I just finished The Lost Spy, about an American who was a spy for Russia in the 30's, and found it an empty experience. The author, Andrew Meier, admits that not much is known about the guy, Cy Oggins, so most of the book comes from three sources: Oggins' son, who never really know his father, a former radical who knew Oggins in passing and mentioned him a few times in his memoir, and some censored Soviet archives. It's odd to read a book about a spy and get absolutely no sense about his espionage activities. To the author's credit, he mostly doesn't try for fake reconstruction scenes, but that leaves a huge gap in the middle of the story: what was this guy doing for ten years for Stalin's spy service in America, Germany, France, and China?
I enjoyed more Donald Bogle's Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, about Black Hollywood in the classic movie era, and how even supporting actors like Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit, who were never given the chance to star in their own vehicles, were still in demand enough to be able to live in high style. I just bought The Underground City, a "lost" classic novel from the 50's by H.L. Humes, founder of the Paris Review, about Communists and Resistance fighters during and after the Second World War. It's a huge book and the first few pages aren't exactly engrossing, but I'll plug away for a while in hopes that I can say I read at least one "beach book" this year, even if I never even saw a beach.
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Somewhere in the blogosphere, I announced earlier in the summer that my summer reading book would be Cervantes's Don Quixote, in the new Edith Grossman translation. Here it is, September, and I've just finished page 650, so I can kind of see the end some three hundred pages ahead, but I'm also very much feeling like I just can't do the reading I want to anymore.
In part, I blame Facebook (I'm trying not to blame Wordshed, MMPR, Historiann, Comics Curmudgeon, Yarmondo, et al). On Facebook, though, I guess I've played a scary number of rounds of Scramble (the "Boggle-analog").
And, then, of course, there's my eyes. Just in the last six months or so, I've found myself having to hold reading material almost at arm's length ("playing trombone" Bing Crosby calls it with all possible hep-ness in White Christmas).
So you're not the only one feeling he's having trouble getting the reading done!
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