Rec books about WWI?

[mightymads]

I’d like to expand my knowledge on WWI which is quite rusty, to be honest. The last time I studied anything about it properly was at school, and that was about 15 years ago. Until I read Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, it was but a historical event for me as the history program at my school wasn’t particularly strong. It was something from the textbooks, and that was all. The letters made me realise how tragic it was. They gave the sense of “immediate presence” and the taste of how it affected one particular family. So now I’d like to know more.

Comments

[recently_folded]

If your taste runs to the sardonic and you can stomach modernist writing, Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy is interesting fiction on the period written by someone who went through that war. Like biography, I think that a well-wrought fiction can give us more visceral insight into an era than narrative political nonfiction works.

[mightymads]

Thank you for the rec! I'll look it up :)

[recently_folded]

It's not a light undertaking: the four books (although it's often recommended that one skip the fourth because it really isn't necessary or especially great) are slow reading, not the least because of the modernist styling. My copy ended up hugely annotated because I had to look stuff up on nearly every page. So it's half reading a novel and half a research project. But because of the historical depth of the writing, by the end you have a fairly interesting grasp of the period. I enjoyed it, but I'm willing to invest in a worthy book and have made a sort of hobby of reading excessively long, slow books.

[mightymads]

Warning well noted! Now I’m trying to get a general picture of things through an online course and documentaries. So maybe when I get to the books I’ll have a better grasp at things.