A Trip to Russka

                                                                              

This has been on our shelf, next to LONDON and SARUM, both of which I'd read and enjoyed, being an Anglophile of long standing. But RUSSKA. . .well, having struggled in the past through Russian novels that required me to keep a running list of the various names, nicknames, and patronymics, somehow, I just continued to ignore this doorstopper (almost a thousand pages) of a book.

Until I didn't. And I really enjoyed it and learned so much about Russian history, from the earliest beginnings to the era of Stalin and a bit beyond. My favorite way to learn history.

Rutherfurd traces two families-one landowners, the other serfs--down through the years, (complete with a handy chart of family tree) showing the ups and downs of each while giving an overview of Russian politics, sociology, religion, and economics. This vast, sprawling country couldn't be contained in a smaller book.

I took it fairly slow and interspersed it with a bit of lighter reading, actually, re-reading--Sharyn McCrumb's earlier Elizabeth MacPherson novels. At the same time, I was toggling between two audiobooks--SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (nowhere near as good as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, though it has its moments) and a continuing re-listen to O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin wonderful series, read by the perfect reader, Parick Tull.

What a delight to leap from a Russian village on the edge of the steppes to a tourist's eye view of modern Scotland to prim and proper Regency England to battles at sea and intrigue in Malta during the Napoleonic era and back to aristocratic life in old St Petersburg! 

Books are such a great way to travel.

Reading While Waiting for Spring

Tender, brutal, heartbreaking, hopeful, Ward's intimate portrayal of an African-American family, living and dead, in present day Mississippi, is rightfully highly acclaimed. It should be a part of the national conscious and conscience. The governor of Florida would probably ban it from classrooms. 

To read this is to be moved, to understand, to some small extent, the dilemma of a person of color in a White dominated world, and to be amazed at the restraint shown by most of the Black community in the face of so much continued injustice.  

Man's inhumanity to man is also on full display in Rutherfurd's  Micherner-eque take on London, from the earliest inhabitants over 2,000 years ago, through the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans and beyond.  It's over 800 pages of fascinating history, and it's also a novel, following several families through the centuries, chronicling their fortunes as they rise and fall. I found it engrossing reading.

Historical fiction was some of my favorite reading as early as junior high, kinda painless learning. I highly recommend both of these.

Oops--I inadvertently hit PUBLISH before setting the date for the second. And can't undo it. So this is Thursday's post a little early.