Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII

[Lexicus]

Rereading Chandler's Campaigns of Napoleon because I didn't bring any new books with me on the election deployment. Probably won't finish before the election.

 

[JohannaK]

The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant was a surprisingly pleasant read. If you are in the mood for some military reading, most of the book is about his campaigns in the civil war.

 

[Cutlass]

The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant was a surprisingly pleasant read. If you are in the mood for some military reading, most of the book is about his campaigns in the civil war.

I'd heard that turned out really well for written by a man who wasn't a writer, and was actually dying at the time he wrote it.

 

[Kaitzilla]

"Neorealism, but in space"?

Sure, why not.
Humans regularly almost have nuclear war on long timescales, and we have almost no language or distance barriers.
The current scare is over intermediate range ballistic missiles I've heard.

Habitable planets are presumably a very valuable and scarce resource.
How are good relations even possible with aliens?
The language/understanding barrier and distance problems are not surmountable.
Space is so vast their strike force could be hidden anywhere while they talk peace.
Habitable planets are near their sun, so their location can be found much easier.

The best strategy is to stay hidden.
Keep emissions down and be careful sending out probes.
Have the probe circuit the target solar system and enter from a different angle than a straight line.
Have the relay far away ready to self destruct after transmitting.

If another race is found, send 1 truly large hydrogen bomb laced with cobalt to wipe them out purely with radioactive fallout. (anything that wrecks a planet for 1000 years is fine)
Then send a colony fleet.
By the time they get there, the world should be habitable again.

The fact that this is the simplest and best strategy feeds the chain of suspicion even before the two races meet.

Things get more complicated with faster than light travel, but the fundamental truth of limited resources remain.

Humans have not left a single threat alive on Earth.
We will do the same in space, much like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Rereading Chandler's Campaigns of Napoleon because I didn't bring any new books with me on the election deployment. Probably won't finish before the election.

An awesome piece of work. It is within arm's reach of where I am sitting now.

 

[Dachs]

An awesome piece of work. It is within arm's reach of where I am sitting now.

It is indeed an excellent book.

You familiar with Connelly's Blundering to Glory?

The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant was a surprisingly pleasant read. If you are in the mood for some military reading, most of the book is about his campaigns in the civil war.

Grant's memoirs are legendary. Twain called them the modern equivalent, in literary merit and historical interest, to Caesar's Commentaries. It's hard to argue with that assessment.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It is indeed an excellent book.

You familiar with Connelly's Blundering to Glory?

Yes, it is a nice counterweight to "Campaigns". I spent a decade or so studying the strategy and tactics of the wars from 1790s through 1815. National armies went through substantial changes in the period many of which were tried and tested by Napoleon. Allocating credit between him and his Marshals is challenging and IMHO, hardly worth the effort. They were interdependent. Age, deaths of his generals and learning by his enemy all contributed to his downfall.

 

[Takhisis]

No, read Shogun when I was a kid and it was ok.
Would you recommend Whirlwind?

Yes. It's not the best in the series but the whole Asian Saga is good. Still, you should read all the books in the correct internal order, which would be first Shōgun (1600), then Tai-pan (1841), then Gai-jin (1863), King Rat (1945), Noble House (1963), and finally Whirlwind (1979), because the characters carry on. Indeed, some of the events from Shōgun have echoes in Whirlwind, 379 years later.

Just about any book banned by the Nazis is probably worth reading.

I assume they banned All Quiet on the Western Front because it went very much against the NSDAP's obvious warmongering spirit.

 

[Lexicus]

I assume they banned All Quiet on the Western Front because it went very much against the NSDAP's obvious warmongering spirit.

Exactly. It's an anti-war book.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Yes. It's not the best in the series but the whole Asian Saga is good. Still, you should read all the books in the correct internal order, which would be first Shōgun (1600), then Tai-pan (1841), then Gai-jin (1863), King Rat (1945), Noble House (1963), and finally Whirlwind (1979), because the characters carry on. Indeed, some of the events from Shōgun have echoes in Whirlwind, 379 years later.

I'll see if I can get hold of them from the library

 

[Dachs]

I assume they banned All Quiet on the Western Front because it went very much against the NSDAP's obvious warmongering spirit.

Yes and no. They banned and burned books more by the author than by the book. Remarque's portrayal of the front experience obviously contributed to their campaign against him, but so did his avowed anti-nationalism in public (changing his name from Remark to Remarque, for example). Because of its popularity, book-burners often referred to Im Westen nicht Neues by name, but all of Remarque's books were slated for the pyre. And in speeches, Goebbels almost always referred to the name of the author, e.g. "Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, und Erich Kästner" (speech at the Opernplatz burning, 10. Mai 1933).

Content was important, but political association and the position of the book in culture mattered more. For example, a nonzero portion of Ernst Jünger's Im Stahlgewittern, the other iconic German-language Great War front memoir, can be read as critical of the way the war was prosecuted. But Jünger was not a public opponent of German nationalism like Remarque was. In fact, although there's a decent amount of ambiguity about the war in Im Stahlgewittern, Jünger's public persona and his other writings valorized the war experience and were blatantly opposed to Weimar democracy. So Jünger's book avoided the flames, and Remarque's did not.

 

[Lexicus]

I got to read Mann's Der Untertan (not in the original German obviously) in my Germany 1871-present class at college...very easy to see why they burned that one.

 

[Takhisis]

I'll see if I can get hold of them from the library

Yes and no. They banned and burned books more by the author than by the book. Remarque's portrayal of the front experience obviously contributed to their campaign against him, but so did his avowed anti-nationalism in public (changing his name from Remark to Remarque, for example). Because of its popularity, book-burners often referred to Im Westen nicht Neues by name, but all of Remarque's books were slated for the pyre. And in speeches, Goebbels almost always referred to the name of the author, e.g. "Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, und Erich Kästner" (speech at the Opernplatz burning, 10. Mai 1933).

Content was important, but political association and the position of the book in culture mattered more. For example, a nonzero portion of Ernst Jünger's Im Stahlgewittern, the other iconic German-language Great War front memoir, can be read as critical of the way the war was prosecuted. But Jünger was not a public opponent of German nationalism like Remarque was. In fact, although there's a decent amount of ambiguity about the war in Im Stahlgewittern, Jünger's public persona and his other writings valorized the war experience and were blatantly opposed to Weimar democracy. So Jünger's book avoided the flames, and Remarque's did not.

I haven't read either Remark/que or Jünger, but I have read Thomas Mann. It's easy to see why he was censured, especially with his expressly calling anti-Semitism a kind of insanity and, of course, his wife being Jewish.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I belong to Robert Silverberg's Yahoo! group, and the other day he posted this:

In a career as long as mine, all sorts of strange offers are likely to turn up. Many years ago 20th Century Fox had a film option on THE BOOK OF SKULLS, and one clause gave them amusement-park rights. What sort of ride THE BOOK OF SKULLS would generate is hard to imagine. (The passengers try to push each other over the side, and the survivors get to live forever?) But the option lapsed.


Now a French juggling troupe wants to devise an act built around LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE, which features a troupe of four-armed alien jugglers. How they will manage to find the extra arms is, well, not my problem. Not a lot of money involved, but nobody else is clamoring for juggling rights to the book, and it's only for 100 performances and then the rights revert, so I have asked my French agent to accept the offer. As I say, if you live long enough....

RS

I haven't read The Book of Skulls, but Lord Valentine's Castle is one of my favorite SF novels. The world of Majipoor is an amazing place - a lovely, mostly-temperate world that's huge. Really huge. And it's peopled by humans and many different types of aliens, some of which are the above-mentioned 4-armed ones.

In the novel, Lord Valentine is the Coronal of Majipoor (a Coronal is like a king) who runs afoul of his enemies. They tamper with his mind, transferring his basic personality into the body of a stranger while leaving him with amnesia as to his real identity, while the son of the King of Dreams (another of the powerful authorities on Majipoor) takes Lord Valentine's place. Valentine wakes up one morning outside the city of Pidruid, completely unaware that he's really the ruler of the planet, and he's taken in by a troupe of itinerant jugglers.

There's a law that all entertainment groups are required to have at least a third of their performers be human, and Zalzan Kavol (one of the alien jugglers) needs one more. He agrees to train Valentine in the art of juggling, and so the story begins. During the course of the novel Valentine gradually becomes aware that he's not in his right body, that he's the Coronal, and his position has been usurped. Then begins his quest to take back his rightful place.

Silverberg's descriptions of the juggling routines performed by six aliens with 4 arms each are amazing, and this is one of the reasons why early attempts to option this novel for a movie fell through - back in the 1980s there was no way to even begin to do justice to these and other aliens inhabiting Majipoor, or the complex juggling routines.

In the intervening years, Silverberg decided that no matter that CGI could solve the problem of how to depict these characters, he didn't trust anyone in Hollywood to do justice to the novel, which is the first of several about Majipoor. So it was a surprise that he decided to allow this attempt to actually perform 4-armed juggling by people with only 2 arms.

Someone else in the Yahoo! group posted that he will try to take in one of these performances and take photos to post. If this actually happens it should be interesting to see.

(in my view, no mere movie could begin to do justice to this novel, as it's a long one and there's easily enough material for a TV series of 2-3 seasons if the sequel - Valentine Pontifex - were included)

 

[tjs282]

So it was a surprise that he decided to allow this attempt to actually perform 4-armed juggling by people with only 2 arms.

Someone else in the Yahoo! group posted that he will try to take in one of these performances and take photos to post. If this actually happens it should be interesting to see.

My guess (speaking as someone who can barely manage to keep 3 balls airborne for >30 seconds) would be that the second pair of arms will be provided by a second juggler, standing directly behind the first and thus unable to see exactly where the balls/ hoops/ clubs/ knives/ chainsaws(?) are at all times. Hence adding to the tension of the performance...

On topic:

Having just given Unseen Academicals (hi, @Takhisis!) another chance (it wasn't any better the second time around), I again ran out of stuff I had any inclination to (re)read.

So in a (possibly vain) attempt to challenge myself a little, I pulled a couple of Anthony Giddens' books off my wife's bookshelf (left over from her student days): just finished "Sociology: a Brief but Critical Introduction" (1982), now on "Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An analyis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber" (1971). Not sure if I'll learn anything useful, and it might have helped if I had actually also read e.g. Marx's Capital, but she doesn't have a copy of that one (maybe Project Gutenburg does...).

 

[JohannaK]

Grant's memoirs are legendary. Twain called them the modern equivalent, in literary merit and historical interest, to Caesar's Commentaries. It's hard to argue with that assessment.

I am aware, I just fear to overhype it.

 

[maxmayer]

Just about any book banned by the Nazis is probably worth reading.

Did you read any other book like that?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Just started "Too like the lightning" by Ada Palmer. It's the first of three I think. The writing style is a bit quirky, but the story line is excellent. It is SF on earth 2-300 years from now.

 

[Takhisis]

Having just given Unseen Academicals (hi, @Takhisis!) another chance (it wasn't any better the second time around), I again ran out of stuff I had any inclination to (re)read.

If you'd ever been a weekend warrior it might be closer to home.

 

[Akropolis24]

The Alchemist