Reading Wednesday
Jul. 31st, 2019 07:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxJust finished
I finished reading The Night Manager, by John le Carré, about a British hotelier who goes undercover to take down an international arms dealer who murdered the woman he loved, and whose death he feels partially responsible for. My feelings about this book are basically just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not my usual type of book, and I rather got the sense that le Carré was not expecting his reader to be anything other than a straight white man, so I guess the feeling was mutual. I quickly reached a sort of emotional detente in which I was just engaged enough to keep reading, but not enough to feel particularly disappointed and/or indignant about, say, the treatment of the novel’s few female characters, or the homophobia. Although being able to picture Tom Hiddleston as the titular hotelier-turned-spy does make the fact that women kept throwing themselves at him make sense, that’s to the credit of the BBC or whoever made the 2015 miniseries. Actually, my main takeaway from the book is that the miniseries was very well-cast overall.
My other big takeaway was that one character, Goodhew, struck me as almost painfully naïve for an allegedly top intelligence official with a 25+ year career: when he found out that the arms dealer’s network had its fingers in the pies of British institutions with previously impeccable reputations, he was like (to paraphrase) “Is NOTHING sacred? Is English integrity an illusion? Does this mean–” (to quote) “–police violence and corruption is REAL, and not just the invention of JOURNALISTS and MALCONTENTS??” Like, bruh.
On the other hand, I went home for the weekend and ended up co-opting a book my mom had borrowed from the library: Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law, by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. district attorney of the Southern District of New York. I tend to take memoirs by public figures with a grain of salt, but even with salt duly applied, I found it a thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection on one federal prosecutor’s career. The last chapter, on the need for prison reform in general, and a few illustrative stories from Rikers in particular – two cases of people killed in custody by guards’ extreme callousness and/or brutality, on one side of the coin, and two innovative rehabilitation programs, on the other – actually made me tear up.
Side note, of a slightly more salacious (and, fair warning, deeply disturbing) nature:
One case Bharara discusses is New York’s cannibal cop, which I had heard of - mostly in connection to the fact that comedian John Mulaney lived in the same building at the time of this guy’s arrest by the FBI - but not in great detail. Oh, boy, do I know some details now.
The most haunting is that apparently his interest in, you know, killing and eating people was discovered when his wife, suspicious he was having an affair, searched his computer, and instead found her husband’s detailed fantasies about wanting to murder AND EAT HER. Can you imagine? Apparently, she just picked up their baby daughter (!) and left immediately, did not pass go, did not collect $200, just got the fuck out of dodge and called her dad (a former or current cop) and then the FBI. She later agreed to go back and talk to him in order to try and secretly record a confession, because she’s a fucking badass. I hope she’s doing okay now.
The other sticking point from that case is that I cannot imagine the psychological stress of being the undercover investigator that had to go on to a cannibal fetish website and pretend to be the co-conspirator of this guy who literally wanted to kidnap, murder, rape, and did I mention eat people.
Currently reading
I’m almost done with Lucy Ives’ Impossible Views of the World, about Stella, a curator at a New York City art museum whose already complicated life (impending divorce, emotional hangover from a brief affair with a co-worker, strained relationship with her mother) becomes even more so with the disappearance of a colleague - not the one she had an affair with - and the discovery of a mysterious map. I’m trying to reserve judgement until I’ve actually finished, but so far, it’s not quite living up to either that plot description or Loudermilk.
I’ve also been flipping back and forth to Vanity Fair, and find myself cheering for Becky’s machinations less and less. One chapter, satirically describing how “one can live elegantly in London on nothing a year,” reminded me vividly of the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix: the audacity of conmen who use the sheer scale of their non-payments to keep the goods coming can be stunning, almost morbidly impressive, but it’s innocent, hard-working, and often already economically vulnerable people that get screwed over. (Also of note: the fact that Thackeray emphasizes that both Becky and Amelia are well-liked by male friends/neighbors/etc. but shunned by other women? Is this some kind of 19th century version of “oh, she’s/I’m not like other girls”??)
To read next
I picked up the copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate I’d reserved through my public library’s interlibrary loan system! I’m also approaching the front of the line for a couple of books I’ve had on hold on Libby for the past 2-3 months: Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark of the My Favorite Murder podcast, and Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken.
I finished reading The Night Manager, by John le Carré, about a British hotelier who goes undercover to take down an international arms dealer who murdered the woman he loved, and whose death he feels partially responsible for. My feelings about this book are basically just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not my usual type of book, and I rather got the sense that le Carré was not expecting his reader to be anything other than a straight white man, so I guess the feeling was mutual. I quickly reached a sort of emotional detente in which I was just engaged enough to keep reading, but not enough to feel particularly disappointed and/or indignant about, say, the treatment of the novel’s few female characters, or the homophobia. Although being able to picture Tom Hiddleston as the titular hotelier-turned-spy does make the fact that women kept throwing themselves at him make sense, that’s to the credit of the BBC or whoever made the 2015 miniseries. Actually, my main takeaway from the book is that the miniseries was very well-cast overall.
My other big takeaway was that one character, Goodhew, struck me as almost painfully naïve for an allegedly top intelligence official with a 25+ year career: when he found out that the arms dealer’s network had its fingers in the pies of British institutions with previously impeccable reputations, he was like (to paraphrase) “Is NOTHING sacred? Is English integrity an illusion? Does this mean–” (to quote) “–police violence and corruption is REAL, and not just the invention of JOURNALISTS and MALCONTENTS??” Like, bruh.
On the other hand, I went home for the weekend and ended up co-opting a book my mom had borrowed from the library: Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law, by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. district attorney of the Southern District of New York. I tend to take memoirs by public figures with a grain of salt, but even with salt duly applied, I found it a thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection on one federal prosecutor’s career. The last chapter, on the need for prison reform in general, and a few illustrative stories from Rikers in particular – two cases of people killed in custody by guards’ extreme callousness and/or brutality, on one side of the coin, and two innovative rehabilitation programs, on the other – actually made me tear up.
Side note, of a slightly more salacious (and, fair warning, deeply disturbing) nature:
One case Bharara discusses is New York’s cannibal cop, which I had heard of - mostly in connection to the fact that comedian John Mulaney lived in the same building at the time of this guy’s arrest by the FBI - but not in great detail. Oh, boy, do I know some details now.
The most haunting is that apparently his interest in, you know, killing and eating people was discovered when his wife, suspicious he was having an affair, searched his computer, and instead found her husband’s detailed fantasies about wanting to murder AND EAT HER. Can you imagine? Apparently, she just picked up their baby daughter (!) and left immediately, did not pass go, did not collect $200, just got the fuck out of dodge and called her dad (a former or current cop) and then the FBI. She later agreed to go back and talk to him in order to try and secretly record a confession, because she’s a fucking badass. I hope she’s doing okay now.
The other sticking point from that case is that I cannot imagine the psychological stress of being the undercover investigator that had to go on to a cannibal fetish website and pretend to be the co-conspirator of this guy who literally wanted to kidnap, murder, rape, and did I mention eat people.
Currently reading
I’m almost done with Lucy Ives’ Impossible Views of the World, about Stella, a curator at a New York City art museum whose already complicated life (impending divorce, emotional hangover from a brief affair with a co-worker, strained relationship with her mother) becomes even more so with the disappearance of a colleague - not the one she had an affair with - and the discovery of a mysterious map. I’m trying to reserve judgement until I’ve actually finished, but so far, it’s not quite living up to either that plot description or Loudermilk.
I’ve also been flipping back and forth to Vanity Fair, and find myself cheering for Becky’s machinations less and less. One chapter, satirically describing how “one can live elegantly in London on nothing a year,” reminded me vividly of the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix: the audacity of conmen who use the sheer scale of their non-payments to keep the goods coming can be stunning, almost morbidly impressive, but it’s innocent, hard-working, and often already economically vulnerable people that get screwed over. (Also of note: the fact that Thackeray emphasizes that both Becky and Amelia are well-liked by male friends/neighbors/etc. but shunned by other women? Is this some kind of 19th century version of “oh, she’s/I’m not like other girls”??)
To read next
I picked up the copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate I’d reserved through my public library’s interlibrary loan system! I’m also approaching the front of the line for a couple of books I’ve had on hold on Libby for the past 2-3 months: Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark of the My Favorite Murder podcast, and Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 11:30 am (UTC)With Becky, I think it's more to highlight that her manipulation is basic enough that it's only effective on men because they're attracted to her/susceptible to a pretty woman flattering them, and/or that she doesn't even bother to try with any women but Miss Crawley. But with Amelia, yeah, I think it's roughly that. "Women are too catty and complicated and game-playing, but men are simple enough to appreciate her simplicity and lack of game." Two sides of the same coin.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 01:57 pm (UTC)..................what.
What??????
(The mother/daughter rivalry thing also makes an appearance in Vanity Fair-- Amelia is so overprotective of her son she once, in her fretfulness, makes a statement her mother interprets as accusing her of trying to poison her grandson, and proceeds to throw a fit about it for the rest of her life. Which is in itself, like... what?!)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 03:48 pm (UTC)On the other hand, they were later able to successfully convict one of his original (real) co-conspirators, as well as a few other aspiring cannibals, in a similar undercover operation, because the guy met with the undercover investigator IRL to, he believed, stalk a potential victim, and he brought skewers.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 05:16 pm (UTC)I didn't know either of those details (I had barely heard of the case) and I also hope both the ex-wife and the investigator are all right, yikes.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 10:55 pm (UTC)I've seen a few articles on that - I remember reading one about a teenager (possibly a teenage couple?) which is even more appalling in retrospect because teenagers are suggestible and prone to exaggeration/dramatics even when they're not talking with an undercover investigator trained to get them to incriminate themselves - and it was definitely something I had in mind when I was reading, and later thinking about, Bharara's account of this case. From what I understand, though, the guy already had a group of co-conspirators from the website with whom he discussed specific ways of killing specific women and had used his resources/authority as a police officer to gather information on the women in question, even before the undercover investigator got involved. Plus, they were planning on a longer investigation in the first place but cut it short when it looked like he was at risk of actually harming someone? Idk... it's definitely a complicated issue.
a minor mystery writer, arrested for the murder of her spouse, which mentioned she’d written an article for a writer’s magazine some years earlier titled “How To Murder Your Spouse”
1. I want to read this article
2. This was literally a Dorothy L. Sayers plot
3. How dumb can you be, to murder someone after writing an article on how to murder someone?! (I mean, don't murder people, just in general, but if you're a murder mystery author, definitely don't murder people!)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 11:29 pm (UTC)