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kindkitCurrently reading:
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. I had to set this aside for a while when I got to the point where I couldn't face another story of atrocities, but I've resumed it and am getting near the end.
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff. I'm bogged down in this novel, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, and not sure if I'll finish it. I jumped ahead to see what happened to the gay soldiers (one of the useful features of an e-reader is being able to search for particular names or words), but the other characters have not caught my interest. Normally I eat up Arthuriana with a spoon, but I think Sutcliff makes a fatal mistake in telling the story from Arthur's POV. Her Arthur is dull, with an interior life consisting entirely of battle strategy, horses, and dogs, and also somewhat priggish and intolerant of others' emotions; this is plausible enough for a great warrior but doesn't make him much fun to hang around with for hundreds and hundreds of pages. About all Sword at Sunset has done for me so far is show me how many of its ideas Catherine Christian "borrowed" for her 1978 novel The Pendragon, which despite its dubious provenance is a much more interesting book.
Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum. I requested this through Interlibrary Loan because it had an essay on camp theaters that included some discussion of female impersonators, but it turns out to be a treasure chest of historical detail, with essays on topics like improvised medical technology in Japanese-run POW camps, camp newspapers created by Japanese POWs held by the British as forced labor after the war, embroidery made by Western civilian women internees in Asia, and the re-creation of family structures by prisoners during the First World War. Most of the articles show their origins as comference papers--they're brief, and like a lot of academic military- and military-related history they tend to be short on theorized analysis--but they're still a fresh and insightful view of POW life. (Special note to![[livejounal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_other.png)
halotolerant: in the essay on camp theaters, there's a photo showing Bobby Spong in costume. He looks beautifully elegant and, at least in that rather distant shot, very very convincing.)
Recently finished:
The League of Gentlemen, by John Boland. Another ILL book, which I requested after seeing the film, which I discuss here. The novel is bleaker and more violent than the film, with more mistrust and less camaraderie among the criminals. Interestingly, and contrary to what I expected, the gay character, Rangerhope, in the novel is conventionally masculine (he's a race car driver), unlike his equivalent character in the film (who is feminine but heterosexual, his gayness having been transferred to a [conventionally masculine] minor character). The story is unjudgmental about his gayness; the protagonist is at one point shown as being disgusted by the fact that Rangerhope is gay, but the protagonist doesn't exactly have any moral high ground, and anyway most of the time he admires and even likes Rangerhope. Not too bad for a pulp novel published in 1958. The book isn't all that interesting otherwise, being mostly devoted to the details of the bank robbery.
What I'm reading next:
Possibly Triumff: Her Majesty's hero, by Dan Abnett, which I picked up super-cheap secondhand and looks like it might be a fun alternate history.
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. I had to set this aside for a while when I got to the point where I couldn't face another story of atrocities, but I've resumed it and am getting near the end.
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff. I'm bogged down in this novel, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, and not sure if I'll finish it. I jumped ahead to see what happened to the gay soldiers (one of the useful features of an e-reader is being able to search for particular names or words), but the other characters have not caught my interest. Normally I eat up Arthuriana with a spoon, but I think Sutcliff makes a fatal mistake in telling the story from Arthur's POV. Her Arthur is dull, with an interior life consisting entirely of battle strategy, horses, and dogs, and also somewhat priggish and intolerant of others' emotions; this is plausible enough for a great warrior but doesn't make him much fun to hang around with for hundreds and hundreds of pages. About all Sword at Sunset has done for me so far is show me how many of its ideas Catherine Christian "borrowed" for her 1978 novel The Pendragon, which despite its dubious provenance is a much more interesting book.
Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum. I requested this through Interlibrary Loan because it had an essay on camp theaters that included some discussion of female impersonators, but it turns out to be a treasure chest of historical detail, with essays on topics like improvised medical technology in Japanese-run POW camps, camp newspapers created by Japanese POWs held by the British as forced labor after the war, embroidery made by Western civilian women internees in Asia, and the re-creation of family structures by prisoners during the First World War. Most of the articles show their origins as comference papers--they're brief, and like a lot of academic military- and military-related history they tend to be short on theorized analysis--but they're still a fresh and insightful view of POW life. (Special note to
halotolerant: in the essay on camp theaters, there's a photo showing Bobby Spong in costume. He looks beautifully elegant and, at least in that rather distant shot, very very convincing.)Recently finished:
The League of Gentlemen, by John Boland. Another ILL book, which I requested after seeing the film, which I discuss here. The novel is bleaker and more violent than the film, with more mistrust and less camaraderie among the criminals. Interestingly, and contrary to what I expected, the gay character, Rangerhope, in the novel is conventionally masculine (he's a race car driver), unlike his equivalent character in the film (who is feminine but heterosexual, his gayness having been transferred to a [conventionally masculine] minor character). The story is unjudgmental about his gayness; the protagonist is at one point shown as being disgusted by the fact that Rangerhope is gay, but the protagonist doesn't exactly have any moral high ground, and anyway most of the time he admires and even likes Rangerhope. Not too bad for a pulp novel published in 1958. The book isn't all that interesting otherwise, being mostly devoted to the details of the bank robbery.
What I'm reading next:
Possibly Triumff: Her Majesty's hero, by Dan Abnett, which I picked up super-cheap secondhand and looks like it might be a fun alternate history.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-26 11:17 am (UTC)Sineala didn't seem all that taken with Sword at Sunset either - not sure I'll fast-track it, though apparently it's very popular with fandom. You would like, I think, 'Blood and Sand' which is a Sutcliff adult novel and whilst it has some racial exoticism fail (not intentionally, I think, just in a 'I'm writing in the 1950s' way) the storyline is very interesting.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-26 08:44 pm (UTC)I think Sutcliff may not be my bag. I feel like she kind of wants to be Mary Renault, writing about heavily masculine worlds and male bonding etc., but unlike Renault she doesn't dare to make her main characters explicitly queer. And she seems to dislike/dismiss women even more than Renault does--in Renault there are exceptions, occasional women characters who step outside the bounds of convention and make themselves, in Renault's terms, interesting and worth talking about. Sutcliff doesn't seem to have even that. I actually am okay-ish with historical novels presenting a fairly male world--because often it was--but because Sutcliff has the mandatory heterosexual thing going, there are women shoved into the narrative as love interests but not developed as people.