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May. 11th, 2012 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo as you guys may have guessed, grad school and finals have set me WAY BEHIND on booklogging. But I am so close to being done for the year! And therefore it's time to start catching up.
However I can't make finals my excuse for not having written up Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which I started reading last year and finished in like January or something.
The real problem here is that these books were just so good and hit me so hard that they left me kind of speechless, a condition that has apparently lasted for six months. I am going to attempt to fight through it to you to convey how fantastic they are, because -- man. Okay.
Regeneration is the first book in the trilogy and I think also the best one. It's a World War I book that's not set at the front; the central characters are a psychiatrist, John Rivers, and two of his patients, Siegried Sassoon (the poet) and Billy Prior (the irritant.)
Rivers' job is to a.) cure his patients, to the best of his ability, and b.) to convince them that returning to the front, that supporting the war, is a sane and rational thing to do.
As you can imagine, there are some challenges.
Regeneration does two things better, I think, than any other book I have ever read: first, convey the sheer horror and senseless damage of World War I; second, convey the kinds of things that the mind can do to itself when dealing with that kind of strain, and convey them with understanding and compassion and respect. Very few books deal with invisible illnesses well. This does.
The sequels -- The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road -- are both very good also. Both contain secondary plots that might on paper have been more exciting than the rest of the book, and they were interesting enough, but each time I found myself just waiting until I could return to the quiet, introspective psychological discourse that forms the real heart of the story. Which is not a way I usually expect to feel!
I suspect that Regeneration will continue to top my list of WWI books, but if anyone else has recommendations for books about that era (fiction or nonfiction), I'm in the market.
However I can't make finals my excuse for not having written up Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which I started reading last year and finished in like January or something.
The real problem here is that these books were just so good and hit me so hard that they left me kind of speechless, a condition that has apparently lasted for six months. I am going to attempt to fight through it to you to convey how fantastic they are, because -- man. Okay.
Regeneration is the first book in the trilogy and I think also the best one. It's a World War I book that's not set at the front; the central characters are a psychiatrist, John Rivers, and two of his patients, Siegried Sassoon (the poet) and Billy Prior (the irritant.)
Rivers' job is to a.) cure his patients, to the best of his ability, and b.) to convince them that returning to the front, that supporting the war, is a sane and rational thing to do.
As you can imagine, there are some challenges.
Regeneration does two things better, I think, than any other book I have ever read: first, convey the sheer horror and senseless damage of World War I; second, convey the kinds of things that the mind can do to itself when dealing with that kind of strain, and convey them with understanding and compassion and respect. Very few books deal with invisible illnesses well. This does.
The sequels -- The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road -- are both very good also. Both contain secondary plots that might on paper have been more exciting than the rest of the book, and they were interesting enough, but each time I found myself just waiting until I could return to the quiet, introspective psychological discourse that forms the real heart of the story. Which is not a way I usually expect to feel!
I suspect that Regeneration will continue to top my list of WWI books, but if anyone else has recommendations for books about that era (fiction or nonfiction), I'm in the market.
