What are you currently reading ?

Started by goat major, 03 November 2012, 06:40:05 PM

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Friedland


I get through a fair few books every month. Recent ones have been:

"Swords Around a Throne - Napoleon's Grand Armee" Robert R Elting.
"Fatal Avenue - A Travellers History of the Battlefields of Northern France 1346-1945" Richard Holmes.
"The Franco Prussian War" Michael Howard.

Also managed to grab a copy of David Chandler's "Campaigns of Napoleon" for £15 from a local market stall (1968 edition). Nice as I've been after it for ages and was reluctant to pay the usual 40 quid price tag.

Leman

The Confederacy's Last Hurrah. Hood isn't coming over this terribly well.
The artist formerly known as Dour Puritan!

sixsideddice


fsn

I've just started "the Last Knight" by Norman F Cantor.

I have a number of prejudices when I read. Firstly, I never read SF written by women. Too much touchy-feely and not enough coruscating lasers. Secondly, I never read modern biographies, thirdly I never read histories written for Americans.

Americans talking about anything before 1600 are like fish discussing athlete's foot. They have no real frame of reference and their attempts to bring it to the understanding of the audience grate. Cantor compares cathedral canons to Ivy League professors, and suggests John of Gaunt spent millions of dollars. By the end of chapter 1 I was ready to toss the book out of the window. I may get into chapter 2.

To support my contention of American historians, one has only to watch some of the dross on the History Channel. It basically goes "Egypt/China invented it, Romans probably had something to do with it,  funny people in armour, then nothing until in 1823 Josiah P Hogswill of Clustermuck, Pennsylvania added a tiny, tiny bit and then the whole world was saved. Since then, America has been the best at everything and the rest of the world doesn't count." (I paraphrase.)

Please don't think I'm dissing America. I'm dissing parochial American historians, and the cultural imperialism of Hollywood, and this book which is unsympathetic to the period and plonks C21 morality onto the C14.

Yes. I know Cantor was Canadian.

   
Lord Oik of Runcorn (You may refer to me as Milord Oik)

Oik of the Year 2013, 2014; Prize for originality and 'having a go, bless him', 2015
3 votes in the 2016 Painting Competition!; 2017-2019 The Wilderness years
Oik of the Year 2020; 7 votes in the 2021 Painting Competition
11 votes in the 2022 Painting Competition (Double figures!)
2023 - the year of Gerald:
2024 Painting Competition - Runner-Up!

General Greenman

Just attempting to listen to some of the pre WW1 invasion literature from Gutenburg plus "Damm the torpedoes"  by BRIAN BURREL.
This is am interesting book that looks at some of the myths about combat and how it is re-corded

Russell Phillips

Just stated The Red Effect by Harvey Black. It's a Cold War turned hot thriller set in the 1980s. I've read good things about it, and it's a good read so far.
Russell Phillips
Books and articles about military technology and history
www.rpbook.co.uk

wurrukatte

Iron Gray Sea by Taylor Anderson. 7th in his Destroyermen alternate universe thingy.

W

mellis1644

Low level hell - by H Mills.

Really great Vietnam helo scout pilot book.

sixsideddice


Ithoriel

"A Memory Of Light" (14th and last book in the Wheel of Time "Trilogy") by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan

A Marmite series if ever there was.
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

HPFlashman

Just finished " The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence" by Martin Meredith. A wonderful but depressing book on the development of Africa from the Colonial states upped and left and up to and including the beginnings of the "Arabian spring".

Excellent primer on the continents near/contemporary history.
Best regards,

Harry

ronan

"les cadets de Saumur" ( French cadets in Saumur 1940 ->  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saumur_%281940%29 ) I don't know if there is an english version..
It's not far from here, I will visit the places indicated


and the osprey "World War II Battlefield Communications"


fsn

Why is it (and I'm not getting at anyone here) that if you see someone whose first language is not English reading in English, you think "well, that's very clever", but if you see someone whose first language is English reading in foreign, you think "show off"?

Or is it just me? 
Lord Oik of Runcorn (You may refer to me as Milord Oik)

Oik of the Year 2013, 2014; Prize for originality and 'having a go, bless him', 2015
3 votes in the 2016 Painting Competition!; 2017-2019 The Wilderness years
Oik of the Year 2020; 7 votes in the 2021 Painting Competition
11 votes in the 2022 Painting Competition (Double figures!)
2023 - the year of Gerald:
2024 Painting Competition - Runner-Up!

Hertsblue

Picked up a copy of Kipling's Stalkey & Co for 60p at the local village fete. Haven't read it for years. Finally found out why Arthur Lionel Corkran was nicknamed "Stalkey". (In the schoolboy slang of the period it means cunning, devious.)
When you realise we're all mad, life makes a lot more sense.

www.rulesdepot.net

fsn

15 July 2013, 12:35:59 PM #209 Last Edit: 15 July 2013, 12:39:27 PM by fsn
Quote from: sixsideddice on 12 July 2013, 07:19:06 PM
Book 5... Game of Thrones

Quote from: sixsideddice on 14 July 2013, 10:27:38 AM
book 6... Game of Thrones ^^

I think we all know how that ends!
Lord Oik of Runcorn (You may refer to me as Milord Oik)

Oik of the Year 2013, 2014; Prize for originality and 'having a go, bless him', 2015
3 votes in the 2016 Painting Competition!; 2017-2019 The Wilderness years
Oik of the Year 2020; 7 votes in the 2021 Painting Competition
11 votes in the 2022 Painting Competition (Double figures!)
2023 - the year of Gerald:
2024 Painting Competition - Runner-Up!