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Books I've Given Up On This Week

I regret to admit (or rather admit without regret) that I got deeply bored about a quarter of the way through Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and have therefore taken it back to the library. Sorry, Jean-Paul! This is simply not a season of my life where I am interested in you.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While looking for more Penelope Farmer books, as one does, I discovered that the author of Charlotte Sometimes also occasionally moonlighted as a translator from Hebrew. Specifically, she and Amos Oz teamed up to translate Oz’s book Soumchi, a wistful childhood journey through British-occupied Jerusalem between the world wars.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book - the tip-off lies in the prologue, a melancholy reflection about how everything is changing all the time which is very “adult looking back at childhood.” A gentle period piece about a boy with a massive crush on his classmate Esthie and also absolutely zero common sense, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps making trades where he is fairly obviously getting the worse end of the deal.

Also continuing my Vivien Alcock explorations with A Kind of Thief, a contemporary novel about a girl whose father is arrested for theft. But before he’s marched off by the police, he manages to sneak her the information to pick up a bag at the railroad station. Does receiving these presumably stolen goods make her… a kind of thief?

I think Alcock’s work is stronger (or at least more tailored to my interests) when she’s exploring a fantastical premise. This is fun but not something I would suggest seeking out unless you’re an Alcock completist. (If you are an Alcock completist, I do own a copy and I would be happy to send it to a new home.)

Also zipped through Dorothy Gilman’s Kaleidoscope, the sequel to The Clairvoyant Countess, which I probably should have read first as Kaleidoscope is chock full of spoilers for the earlier book. On the other hand, I’ll probably have forgotten all the spoilers by the time I mosey around to The Clairvoyant Countess, so it’s fine.

Always love Gilman’s older heroines. This book is aptly named, a kaleidoscope of different fractured glimpses of other people’s lives, some of which appear once and some of which are threaded throughout the book. No strong through-line but lots of fun little interweaving stories.

What I’m Reading Now

Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu, a lavishly illustrated compilation of the legendary origin stories of many classic Chinese dishes. Just about the embark on the story of spring rolls.

What I Plan to Read Next

I know I keep saying I’m going to read E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia, but I’m going to read Queen Lucia for real this time.

I know I’ve read Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 before, because my ebook is spattered with my own highlights all the way to the very end. However, I have no memory of the book, and also apparently never posted about it, both of which are baffling because it’s an enjoyable and fascinating read.

The Empire Must Die is telling the intertwined stories of many different prominent figures in late tsarist Russia: not just the prominent political figures (both in the government and in the varyingly legal levels of opposition), but also figures in the arts, Chekov, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Nijinsky. It is both painting a picture of Russian high society and exploring the events that led to the downfall of that society.

Zygar is telling a story more than he is advancing a thesis, so he doesn’t advance the idea that this or that thing is the root cause of the ultimate Bolshevik takeover. And obviously any complex historical phenomenon has many causes: autocracy, the Russian orthodox church, a highly class-stratified society with huge income inequality, etc. etc.

However, it ultimately seemed to me that any of these problems might have been overcome were it not for Nicholas II, Russia’s weak-willed, vacillating, but also stunningly pigheaded final tsar. He’s like the guy in the parable who is sitting on top of a house roof in a flood, turning away a neighbor in a boat and a helicopter and what have you because he’s convinced that God will save him, except in Nicholas’s case he’s ignoring warning signs like “we just lost a war with Japan because of our antiquated military, so perhaps we should modernize before we get embroiled in a larger war?”

Or, rather, he repeatedly sees the warning signs, he agrees to direly needed reforms, and then he backtracks the next day after he’s had a chance to talk to his wife. Absolutely a case where both halves of an adoring couple made each other exponentially worse. Nicholas believed that any attempt to amend the autocracy was a violation of the oath he made to God at his coronation, and his wife Alix not only agreed wholeheartedly but remained steadfast in this belief when the weak-willed Nicholas wavered.

So much for the collapse of autocracy. After Nicholas abdicates, why do the Bolsheviks end up in power? Well, you’ve got three main parties vying for it.

The Kadets: the liberal democratic party. In favor of a republic or a constitutional monarchy. Popular among Russia’s middle class, which is not very large. Just can’t pull the numbers they need. Ideologically opposed to shooting people for political reasons.

The Socialist Revolutionaries (also known as SRs): in favor of peasants and the political assassinations of tsarist officials. Despite this history of violence, excited to work non-violently within the new state system that everyone is trying to patch together after the revolution of February 1917. Unfortunately, their two most charismatic leaders recently died, and also they discovered that Azef, the guy who organized most of their high profile political assassinations, was actually a police agent. Awkward. The SRs fail to kill him.

The Social Democrats (also known as the SDs; split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks): Marxists, in favor of the industrial proletariat; hate peasants, but canny enough to promise to distribute land to the peasants anyway. The Bolsheviks are ideologically in favor of shooting people for political reasons, which gives them a decisive edge while their opponents are fretting about whether it will fatally undermine their attempt to build democracy if they shoot political opponents who threaten to violently overthrow democracy. As it turns out, the answer is “probably yes, but do you know what will undermine democracy even more decisively? Being violently overthrown.”