Monday, August 29, 2005
Currently reading...
The Winds of War. Ordinarily I would have bought this at a thrift store, or a used book store, or tried to find it at Paperbackswap, but I was on a trip, so I paid $16 for a big ol' trade paperback with a flimsy cover and thin pages. Also, the book-within-the-book, a fictional treatise on Germany's actions in WWII, is in a nearly unreadable sans-serif font (with titles in a completely unreadable gothic German font).
However, the book itself is, as the blurb on the front says, "hypnotically readable." I never saw the mini-series, although I remember my mother watching it avidly; as I recall, that was the year I spent mostly shut up in my room, writing daily letters to a friend in another town (the '80s version of blogging) and reading such diverse material as The Fountainhead and My Darling, My Hamburger (for about the 12th time). I remember that my mother bought the book--a monstrous doorstop of a mass-market--and I tried a few times to wade through it, but hadn't yet developed the kind of patience that is required for reading about diplomatic strategy, world history, and military technology (probably why I never quite fit in with the D&D club) along with the character development and such.
Wouk's characters are always interesting, if a little two-dimensional; one of the things I like about vintage reading is that two-dimensional characters are often still interesting, without a lot of the formulaic hooks that mediocre authors use now to make their two-dimensional characters seem more interesting, such as a fondness for something just obscure enough to allow a pretentious reader a frisson of delighted recognition, an unnaturally intelligent pet, or a comically irrational fear (or a combination of all three: "I hugged my hamster, MacHeath, closer to my chest as I approached the closet door. Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely that an elderly nun carrying an umbrella was going to leap out and bash me about the head and face with it, but you can never be too careful. Mack the Knife twitched his whiskers in a way that let me know he understood.").
The war is the plot, and the characters are secondary. While I prefer books like Mila 18, where completely believable characters are tested by extreme external circumstances and show their true selves, the way some of these characters are little affected by the war even as it rages around them feels a little more realistic.
In any event, the book is incredibly absorbing: last night, after reading about an air strike, I found myself getting jumpy when planes flew too low overhead.
However, the book itself is, as the blurb on the front says, "hypnotically readable." I never saw the mini-series, although I remember my mother watching it avidly; as I recall, that was the year I spent mostly shut up in my room, writing daily letters to a friend in another town (the '80s version of blogging) and reading such diverse material as The Fountainhead and My Darling, My Hamburger (for about the 12th time). I remember that my mother bought the book--a monstrous doorstop of a mass-market--and I tried a few times to wade through it, but hadn't yet developed the kind of patience that is required for reading about diplomatic strategy, world history, and military technology (probably why I never quite fit in with the D&D club) along with the character development and such.
Wouk's characters are always interesting, if a little two-dimensional; one of the things I like about vintage reading is that two-dimensional characters are often still interesting, without a lot of the formulaic hooks that mediocre authors use now to make their two-dimensional characters seem more interesting, such as a fondness for something just obscure enough to allow a pretentious reader a frisson of delighted recognition, an unnaturally intelligent pet, or a comically irrational fear (or a combination of all three: "I hugged my hamster, MacHeath, closer to my chest as I approached the closet door. Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely that an elderly nun carrying an umbrella was going to leap out and bash me about the head and face with it, but you can never be too careful. Mack the Knife twitched his whiskers in a way that let me know he understood.").
The war is the plot, and the characters are secondary. While I prefer books like Mila 18, where completely believable characters are tested by extreme external circumstances and show their true selves, the way some of these characters are little affected by the war even as it rages around them feels a little more realistic.
In any event, the book is incredibly absorbing: last night, after reading about an air strike, I found myself getting jumpy when planes flew too low overhead.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 5:14 AM 
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