Steve Middendorf > Recent Status Updates

It was getting late, time for me to put away the book for the night. I just couldn’t do it. Luckily the author gave me a spot with 10% to go where the heroines were safe both now and then. I could sleep.

This is as great as great can be. A mystery wrapped in a literary quest wrapped in a philosophical debate wrapped in religious war… in the time of plague

I was at a low point. I didn't have the motivation to find something to read much less to go out. I exported the Goodreads history to Perplexity looking for recommendations. I got back a great list. This apparently will satisfy my “People of the Book” itch: objects, archives, long memory. I'm hooked.

Kursk, Volchansk, Kharkhov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye. So many names from the news today. Before and after the Germans were cleared out out of the south, most of the fighting took place in Ukraine. The brilliance of Russia’s generals has been an untold story, as has been the contributions of their military industrial complex. Thinking that each factory had to be packed up and moved 1000 miles….

I had the idea to compare this to 3 Who Made A Revolution. However, the latter is more like a paean to Bolívar than a scholarly study of ejecting Spain from South America. Such an achievement deserves to be fully documented and interlaced with other events in the Americas and Europe

I love this. Writing is thinking. The power of self discovery just builds and builds.

Joyce Carol Oates describes reading as "the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul". I wonder what it means then to give a book like this to a friend from a traditional Italian family who complains about being the workhorse.

“ But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”

Like Poland and Ukraine and most of Middle Europe, Yugoslavia has been challenged from the north east west and south, but not rolled over. Not by Christendom from Rome, not by Islam from the Ottomans, not by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not by the Wehrmacht, not by the European Union. All have left their mark. But none have escaped without the mark of the Slavs.

As a fly in a world of Venus fly traps SINGAPORE has navigated very successfully to become a powerful city state under the leadership of people like Lee Kuan Yu and people like Kishore Mahbubani. They have learned much about powerful states and have much to teach the west about the east.

A fantastic book that takes us into the heart of the country. Like an extended Balken Trilogy that stays in Yugoslavia. Teaches me about the pull of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Germany and the push back of the Slavs. I'd like to learn more about the Slavs.

Speaking of narratives, we've always considered Hitler to be the main driver of World War II events. What if that was just a narrative? What if it was Stalin? It sounds like a that would make for a good book and this is it!

“Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange, a jumble of feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.”

I must be getting to know Charles Dickens. 40 pages to go. Louisa and Rachel go for a walk on a bright Sunday morning. As I settle down to read, I say to myself it's time for a coincidence. They come to a disused mine shaft....

Referred from https://www.rt.com/russia/600169-kiev...

I finished Volume 1 Book One. I'm almost afraid to pick up Book Two. After inheriting a fortune, and being released from prison, where could they go from here?

"Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun one day...

(I'm starting on an adventure!)

...So, with people lounging and lying wherever shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with occasional jangling of discordant church bells, and rattling of vicious drums, Marseille, fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day.

I had meant to reread all of Joseph Roth to consolidate my understanding of Europe between the wars as a platform to reflect on what’s going on in Ukraine. Instead, I picked up this very large biography. I am loving it.

Unlike most other Dickens books I had trouble catching onto this one until Little Florence got lost. Now it’s got me like Covid.

I'm very disturbed by the ending of this. Not sure I want to read the last 20 pages or so.

I read this a long time ago, long before I started my reading on Russia. I wanted to reread it now with Vasily Grossman fresh in my mind. It is said to be the best book on the subject in German. Eli Wiesel called Roth “a truly extraordinary writer” but a historian?

In one review, it was said that this could be a companion book to Woolf’s Orlando. I see it as an ode to the women writers of the fin de Siècle, celebrating their beautiful melange of freedom, of hedonism, of the lavish lifestyles among the rich and their artistic pals, the blossoming of artistic and literary creativity and the bursting of sexual boundaries among women.

#AfterSappho
Drips with fin de siècle, Paris, Rome, Venice, Lesbos. Women translating Greek & Latin finding themselves & each other. Ordinary heroines imagined with the likes of Sarah Bernhart, Gertrude Stein. Empowerment and love motifs and threads throughout connect the characters in startlingly clever ways.

So far, so fantastic.

Why did the revolution so steeped in high ideals fail? Why did it turn on its people? Why do its leaders care so little for its people? I have read some 20 or 30 books on Russia and the Soviet Union trying but not understanding Why? Why? Why?

Now I think I have an idea why thanks to Vasily Grossman whose three books should be read as a trilogy, along with Grossman's biography by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler

Oh what mental anguish Grossman goes through as he struggles deal with what he saw during World War II: Stalingrad, the Russian front, and being one of the first journalists into the death camps. To come to terms with it himself, but then to get it published in the Soviet Union at time when all the editors were publishing to a political imperative, must have been equally daunting.

I read Stalingrad first before this. I was hardly able to put that down. Now I am 245 pages in and I forgot to even journal that I had started it.

War is not conducted on a map with a view from 20,000 feet. It is conducted in the lives of everyone who is affected by it. This is the gift given to us by Grossman: to smell the sweat of fear accumulated over months…

Finished at 4PM New years eve! Perfect timing. My last book of the year and last before I start the Trilogy of Memory on New year's day.

Finished at 4PM New years eve! Perfect timing. My last book of the year and last before I start the Trilogy of Memory on New year's day.