POI 2x05, "Bury the Lede"

The watchalong continues. Anyone's welcome to join in, but please no spoilers past this episode. Most of the discussion will probably be on the LJ mirror of this post.

( Episode summary under the cut, my thoughts in the first comment )

reading post

Recently read: I finished Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazis Scientists to America, in the sense that I gave up on it. The topic--the US recruitment of Nazi scientists after the Second World War--is important and interesting, but I couldn't get through Jacobsen's prose. She's a journalist and she writes like one, with names and dates and more names and more dates, and little capsules histories of people's careers when she first introduces them, and a lot of back-and-forth between different threads of the story. I find that kind of thing difficult to follow; it would have helped if Jacobsen had included a sort of "who's who" brief reference guide, but she didn't. Plus it was all very tightly focused on events, without a lot of background beyond a reminder that the Nazis killed a lot of people, and without any kind of contextualization of the United States's decision to recruit men who'd been complicit in genocide. Maybe that came later--I only got about a third of the way through--but I think it's the kind of thing that should come first. My model for what history should look like is academic history, which (generally) values context over narrative and certainly never tries to create "suspense" with the journalistic techniques Jacobsen uses. This was the wrong book for me--can anybody recommend a different one?

I did get all the way through Elizabeth Speller's novel First of July, though I'm not quite sure why I bothered. Speller tells the story of four men (one French, three English) whose lives converge on the first of July, 1916--the first day of the Battle of the Somme. I'd have thought this was sufficient drama in itself, but Speller can't resist the urge to liven things up. She gives her characters far too many quirks (one, Benedict, has synaesthesia and psychically experiences other people's pain--no mention of how he coped with this on the battlefield--and he's gay and in love with his selfish cad of a heterosexual childhood friend). There are also soap opera-like plot twists that make the war seem like the least interesting and horrifying thing happening. To make matters worse, her US publisher Americanized the text to distracting degree. After finishing the novel, I realized the Speller is also the author of The Return of Captain John Emmett, another First World War themed book that I found melodramatic and unsatisfying.


Currently reading: Nothing just at the moment. I've been near-obsessively re-reading the three Person of Interest fics that I've dated to read (meaning only ones posted before S2 began, so that I can avoid spoilers) that I've also liked.

( Recs and links under the cut )

Things I'm planning to read: I got The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, by Alan de Queiroz, from the library today.

Mostly I want to read more POI fanfic, but I need to watch S2 first (and then I can read anything posted before S3 started to air!).