Yannick Murphy at Powells on writing her novel, Signed, Mata Hari:

Would the reader like to know instead what you did not include in the book but that you learned about Mata Hari while researching her? How you learned from a questionable source that she may have had another daughter, an illegitimate daughter born in Indonesia and that she too became a spy? Or would the reader react the way you reacted to that tidbit of information, thinking it was too good to be true, too coincidental to be real? And so you let that item fly away in the wind and it's somewhere now a lost thought you had once tried to include in your book, it's sailing past the jasmine that lined your street in southern California where you lived while you wrote the book. (Link via Dan Wickett who loved the book.) (Dan has been running a series of posts lately entitled "what to buy your friends and relatives" that highlight all kinds of interersting small press titles. Start reading about them here.)

In case you are wondering about the high price paid by individuals for state security, consider Orlando Figes's new book on life under Stalin: The Whisperers (from the NY Sun's review):

Like many sons and daughters of the nobility, Simonov, whose mother was a princess, enrolled not in a university but in a factory apprentice school as a way of fashioning for himself a new "proletarian" identity, Mr. Figes writes. Simonov gained fame writing from the front during World War II, when he published his most famous poem, "Wait for Me." He went on to become the editor of the prestigious Soviet publications Novy mir and Literaturnaya gazeta, and a favorite of Stalin's.

Living comfortably among the elite, Simonov found a way to rationalize and even justify the arrest of his stepfather and the deportation of three of his mother's sisters to Orenburg. Mr. Figes writes that Simonov saw the arrest of his relatives as necessary acts, mistakes — because were innocent — but understandable considering the state's need to eradicate counterrevolutionaries. "Perhaps I thought, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,'" he later wrote. "It was rare to have a conversation without recourse to that phrase." (Jenny D. rightfully points out in her link that really, we hardly need another big whopping book to read - but this one seems very hard to resist.)

Jacqueline Winspear has a new Masie Dobbs novel due out in February, An Incomplete Revenge. This look at post WWI Britain continues to impress the hell out of me. Here's the new novel's description:

In her fifth outing, Maisie Dobbs, the extraordinary Psychologist and Investigator, delves into a strange series of crimes in a small rural community With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work. As Maisie discovers, the villagers are bitterly prejudiced against outsiders who flock to Kent at harvest time-even more troubling, they seem possessed by the legacy of a wartime Zeppelin raid. Maisie grows increasingly suspicious of a peculiar secrecy that shrouds the village, and ultimately she must draw on all her finely honed skills of detection to solve one of her most intriguing cases.

Here's a bit of an essay Winspear wrote about visiting several of the WWI battlefields:

Siegfried Sassoon, the famous Great War poet and author, wrote, "I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele." At the Third Battle of Ypres, more usually known simply as "Passchendaele." it is estimated that the remains of some 40,000 men -– mainly British, South African, Australian and Canadian -– still lie some 15-20 feet below the rich farmland. The clay soil had been aerated to such a degree by the intense shelling, that the mud was at least15ft deep. If men were not killed by enemy shelling, then they drowned, their lungs filled with mud and gas.

I have read a lot about WWI and I'm always shocked by how little most people know about the war - it led (directly or indirectly) to pretty much every conflict that followed in the 20th century. The Maisie Dobbs series is an excellent (and highly readable) place to start.

I dearly wanted to find some insight into Iris Chang's death and how her research might have affected her state of mind in Finding Iris Chang. But after reading both Jessa and Ed's thoughts on Paula Kamen's new book, I'm thinking I will pass. I'm particularly disappointed by Ed's comment (he reviewed it for the LAT) that it did not look at her role as a historian as possible factor. That was such a big part of what I thought (and so many others) after her death - even if it wasn't a factor I'd still like to see the idea explored.

It has been a long day of trying to remember what it was to discover (for the first time for me) the bush pilot myth. Writing tomorrow - sleeping now.