The first is that because of the nuclear bombs, the common framing here around WWII is of Japan as victim instead of/as well as aggressor, which creates a more complicated picture. The second is that the US occupation and dominance of Japanese politics after the war also affected the way that the war was remembered. I was shocked when I discovered last year, from an obituary of Katsumoto Saotome, that the Japanese government had deliberately played down the impact of the firebombing of Tokyo so as not to offend the occupying forces.

I had never even heard of the firebombing until I was in my 30s and saw the film "The Sun" (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov) - there is a sequence which I didn't understand, and had to go and read about the film to learn about what happened.

>243 labfs39: After a good think...I believe I let go of the other Women Writing Africa when we were preparing to move to NH. I couldn't let go the one you had because it had all my favorites in it ....

>246 wandering_star: Thanks for chiming in, Margaret. I can see how the Japanese perceptions of WWII would be complicated ones, and I'm curious to learn more. One of the things that fascinates me is the development of national memories. If you have suggestions for additional reading, I will try to track them down. How long have you lived in Japan?

>247 avaland: Ah, that explains it. WWA: The Southern Region arrived yesterday and the Eastern Region is scheduled to drop early this week. I'm having more trouble finding an affordable copy of the Sahel, but I'm going to keep at it.

>246 wandering_star: very interesting insight

On the subject of Japan and perceptions of WW2, just a small anecdote. In the early 1990s I was teaching English as a Second Language at a small private ESL school in San Francisco. The students were adults from many different countries around the world. Mostly there were in the U.S. on student visas. Many already spoke some English but wanted to get their English level to the point where they could attend college or even grad school in the U.S. At any rate, one of my colleagues was teaching a film/conversation class and had several Japanese students in the class. Given that fact, the choice to use The Bridge Over the River Kwai for viewing and discussion seems questionable, to put it mildly, but that's what he did. They would watch short sections of the movie, 10 or 15 minutes worth, if I recall correctly, and then discuss them. Each movie would take several class periods, of course. After about the third or fourth segment of River Kwai, one of the Japanese students, in her 20s, finally spoke up and said, "What war is this?" My friend had taken it for granted that they would know the history, but, evidently, they didn't.

>251 rocketjk: I wonder if US students would know

>252 labfs39: That's a fair question, though I think the answer is yes, as we are still getting a lot of movies and TV shows about WW2 here. In the U.S., it's "The Good War," still. I'm not sure about the 1990s, when the incident I described took place, but I would conjecture that in the U.S. today, 30 years (holy cow!) on from that, more people in their 20s would know a significant amount about WW2 than would have any depth of information about the Vietnam War.

>253 rocketjk: Although I bet it's true that students are taught more about WWII than Vietnam, I'm not sure how much that equates to. In the "U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z," 48 percent of respondents couldn't name a single concentration camp and 20 percent thought the Jews caused the Holocaust. According to College Stats something like 20% of 8th graders could answer this question:

3. When the United States entered the Second World War, one of its allies was:

(a) Germany

(b) Japan

(c) the Soviet Union

(d) Italy

So I'm not sure I would assume that the average US student or young adult would understand the context of The Bridge over the River Kwai. Of course your anecdote was about college-bound individuals, so one would expect the knowledge base to be larger.

>254 labfs39: Well, I would differentiate between knowledge of the Holocaust and knowledge of WW2 in general -- that is, the war itself. Also, remember that I was describing young adults who couldn't discern what war The Bridge over the River Kwai was depicting, and seemingly had never heard of that war. I do think that most Americans in their 20s in the 1990s, and even today, having a look at River Kwai would have understood it to be taking place during World War 2. But it would certainly be an interesting experiment to run.

"something like 20% of 8th graders could answer this question:"

Again, and as you acknowledged, the students in the class I was describing were in their 20s, at the youngest. I learned a lot about history between 8th grade and my 20s.

>255 rocketjk: Interesting. I would assume that kids growing up with the ubiquitous Anne Frank would know more about the Holocaust than the war in the Pacific. Certainly true of my daughter (19) and her classmates, but that's a small sample. I think I have a poorer opinion of American public school education than you. :-)

>255 rocketjk: (Somehow, I think because I went into my post to edit while you were writing and posting, we now have two post 255s!. Anyway, the following is a response to your 255)

"Interesting. I would assume that kids growing up with the ubiquitous Anne Frank would know more about the Holocaust than the war in the Pacific. Certainly true of my daughter (19) and her classmates, but that's a small sample. I think I have a poorer opinion of American public school education than you. :-)"

Well, my experience with my American public school education was a pretty good one, but I was lucky enough to be living in a place with a very good system in place. Generally speaking though, I get your point.

I tend to think that my own particular knowledge of the Holocaust comes from the fact that I'm Jewish. As I remember it, the bulk of my learning on that topic came within the context of my Jewish eduction (Hebrew school twice a week after my secular school day was over (those were long days!) and then on Saturday mornings, as well) and my family environment. When it comes to the war itself, though, the more general context both in school and around me in the culture as a whole, was Pearl Harbor and D-Day (the anniversaries of both of these events were and still are commemorated) and the Battle of the Bulge and movies all the way from PT 109 (about JFK's wartime experience, and, yes, I am old) to The Great Escape and the Longest Day, John Wayne movies on Saturday afternoon TV, to Saving Private Ryan and the Clint Eastwood movie about Iwo Jima and the two HBO series, Band of Brothers and The Pacific, the Brad Pitt movie, Fury. All of that. I still think that in U.S. culture in general there is a lot of consciousness of WW2, and even still of WW2 being "the good war."

Anyway, that's my personal perception, and perhaps I'm especially influenced by the particular era I grew up in. I was born, after all, only 11 years and one month after D-Day.

Are you conjecturing that your daughter and her classmates, watching The Bridge over the River Kwai, would be confused about what war they were seeing? How about Saving Private Ryan?

>257 rocketjk: I on the other hand grew up in a place with a lousy public school system, although not as lousy as that in Florida. I received almost no classwork on WWII (and nothing beyond). My daughter went to a very progressive school in Seattle through 8th grade and studied the Holocaust, as well as topics like the civil rights movements, women's rights, bioethics, and all sorts of interesting things. She went to high school in Florida. I just texted her, and she has never heard of the Bridge over River Kwai and has no idea which war it's about. I don't mean to nitpick with you, Jerry, I just find it interesting. While I agree with you that Americans in general know more about WWII in Europe than other American wars like Viet Nam or even more so Korea, I don't have as much faith in what the average American student is taught about history. As you say, much of what is known is probably picked up from movies and popular culture and very biased toward the heroic American.

>258 labfs39: "I don't mean to nitpick with you, Jerry, I just find it interesting."

Oh, me too. Absolutely not a problem. But my question was not whether she'd ever heard of the movie. My question is, if you sat her down and said, let's watch this movie together, without giving her any historical context, would she turn to you a third of the way through and ask what war was being portrayed? Or would she be able to discern on her own that she was seeing a depiction of World War 2? That is what happened in my friend's classroom in around 1992.

>259 rocketjk: True. Idk. Although she grew up in a house with a mom who reads a lot of WWII books so if I suggested the movie, she could make a good guess based on my proclivities. I'm tempted to seek out a few history textbooks and see what's covered vis a vis WWII.

>248 labfs39: Just over a year. I am really interested in the development of national memories, too, especially through public history (statues, museums etc). One book which I read too long ago to remember any detail, but which I thought was good at the time, was The Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma which looks at the different ways Germany and Japan have remembered WWII.