Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August. In a throw-away remark here, Alex Ross described the opening chapter of his book The Rest is Noise as an instance of the “Tuchman maneuver”, and not being familiar with her, that remark compelled me to pick this up. It covers the run up to and the first month of WWI. The best parts are the vividly drawn scenes of generals and statesmen in moments of key decisions – history shaped by personal dogma, vanity, indecision, fear. Also, somehow I associated WWI mostly with trench warfare, but here I learned a lot about the importance of logistics in the early stages of the war: getting armies to where they need to be in time, managing supplies, figuring out where the hell the enemy lines even are.

Malcolm Turvey, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism. A friend pointed me at this book via an LRB review – it’s no secret I’m slightly obsessed with Tati and consider Play Time the greatest movie ever made. It’s a close study of Tati’s films and methods, in the academic manner. Nothing kills the funny like explaining a joke. This book is necessarily full of explanations why and how Tati’s comedy works, categorizing gags using academic terms (“mutual interference gag”), which to me read as kind of meta-funny. I learned one can indeed theorize about comedy, but this is not a must-read even as a Tati fan.

Bov Bjerg, Serpentinen. In earlier days of the web, pre-Twitter, pre-FB, pre all contemporary forms of social media, having a blog was a bit like having a septum piercing: vaguely subversive and uncouth yet stylish if worn right. Bov Bjerg’s was one of the stylish ones in the German language “blogosphere”. There is a specific post of his about a date with a political party in the august city of Bielefeld that still pops into my head once in a while. Anyway, now he’s a successful novelist. A previous novel, Auerhaus, was adapted into a movie. This new novel, Serpentinen, is shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2020. It’s a family chronicle of sorts, told in impressionistic bursts (not unlike a typical blog in the early 2000s, you might say). Heavy themes – addiction, physical abuse, suicide – run through the generations of the portrayed family. The almost constant jump cuts in the text did propel me forward as a reader but, ultimately, I wouldn’t say I was invested in the story.