What Book Are You Reading? Volume 9

[Dachs]

Yeah, Heather's writing style has been the subject of some complaints. I think O'Neill (who maintains a superlative blog on Late Roman/Early Post-Roman history writing) mentioned that he thought calling certain diplomacy "of the yah-boo sucks variety" would've been better suited to a lecture than an actual book. Still, his writing style is preferable to Goldsworthy's in The Fall of Rome, and he does take more definable positions than, say, Wickham in The Inheritance of Rome (which also covers the relevant period in a lot less depth due to having a solid five centuries and another half of the Mediterranean left to deal with).

You never got back to me on what you were looking at for that reading list, btw.

 

[GoodGame]

Lots of textbooks on the inner workings of biological cells. And lots of other crazy minutae.

 

[Agent327]

Finished, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, by Peter Heather a few days ago. It was a good read, the writing was sharp and to the point, with only the occasional slip. It certainly managed to convey what I thought was an accurate picture of the situation. But, I sometimes felt that the writing style may have detracted from the detail. Although, this may have been simply the result of it being written with an eye to the layman. In any case, it was a certainly worth a read.

I agree. Good read.

 

[Harvin87]

Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky

 

[Cutlass]

Biography of the Dollar - Craig Karmin

 

[Camikaze]

Dune- Frank Herbert

Actually never read it before, although I've seen the movie a couple of times. I'm not a big Sci-Fi fan. Hopefully it's good.

 

[Munch]

Dune- Frank Herbert

Actually never read it before, although I've seen the movie a couple of times. I'm not a big Sci-Fi fan. Hopefully it's good.

I thought it was excellent, with a particularly immersive backstory.

 

[Dachs]

T. N. Dupuy, Genius for War and B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War, for that paper I mentioned.

 

[holy king]

"el delantero centro fue asesinado al atardecer" by manuel vazquez montalban.

dont know if available in english.

 

[Munch]

Achtung Panzer! - Heinz Guderian

Good bedtime reading, as after a couple of pages of 'WW1 battle #435: the French 6th Cavalry did this, the German artillery did that; it was a bloodbath and tanks used intelligently would have really helped' you get rather sleepy. Still, tanks! To be fair it's only the beginning, going over military blunders in WW1... the best bit of the book is yet to come, where he lays out plans for the successful use of tanks in a then hypothetical future war. The introduction was good too, decribing how what was intended as a piece to convince those in charge to invest in development of this new weapon could never be only that (considering Guderian's recent years of tank research) and that it ended up being a critical manual for tank commanders in WW2.

 

[Babbler]

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec by Mordecai Richter - an interesting book from the famous author. It was quite controversial when it came, and quite given in to hyperbole. Still, it's a neat look into Canada in the late 80's and early 90's, where it felt like the country was going to hell in a hand basket. It feels so very alien, despite being the same country and only twenty years after the fact.

Eve of Distruction - A journalistic look into the Yom Kippor War. A concise and readable account, if somewhat flawed.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I'm almost finished with John Grisham's Ford County: Stories, which I received for Christmas, and will then move on to Herbert Ashbury's The Gangs of New York.

 

[Azale]

About 3 chapters into The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Good short read on something I don't know much about.

 

[Gilder]

I finished up Dubliners earlier this week, so I can start on one of the books I got for Christmas. They were a nice bunch of stories, but they all had downer endings. It did make a strong point through all the downer endings, though.

I started Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan. Already about thirty or forty pages in, and am immensely enjoying it. The look at his life in early 1960s New York before he hit it big is interesting.

 

[Godwynn]

The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

 

[Zkribbler]

Fear of the Dark by Walter Mosley

 

[The Imp]

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

 

[Zkribbler]

Dune- Frank Herbert

Actually never read it before, although I've seen the movie a couple of times. I'm not a big Sci-Fi fan. Hopefully it's good.

I thought it was awful.

 

[Kyriakos]

A collection of Lovecraft's epistols and one of Dunsany's short stories.

 

[Camikaze]

I thought it was awful.

I thought it was quite good. Granted, the ending was awful. It just...stopped. But the rest of the book was reasonably captivating and interesting. Not the best book I've ever read, but a pretty decent one.

Am about to start Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.