Garber, Crews and Tarzi, Lacey

I read Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare and Modern Culture. I learned for the first time about actresses playing Hamlet or Shylock, for example, but otherwise I found some of the parallels -- Coriolanus and Il Duce's execution? -- a little forced. However, I have no doubt that the Bard's influence is as broad or broader in language that she proposes. I also read Crews and Tarzi's The Taliban and the Crisis in Afghanistan, for professional reasons, as I am reading Jim Lacey's edited A Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad. This last volume is quite a difficult read, and I'm glad that I'm not reading the 1600-page version. I also read an issue of The Economist.

Trollope, Lacey

I've been reading lots of military material for professional reasons, but I also finished The Way We Live Now, which was relatively boring, and Robert Lacey's Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II. This latter book had some gory details about the royal family that I hadn't known, including the fact that George V was indeed euthanized. Anyway, it's the book on which the movie The Queen is based.

Turgenev, Emmons, Lacey

I have finished reading Turgenev's novels, in recent days the shorter ones such as The Lear of the Steppes and The Priest's Story. The comments I made about his longer novels apply to his shorter one. I am glad to have filled out the Russian canon, but I didn't not find him riveting like Tolstoy, whose naturalism is so acute and whose mastery of language is so obvious. I went on to read, rather idly, Emmon's Russian Landed Gentry. I was interested by the title, which turned out to be too general -- it should have read 'The Abolitionist Movement in the Russian Landed Gentry.' I was interested to read that in the days of serfdom, it was not the land which was mortgaged, but the serfs. Their exploitation is what provided the gentry with income. I also read Robert Lacey's Aristocrats. This was also something of a puff piece about titled people who are no longer necessarily rich -- but the only people in the book are both titled and rich. Hm mm, is there is a bias here?