For the first time ever, I’ve decided to participate in a reading challenge. War Through the Generations is hosting a 2012 challenge to read “fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, etc. with WWI as the primary or secondary theme.
Books can take place before, during, or after the war, so long as the conflicts that led to the war or the war itself are important to the story.”
Challenge information and sign-up are here.
I signed up at the “wade” level, 4-10 books. Since I’m not very far into it, I’m going to count Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History by Jay Winter as my first book, even though I began reading it at the end of 2011.
Because I set a novel (The Moonlight Mistress) during World War One, and have an upcoming Spice Brief also set in that period, my collection of research books is rather…large. Truthfully, I buy far more books than I actually need. I don’t always read the books from cover to cover, particularly during the process of writing, when I’m more likely to dip in, find what I need, and move on. So I have a wide selection to choose from for this challenge. The difficulty will be choosing which books to read and review.
Here are a few books that are at the top of my To Be Read list:
Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves
A Diary Without Dates by Enid Bagnold
1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald
