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This post is possibly going to be even more disjointed than usual, but it's been that kind of weekend. I've spent both yesterday and today in customary activities: two hours of classes at the gym, followed by vegetable shopping at the market with Matthias, and curry from the Tibetan stall for lunch, eaten huddled indoors at our favourite cafe/bar. All that pretty much covered Saturday morning, and after that we returned home, to thaw out in the living room, reading, watching biathlon, and just generally relaxing. Today, I walked out to the pool first thing in the morning (and felt vaguely surprised that it's still not fully light at 7.30am), swam my 1km, and returned home, shivering. We went out for a walk after lunch, picked up hot drinks from the coffee rig in the market, and browsed the bookshop on the way home, without buying anything. I've just finished an hour's slow, stretchy yoga class, and have opened Dreamwidth for the first time this weekend. I'm hoping to spend the next hour or so catching up with my reading page, and all the emailed newsletters I've received in the past couple of days. (To minimise my time on short-form, real-time social media, I subscribe to a lot of journalists, commentators, academics, food writers, authors and so on — and long form is my preference, in any case.)
The books I've read this week have been a mixed bag — two excellent, one decidedly mediocre.
The excellent books are on the surface very different, but in essence are doing similar things, approached in dissimilar ways. The first is New Yorkers (Craig Taylor), which is basically a series of vox pops with the titular residents of New York city, covering a broad sweep of humanity, and interwoven in interesting and illuminating ways. The author, who is Canadian, apparently did a similar book interviewing Londoners, but he said in the foreward that New Yorkers were much chattier and keen to get their views in print (he mentioned that frequently when interviewing subjects in public places like cafes, other people would overhear, interject, and become part of the conversation). I imagine that to a certain extent, given people's chattiness and interesting life stories, the book wrote itself.
The second excellent book is I Will Show You How It Was (Illia Ponomarenko), part military history, part memoir, covering Ukraine's post-independence recent history from the perspective of a thirtysomething journalist who had experienced it first-hand, the lead-up to the 2022 fullscale invasion, and the first few months of the war, from the partial encircling of Kyiv to the Ukrainian military's extraordinary, against-all-odds success in surviving that first blow and forcing the invading Russian army away from the vicinity of the capital (and indeed from all of the northern part of the country). Ponomarenko was the defence reporter for the Kyiv Independent English-language newspaper at the time of the fullscale invasion, and the war catapulted him (and the media outlet for which he worked) into the spotlight; his contacts in the military and prior experience embedding with them during the smaller-scale war in the Donbas region meant he was well-placed to understand what was going on both in the broader military sense, and at the level of individual units of soldiers. Although I was already well aware of this, the book makes it really clear how much of the success in those early, terrifying days was due to the good fortune of exactly the right figures being in positions of authority (both civilian and military) to meet the moment, making exactly the right choices under an incredible amount of strain, ordinary people (again both civilian and military) behaving with unbelievable courage, and a huge helping of sheer luck. But although the book involves a lot of discussion of battles, military tactics and so on, it's also a portrait of a city under siege, the resilience and defiance of its people, and the choices they made, individually and collectively, at a time of existential threat when there were no easy choices. Like Craig Taylor's book, it's a love letter to an extraordinary, complicated city, and the people who made it their home.
The third book I read this week was something of a letdown: Medici Heist (Caitlin Schneiderhan), which, as is probably obvious from the title, is an Ocean's Eleven-style heist novel set in Renaissance Florence. It's told from the multiple points of view of our rag-tag gang of thieves, who have hatched a plan to steal the indulgence money from the Catholic Church (whose pope, at the time, is a Medici). It's a fun idea, and on a plot level there's nothing wrong with the book, but I felt that this kind of story in novel form needed to give us a bit more than a collection of tropey clichéd backstories and personalities when it came to its cast of characters. I also didn't really feel that Schneiderhan made enough of Florence as a setting — I never really got much of a sense of the place, and it all just seemed like set dressing, for a story that could have taken place anywhere. As a film, it probably would work very well, but in a novel, I want more — and I was unsurprised when I turned to the final page, to discover in the acknowledgements that the author had previous worked as a scriptwriter, and had written the story as a film script first, before (for reasons not clarified) turning it into a novel instead.
One out of three books being somewhat disappointing isn't too bad, in my opinion (especially since I borrowed it from the library rather than paying for it), and beyond that, the weekend has been filled with nice things:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees reveals (I scored some Christmassy icons, and a little original fairy tale ficlet), lots of good cooking, and moody, atmospheric weather. We'll light the wood-burning stove after dinner, and sit underneath the string lights, closing out the weekend in cosiness.
The books I've read this week have been a mixed bag — two excellent, one decidedly mediocre.
The excellent books are on the surface very different, but in essence are doing similar things, approached in dissimilar ways. The first is New Yorkers (Craig Taylor), which is basically a series of vox pops with the titular residents of New York city, covering a broad sweep of humanity, and interwoven in interesting and illuminating ways. The author, who is Canadian, apparently did a similar book interviewing Londoners, but he said in the foreward that New Yorkers were much chattier and keen to get their views in print (he mentioned that frequently when interviewing subjects in public places like cafes, other people would overhear, interject, and become part of the conversation). I imagine that to a certain extent, given people's chattiness and interesting life stories, the book wrote itself.
The second excellent book is I Will Show You How It Was (Illia Ponomarenko), part military history, part memoir, covering Ukraine's post-independence recent history from the perspective of a thirtysomething journalist who had experienced it first-hand, the lead-up to the 2022 fullscale invasion, and the first few months of the war, from the partial encircling of Kyiv to the Ukrainian military's extraordinary, against-all-odds success in surviving that first blow and forcing the invading Russian army away from the vicinity of the capital (and indeed from all of the northern part of the country). Ponomarenko was the defence reporter for the Kyiv Independent English-language newspaper at the time of the fullscale invasion, and the war catapulted him (and the media outlet for which he worked) into the spotlight; his contacts in the military and prior experience embedding with them during the smaller-scale war in the Donbas region meant he was well-placed to understand what was going on both in the broader military sense, and at the level of individual units of soldiers. Although I was already well aware of this, the book makes it really clear how much of the success in those early, terrifying days was due to the good fortune of exactly the right figures being in positions of authority (both civilian and military) to meet the moment, making exactly the right choices under an incredible amount of strain, ordinary people (again both civilian and military) behaving with unbelievable courage, and a huge helping of sheer luck. But although the book involves a lot of discussion of battles, military tactics and so on, it's also a portrait of a city under siege, the resilience and defiance of its people, and the choices they made, individually and collectively, at a time of existential threat when there were no easy choices. Like Craig Taylor's book, it's a love letter to an extraordinary, complicated city, and the people who made it their home.
The third book I read this week was something of a letdown: Medici Heist (Caitlin Schneiderhan), which, as is probably obvious from the title, is an Ocean's Eleven-style heist novel set in Renaissance Florence. It's told from the multiple points of view of our rag-tag gang of thieves, who have hatched a plan to steal the indulgence money from the Catholic Church (whose pope, at the time, is a Medici). It's a fun idea, and on a plot level there's nothing wrong with the book, but I felt that this kind of story in novel form needed to give us a bit more than a collection of tropey clichéd backstories and personalities when it came to its cast of characters. I also didn't really feel that Schneiderhan made enough of Florence as a setting — I never really got much of a sense of the place, and it all just seemed like set dressing, for a story that could have taken place anywhere. As a film, it probably would work very well, but in a novel, I want more — and I was unsurprised when I turned to the final page, to discover in the acknowledgements that the author had previous worked as a scriptwriter, and had written the story as a film script first, before (for reasons not clarified) turning it into a novel instead.
One out of three books being somewhat disappointing isn't too bad, in my opinion (especially since I borrowed it from the library rather than paying for it), and beyond that, the weekend has been filled with nice things:
fandomtrees reveals (I scored some Christmassy icons, and a little original fairy tale ficlet), lots of good cooking, and moody, atmospheric weather. We'll light the wood-burning stove after dinner, and sit underneath the string lights, closing out the weekend in cosiness.