What I’ve been reading

1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War.  An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments.  Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?

2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935.  My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s.  He might have mattered as much as Malevich?  It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that.  Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago.  The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the anarchists and the futurists is not so surprising.”

As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, also very good.

3. Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann.  What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside?  There is now a whole book on this topic.  Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently)  Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended nonetheless.

4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings, edited by Emiliano Bugatti.  Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy.  The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa.  He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper.  I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.

5. Céline, War.  A newly unearthed novel by a great classic author is rare to come by, but here we have one.  The text is not fully intact, but enough is there for reading to be a sufficiently integrated experience.  It is in fact one of the best novels on the horrors of war, and now is not such a bad time to revisit that theme.

I enjoyed Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, but it is too skimpy on the moderns.  No coverage of Uchida or Ursula Oppens or Angela Hewitt?

Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is a good follow-up to his earlier work.

In my pile is Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State.