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Reading Wednesday
Aug. 7th, 2019 07:40 amLove in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
I picked this up because a. I enjoyed the couple of Nancy Mitford’s other books I’d read earlier this year, and b. I discovered that a major character in the novel was based off of Stephen Tennant, who also inspired not one but two – as it turns out – of my favorite Evelyn Waugh characters, Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited and Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies. Other than that, I’m not sure what I expected, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a plot I can only describe as kind of a reverse Hamlet situation, without the murder, in the 1930s.
( Read more... )
Slacks and Calluses – Constance Bowman Reid
The real-life account of two teachers in WWII-era San Diego – Reid, at the time just Constance Bowman, an English teacher, and Clara Marie Allen, or C.M., as she’s called throughout the book, an art teacher who provided the book’s charming illustrations – who spent a summer working at an airplane factory.
It was a fun read— it reminded me of Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration in the sense that it was what is, to me, History™, as told by someone who lived through it, in a cheerful, gossipy tone like your friend who just plopped down at the table across from you like, “you won’t believe what happened at work today!” It’s full of cheeky descriptions (at one point, Reid describes a guy as “[looking] like Gary Cooper, but not enough to be exciting”) and she and C.M. evidently shared a deep love for dorky puns: when one girl jokes that an allergy to electricity runs in her family – she had an uncle who was electrocuted – Reid can’t help but include the aside that it must have been quite a shock; one chapter, about C.M.’s experience working in the bomb bay of the plane, ends with the joke that the Black Hole of Calcutta was nothing compared to the Black Hole of Bomb Bay. (Ba dum shh!)
It was also absolutely fascinating as a first-hand account of social history. The two parts that stuck out to me the most were:
( Read more... )
I picked this up because a. I enjoyed the couple of Nancy Mitford’s other books I’d read earlier this year, and b. I discovered that a major character in the novel was based off of Stephen Tennant, who also inspired not one but two – as it turns out – of my favorite Evelyn Waugh characters, Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited and Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies. Other than that, I’m not sure what I expected, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a plot I can only describe as kind of a reverse Hamlet situation, without the murder, in the 1930s.
( Read more... )
Slacks and Calluses – Constance Bowman Reid
The real-life account of two teachers in WWII-era San Diego – Reid, at the time just Constance Bowman, an English teacher, and Clara Marie Allen, or C.M., as she’s called throughout the book, an art teacher who provided the book’s charming illustrations – who spent a summer working at an airplane factory.
It was a fun read— it reminded me of Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration in the sense that it was what is, to me, History™, as told by someone who lived through it, in a cheerful, gossipy tone like your friend who just plopped down at the table across from you like, “you won’t believe what happened at work today!” It’s full of cheeky descriptions (at one point, Reid describes a guy as “[looking] like Gary Cooper, but not enough to be exciting”) and she and C.M. evidently shared a deep love for dorky puns: when one girl jokes that an allergy to electricity runs in her family – she had an uncle who was electrocuted – Reid can’t help but include the aside that it must have been quite a shock; one chapter, about C.M.’s experience working in the bomb bay of the plane, ends with the joke that the Black Hole of Calcutta was nothing compared to the Black Hole of Bomb Bay. (Ba dum shh!)
It was also absolutely fascinating as a first-hand account of social history. The two parts that stuck out to me the most were:
( Read more... )
