What book are you currently reading?

[Dachs]

Reading Endgame: Britain, Russia, and the Final Struggle for Central Asia by Jennifer Siegel. Useful overview of the Great Game after 1907, which arguably got more intense than it had been before the Anglo-Russian Entente. Very informative.

The War After Armageddon, by Ralph Peters.

Back in the late 1970's-80's, there was a brief genre of military fiction featuring World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. General Sir John Hackett wrote The Third World War, which was seen on Jimmy Carter's Oval Office desk. Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising was perhaps the most famous, but there were versions by Harold Coyle, Larry Bond and others. What they all seemed to have in common was victory by the West. America and it's Allys always pulled it out.

One notable exception was Ralph Peter's Red Army, which was not only an enjoyable novel and a modest best seller - but it also featured a Ruskie win and a persuasive story line. Peter's books remain unconventional, and The War After is another example. What does America have to do to defeat militant Islam? Become just like them...

Actually, the first edition of Hackett's The Third World War (August 1985) did feature a Communist victory. Only in the revised version - written with the consultation of noted GRU defector Vladimir Rezun (ps. Viktor Suvorov) - titled The Third World War: The Untold Story, did NATO win the war. Soviet spearheads in the Rhineland were destroyed via a B-52 bomb run from the Azores, whereupon the Communists nuked Birmingham, which invited a retaliatory American nuclear attack on Minsk. Popular uprising - the standard ironic bread riot in Moscow - then forced the Soviet regime to come to terms with NATO. There were also other factors, of course, like the collapse of the Cuban state and a successful NATO Scandinavian campaign that recaptured Denmark and northern Norway in conjunction with Sweden, which reluctantly sided with NATO after the USSR made a farce out of Swedish neutrality.

I don't recall Larry Bond writing a World War III technothriller set in Europe, other than his work "collaborating" with Clancy on Red Storm Rising. Bond wrote Red Phoenix, about a second Korean war (ending with the Chinese totally embarrassing the hell out of the USSR) and Vortex, about a series of conflicts in South Africa that saw pro-apartheid hardliners seize control of the government by manipulating the ANC into killing moderates, then invaded Namibia, inviting Cuban intervention, which escalated into use of South African nuclear weapons against Cuban spearheads to hold the Communists back, and then finally the Americans showed up and forced the Cubans to withdraw. Then (in real life) the Cold War ended.

Coyle's two "Cold War goes hot" books weren't the standard formula either. Team Yankee was actually set in the Third World War setting (the second version, which, yeah, featured an Allied victory), but focused on small-unit tactics and individual experiences like Peters' book did. Sword Point was based on a Soviet invasion of Iran, which invited American response and which basically turned into Korea Part II. Team Yankee was the only decent Coyle book, honestly.

 

[Glassfan]

In a BBC television interview at the time, Sir John admitted to giving way to the publishers who felt the book could only sell if NATO (read BAOR) won. He pointed out that since publication, things had actually gotten worse - ie., American ally Iran collapsing.

I believe Ralph Peters' Red Army was the only popular work were the Soviets won.

 

[Meteor Man]

Okay, I'm reading Red Storm Rising. I must say that it's very good.

 

[Cutlass]

Clancy does write modern military action very well. His plots got crazy after the Cold War faded though.

 

[Atticus]

Satan brought Imperium by Robert Harris to me for Christmas. I read it and liked, it was untypical for a historical novel, as it wasn't just a run through famous events, but rather like ordinary novel that just happened to be about Cicero.

I'm going to read other parts too, but was wondering about Harris' other works. The Germany-thing sounds good, and I'm going to read it (please don't spoil), but what about Enigma and Ghost Writer? Are they good fiction even if you're not interested about the topics?

At the moment I'm rereading The Name of the Rose, which is good, since on the first reading I wasn't old enough to appreciate certain aspects of it.

 

[sophie]

Finished Sense and Sensibility, and now I'm going through the other Austen books, working my way through Pride and Prejudice. She really does have a fiery wit, that Austen.

 

[Lillefix]

Satan brought Imperium by Robert Harris to me for Christmas. I read it and liked, it was untypical for a historical novel, as it wasn't just a run through famous events, but rather like ordinary novel that just happened to be about Cicero.

I've read the same book in French(I've discovered that to read is a convenient way to improve language abilities), and I also liked it. What surprised me the most was afterwards, when I found out how historically correct it was.

 

[SuperJay]

Finished Sense and Sensibility, and now I'm going through the other Austen books, working my way through Pride and Prejudice. She really does have a fiery wit, that Austen.

Excellent choices. She's great. My grandma is a huge Austen fan, so I got her Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for Christmas; she was actually quite amused. Gotta give the old lady credit.

If you like Austen, perhaps I could interest you in some Patrick O'Brian...?

Which is a segue into my own current books: The Surgeon's Mate (book 7 in O'Brian's "Aubrey-Maturin" series, and Bad Things Happen, a mystery thriller by Harry Nolan.

I also recently finished a novel based on a video game, but we shan't get into that here.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. It's actually a re-read, so I know what I'm in for. It's a very imaginative and rewarding book, but it is dense in it's ideas. First time it took me a month to read, something that almost never has happened to me with SF books since I was 14.

 

[Cashie]

Still reading The Slap; but I'm also reading A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes), The Best Australian Stories 2009 and the first TPB of "Unknown Soldier".

 

[Atticus]

the first TPB of "Unknown Soldier".

What's TPB? You mean Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna? I've heard it is notoriously bad translated in English, though there might be some newer translation that's better.

Even if you don't like it, Linna's Under the North Star is superb. If I was forced to pick a favourite novel, it might very well be that. Non-Finns won't probably find it as good as Finns, but nevertheless very good.

 

[Traitorfish]

An Introduction to Marxist Economics by Ernest Mandel.

Because I am kind of a dork like that.

 

[Dachs]

What's TPB?

Trade paperback. A book of collected comics issues, usually of a certain story arc.

 

[Kyriakos]

I bought a new collection of stories by Poe.
I probably already had all of them, but not from this edition, and from what i read of it the translation is very good. I collect books from a number of authors, if a new edition is worth having i will try to get it

 

[Lillefix]

I picked up Sacred Stone by Clive Cussler on the airport and it blew my mind. I have never in my entire life read something so epically awful. It's so awful on all possible levels. It fails in research, character development, storytelling, plot, writing. In short EVERYTHING. It had some promise in the start, but it soon developed into two unrelated plots and there were no tension in any of them. There are too many characters and he sometimes jumps between them several times on each page. God it's bad. I thought Digital Fortress was bad, but at least it had some surprises(at least if you hadn't read any other Dan Brown novels before ). This book was just boring and bad. But I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to read the book equivalent of "The Room".

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Stone-...1023/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295837822&sr=8-1

To Cussler's credit, he probably didn't write it. But still, it's his name on the cover.

 

[Cutlass]

I haven't read that, but it is unlikely that anything that went out under his name could be worse that what he himself wrote. "god-awful-disasters" would be too kind for the 2 books by him that I read in years past.

 

[Lillefix]

He doesn't strike me as the best writer in the world. But I can't say for sure, since the only other book I've read by him was Raise the Titanic!, and I struggled my way through it when I was around 10-11 years old. That's 15 years ago. But I can still remember great parts of it, so it wasn't forgettable. But then again, it was the first "adult" book I ever read. I still remember when a woman, central to the plot was forced to undress(that was VERY exciting for me). I was also very surprised that there existed laser weapons that could cut people's arms. But I know better now. For years I actually believed laser weapons like that existed because of him.

 

[Cutlass]

I don't recall the name of what I read. I do recall some basic gems such as the hero being god like in all respects. Lesbians rip their clothes off as the sight of him. Governments gift him with priceless historical objects. He's always in exactly the right place at exactly the right time saying exactly the right thing. He can't be seriously injured when a hand grenade explodes in a small enclosed space with him. ect, ect, ect...

God-awful did not begin to describe it.

 

[Atticus]

Lesbians rip their clothes off as the sight of him.

How can this be a bad book?

 

[Cashie]

What's TPB? You mean Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna? I've heard it is notoriously bad translated in English, though there might be some newer translation that's better.

Even if you don't like it, Linna's Under the North Star is superb. If I was forced to pick a favourite novel, it might very well be that. Non-Finns won't probably find it as good as Finns, but nevertheless very good.

Trade paperback. A book of collected comics issues, usually of a certain story arc.

What Dachs said; Unknown Soldier is a reinterpretation of an older comic title, this one is set around the Acholiland insurgency in Uganda. It's pretty intense stuff; I'm not a fan of war-wankery as a rule, but this is well worth reading. Not for the faint of heart.