I didn't sleep very well last night, and today I feel like tenderized meat.

 I'm reading Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts. The books covers the story of Ambassador Dodd, a Chicago history professor who was assigned, through a series of misadventures, the post of Ambassador to Germany in 1933. It's a beautifully written and exhaustively researched book. Larson balances the homework he did with a fluid and engaged writing style. I have attempted this blend in shorter bursts, and every time I took a piece into workshop all of my classmates hated it. What I'm saying is that it's a difficult line to walk, and Larson does it well.

Reading this book has me thinking about the modern style of murder mystery, which is no the longer the whodunnit. More common now is to open with the tragedy, either the act or the aftermath, and either the real or suspected culprit. This builds a different kind of suspense than the traditional formula. It's a cymbal crash that recedes into a low, erie hum, one that sustains (if well written) for the length of the book.

The idea here is that what you know is coming can be more terrible than what you can imagine. It's chilling now to read about Martha Dodd's lunchtime meeting with Hitler, an attempt on the part of her Nazi officer friend to set the two up, because we know how it ends. (Martha, thank goodness, wasn't to Hitler's taste and never started dating him.) We all like to think we'd know evil, that we would recognize it and be brave enough to stand against it. We like to imagine ourselves better than we are.

To end with a fun anecdote: I was reading this book right before bed last night. Then I was ruminating on something else that upset me yesterday, and had trouble falling asleep. It got bad enough that at one point I actually said to myself, "Stop thinking about this, and just think about the Nazis." Guess what? It didn't help.

On a more cheerful note, here are some totally mind-blowing color photographs of Paris in the early part of the 20th century.