It’s Monday! What Are Your Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila of Book Journey. Be sure to check out her post today to see her selections and the list of links to all the other participating bloggers.

Read

My review for Dark Mirror by M.J. Putney brought up issues of pacing that I continue to ponder: Book Review: Dark Mirror by M.J. Putney.

A Covert Affair by Jennet Conant proved to be a bit of a disappointment. I read it as a natural extension to My Life in France by Julia Child (Book Review: My Life in France by Julia Child) because the subtitle indicates it to be the story of Julia Child during World War II. Unfortunately, the story is much more about Jane Foster, an OSS colleague of Julia McWilliams (later Child) and Paul Child. It’s not clear if Jane Foster had the better story or simply that it is better documented.

I did learn a scary amount about the conduct of the war in Southeast Asia. World War II might have been justified in Europe, but it’s much more ambiguous in a part of the world where America’s European allies were fighting less to get the Japanese out and more to regain their colonies. There are moments when the Americans and British were positively on opposite sides when determining appropriate propaganda efforts. After the War, the Americans might have been on the right side of history had we supported the fledgling independence movements and discouraged European colonial interests in places like Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam more vigorously.

I skimmed the last half of A Covert Affair and moved on to other things.

Reading

It turns out that The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry was the perfect follow-up to My Life in France even though it’s a novel, as evidenced by this quote on page 77:

Ma taught me almost everything I know about cooking, but the omelet, I learned from Julia Child.

The Kitchen Daughter has an amazing narrator, Ginny, whose brain functioned a bit differently from most people’s even before her cooking conjured up ghosts. I’m reading this novel so that I can participate in BookClubSandwich at Sophisticated Dorkiness and Estella’s Revenge which starts today!

This week in Watching the English by Kate Fox, I learned how pink can be an ironic color and that the English squash their peas on the back of their forks. The next chapter is on sex, so that should be fun!

Will Read

Next up is The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris for my real life book club, meeting on Thursday evening.

What are you reading?