Category Archives: Siege of Krishnapur (The)

Long Hot Summer

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I thought that I would read more books and post more blog entries as I stayed housebound during Charleston’s hot and sticky summer, but it didn’t turn out that way.  A lot of this dereliction was caused by a Kindle game called Every Word, an addictive scrambled word game that the friendly Amazon people give Kindle owners for free.  A big time-suck, but so much fun.  I did get some reading in, though.

New (to me) books

I finished the second half of Midnight Rising (my book), an exciting and sad account of John Brown’s inexplicably nutty attack on Harpers Ferry.  Tony Horwitz finds heroism and cruelty on all sides of the attack and during the subsequent trial and execution of Brown and his captured men.  The story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry is familiar to me, but Horwitz makes a particulary detailed and compelling case that Brown’s actions and their consequences were pivotal in the run-up to the Civil War.  There is a long period between publication of each of Horwitz’s books, but they are always worth the wait.

I read half of The Potter’s House, by Rosie Thomas (library book), then flipped through to see how it turned out. Slow, boring, silly.  I liked Thomas’ Kashmir Shawl, so this was a disappointment.  I’m glad I didn’t spend any of my money on this thing.

Same thing with False Mermaid, by Erin Hart (library book).  This is Hart’s third book about a pathologist named Nora Gavin.  I’m a bit tired of pathologists in mystery series, but I really liked the first book in this series, Haunted Ground (Kindle book), especially the setting in Ireland and the details about ancient Irish history.  I thought the story about the years-back murder of Nora’s sister, heavily referenced in the first book, would be compelling, but it felt kind of flat.  Glad the library had it and I didn’t have to buy it.  I still want to read the second book, Lake of Sorrows, because Hart can be that good. 

I also read two books (library books) that aren’t just new, but by a new author:  Alan Furst.  I read about Furst in an article about a new British mini-series starring the former, fabulous Doctor Who, David Tennant.  The series is called The Spies of Warsaw, from the book of the same name by Alan Furst, “master of the historical spy novel”, according to Amazon.  So I added Alan Furst to my library list, and the library had two of his books. The World at Night is set in Paris just before and during the first part of the German occupation, and Dark Voyage is set on a Dutch tramp steamer in May and June 1941.  In a nutshell, The World at Night is about a French guy who has sex with different women and one fairly simple spy mission.  Boring both as a spy story and a love story.  Dark Voyage was a lot better with more interesting characters, and I liked the stories about the ship’s clandestine work for the British in the Mediterranean and the Baltic.  Still, Furst is a library and maybe used book store author for now.  On the other hand, I can hardly wait until January to see David Tennant in the new series.

Old Favorites

 I picked Archangel, by Robert Harris, off one of my shelves, read every word and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I read it years ago, but remembered hardly anything about it so it was almost like a new book.  Great characters and a really good story, based on events that started with the death of Stalin, and continue in post-USSR Russia.  Reading one of Harris’ novels is always a treat, but unfortunately he hasn’t written very many of them.

 I thought I would be reading a new book when I picked John LeCarre’s The Secret Pilgrim from another shelf, but realized fairly soon that I’d read it before.  I’ve bought several of LeCarre’s post-Cold War novels, but never really got into them.  I thought The Secret Pilgrim was one of those, but it consists mainly of an old spy named Ned reminiscing about (cold) war stories while George Smiley talks to a class of new spies.  The book was written in 1990, just after the break up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and John LeCarre, through George Smiley and Ned, has some prescient things to say about how the world would change after the victory of the West and capitalism. 

I then read a book, Pray for a Brave Heart (my book), by another great espionage author, who has a different perspective on the Cold War than LeCarre.  British author Helen MacInnes wrote Above Suspicion, one of my favorite spy novels, just before World War 2, followed by a couple more books set in occupied Europe.  MacInnes and her husband moved to the US after the war, and, after two lackluster novels, she found her niche in writing bestselling books about innocent Americans caught up in the Cold War struggle against Communism.  MacInnes tends to be earnest in these books, and seems to have lost her British sense of irony after she came to the US, but she is a fantastic storyteller and idealistic without being dogmatic.  Starting with Pray for a Brave Heart in 1955, she wrote six superb espionage novels set in various interesting European locations, good reads every one.  After 1968, I find the quality of her books a little more hit and miss, but even at less than her best, her books are very good.  Most of Pray for a Brave Heart is set in Zurich and a small mountain town not far away, and I enjoyed the descriptions of these places and how they were used in the plot.  The central plot concerns smuggling notable East Europeans out from behind the Iron Curtain, very current affairs for 1955, and still exciting to read about.  I was pleased to see that this book, as well as Above Suspicion, will be available in new editions in early 2013.  Nice to see this author getting attention again. 

Instead of reading the good non-fiction book I bought about the Indian Mutiny, I reread Flashman and the Great Game (my book), in which Flashman is caught in besieged Cawnpore and Lucknow and sees and experiences conditions similar to those in The Siege of Krishnapur.  As usual, he has many other adventures involving real historical people, he fornicates freely, extricates himself from deadly situations by the skin of his teeth, and n-words every non-European he comes across.  Love Flashman, get tired of some of the things he says.  While I was reading Great Game, I was also reading Midnight Rising.  After I finished them, I thought I’d read Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which is also about John Brown and Harpers Ferry, again.  But too much Flashman in a row is not a good thing, I put the book back and will take a Flashman break for a while.

I enjoyed rereading Sarah Caudwell’s Thus was Adonis Murdered so much, that I started her The Sirens Sang of Murder, and again it was a problem of reading two books by a talented but very stylized author in a row.  The witty young lawyers and their clever bantering lose too much of their charm when taken in too much quantity, so Caudwell needs to also be put aside for a while.

 

Building reading trees

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How do I decide what to read next?  Many times I’ll see a review or mention of a new-to-me book or author that sounds intriguing, and give that a try.  Bookstores are alluring places to find new and different books, and Amazon’s recommendations and special offers are almost as good - Amazon’s book prices are great too.  And it’s always a treat when a conversation or e-mail with friends and family leads to some wonderful reading.  But a lot of my reading is directed by a generating or branching effect, from something I’ve read, or from a movie or TV program.  I think of this as something similar to a family tree. 

For example, this is the Nile tree:  By chance I picked Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile out of the revolving bookcase last week, and Moorehead’s rich writing and the exciting stories of the Nile explorers quickly drew me in.  The great BBC series The Search for the Nile, broadcast in the US in 1972, first inspired me to read this book years ago.  My 1983 Penguin edition of the book is very attractive; large format, good paper and interesting pictures.  When I finished the book, I wanted to know more about European exploration and colonization of Africa in the late 19th century, and I remembered that I had a book called The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham.  I checked the table of contents, and saw the book was a comprehensive account of exactly those topics.  I’m 150 pages into the book’s 680 pages, and already there are more details and perspective on the Nile explorations and political exploitation of the region, and lots of new stuff.  I bought this book about 15 years ago because I’d read Pakenham’s The Boer War, which is excellent, and I’m glad that Moorehead’s classic book about the White Nile finally pushed me to read Pakenham’s other African history book.  The Pakenham branch of the Nile tree just reminded me of a gorgeous Pakenham book I bought last year called Remarkable Trees of the World.  Turns out Thomas Pakenham’s love of African history is matched by his love of trees and photography, and this will be the perfect book to browse when I want a break from The Scramble for Africa, which can get pretty depressing from time to time.  Also love that the Nile tree has led me to – trees.

Where else might the Nile tree take me?  Alan Moorehead loves loves loves semi-colons and colons, and uses them well.  This type of punctuation has gone out of style since The White Nile was first published in 1960 - maybe I’ll read Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss again, to enjoy the company of someone else who loves elegant punctuation.  This truly entertaining book is subtitled “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”, an unusual topic for a book that hit number one on bestseller lists in the UK.  Moorehead also wrote a companion book called The Blue Nile.  My edition is a scruffy mass market paperback with very small print, maybe I’ll treat myself to the nice-looking trade paperback Amazon is selling.  So delighted that both Nile books are still in print.

The Siege of Krishnapur tree is still pretty small, but I’m trying to grow it.  I did start watching my DVD set of The Jewel in the Crown, a BBC TV series set in India during and just after World War 2, again.  I’m so familiar with this series that it makes a great accompaniment to ironing, since I enjoy it but don’t have to give it my full attention to keep up with the story.  Not in the mood right now to read The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott’s novels that are the basis for the Jewel series.  So I bought two new Kindle books about India.  I have high hopes for a novel  called The Kashmir Shawl, by Rosie Thomas.  It’s set in India during World War 2 and in the present day and sounds mysterious and romantic.  The curious thing about this novel is that I bought it on Kindle, but the hardcover won’t be published in the US until next year.  The second book is The Indian Mutiny by Julian Spilsbury, also published only on Kindle in the US.  Spilsbury is a journalist and TV writer, these should be good qualifications for making this history book interesting as well as informative.  I’m particularly pleased with these new purchases because they are new books!  That I haven’t already read!

War Horse, the book and the movie, is still a shrub, I don’t know if this will take me any further.  I didn’t like the movie that much, not as compelling and without the internal logic of the book.

Note to self:  A very recurring British theme to this post.  Read more American books!  At least finish Midnight Rising.

Current books, March 21, 2012

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The Siege of Krishnapur, by J.G. Farrell (my book).  I read this book about 20 years ago, and was happy to see it again.  It takes place during the Indian Mutiny in 1857.  A group of British East India Company employees, English planters and businessmen, and their families, take refuge in the Company’s compound from mutinous Indian sepoys.  They, and some Indian army pensioners, hold out during a months-long siege by endurance, courage and adaptation, and in spite of many foibles and weaknesses.  I am about halfway through this book, although I have done some of my usual forward flipping through the rest of it.  My favorite character is the Collector, the heroic head bureaucrat for the Company in Krishnapur.  He is the only person who sees trouble brewing, and tries to warn the authorities, exciting much ridicule and scoffing from the British community. The author did extensive research into the Indian Mutiny and life under the British Raj in the 19th century, and read many personal accounts of those caught up in the Mutiny.  The story’s tone and the characters’ thoughts and actions are realistic and compelling, the action and romance are thrilling, and the clashes between Church of England theology, Victorian ideals of progress, duelling medical standards and rejection of materialism make the story even better. 

A Nation Rising, by Kenneth C. Davis (my book).  I bought this in a moment of book lover’s bliss in a wonderful bookshop in Savannah.  Kenneth C. Davis wrote Don’t Know Much About History:  fast, lively chunks of history that are useful to know.  This book seems more ambitious; the author has chosen little-known but, in his opinion, significant events in American history 1800 – 1850, and tries to relate them to concepts and events in contemporary America.  I’ve read the first chapter, about Aaron Burr, and it was a very good historical account, with some important points about judicial developments in the early years of the Republic.  However, the author’s attempts to tie these events to specific current events seem forced and don’t ring true, even though I am in sympathy with many of his ideas.  I will finish the book for the history.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis (Kindle).  I saw this book in the wonderful bookshop, but decided to get some more information about it before buying.  Michael Lewis has written well-known books like Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Blind Side.  I have borrowed several of his books from the library, and could never get into them before it was time to take them back.  Boomerang is a collection of five long articles Michael Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair, and Amazon was selling the eBook for $3.99.  I decided to take a chance on it.  The articles are about the causes and effects of the economic recession in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California, and I’ve finished them all except California.  Lewis has the clout to get interviews with important players in the downfall and rehabilitation efforts of the world economy.  His observations about the countries and people he visited are pithy and funny, interesting and entertaining while maintaining a sense of objectivity.  Useful for people who are still interested in trying to figure out how we got into this mess, and want some ideas on how we’re going to get out of it. 

The Sheikh and the Dustbin and The Hollywood History of the World, by George McDonald Fraser (my books).  I wrote a little about these books in a post below on a book I just finished, Flashman on the March. 

Crime through Time III, edited by Sharan Newman (my book).  This is a collection of mystery stories, always a great “need to read” fallback for me.  This book was in storage; I can’t remember reading it and my copy looks pristine.  Virtually a new book, yay.

In review, I notice that only one of my current books is actually book-length, requiring sustained reading effort.  All the rest can be read in fits and starts.  My attention span doesn’t seem to be getting much better.