What are we reading?

[Sir Slash]

Just finished "Germany Ascendant" Prit Buttar's second of three books about WWI on the Eastern Front. Both books are great especially if you're like me generally ignorant of the war in the east's details. Lots of insight of the conflict between Gen. Falkenhayn and Austria's Gen. Conrad over strategy and priorities during the 1915 campaign. This book covers just 1915 with the first book covering the first year of the war in the east. The only minor complaint I have is again the maps in the book while functional, aren't that well done. But at 400+ pages, you get plenty of details and info. Can't wait for book three.

[besilarius]

Frank Chadwick's trilogy continues.

http://www.fictiondb.com/author/frank-chadwick~come-the-revolution~1255655~b.htm

[besilarius]

IIRC, Guns was Barbara Tuchman's first mass market book.  At the time, must have been about 1963, the Kennedy Assassination was very fresh. 
The destruction of Europe and a whole way of life, made it faschinating in a train wreck sort of way.  You knew the results were terrible, but couldn't make yourself look away.  There was a scenario that many people at the time was happening to the world again.

Her style got better as she did more.  An odd confluence between Distant Mirror and Guns would be Engourand DeCoucy and his Tower.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

If SPECTRE sucks, you can try escape to the imperium's service for a couple bucks. :D

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KCLJ39G

[Staggerwing]

^For three bucks what could go wrong?

[bob48]

Just finished "Germany Ascendant" Prit Buttar's second of three books about WWI on the Eastern Front. Both books are great especially if you're like me generally ignorant of the war in the east's details. Lots of insight of the conflict between Gen. Falkenhayn and Austria's Gen. Conrad over strategy and priorities during the 1915 campaign. This book covers just 1915 with the first book covering the first year of the war in the east. The only minor complaint I have is again the maps in the book while functional, aren't that well done. But at 400+ pages, you get plenty of details and info. Can't wait for book three.

Collision of Empires is the only one that I have so far, but its an excellent read.

[Greybriar]

Raylan by Elmore Leonard.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Kindle freebie

The Start of World War II: The History of the Events that Culminated with Nazi Germany's Invasion of Poland [Kindle Edition]

[JasonPratt]

Finally finished Worm the other day, the super-long superhero webseries of novels. (Well, about ten epic-fantasy sized novels' worth of material, probably to be expanded by a book or two when-if-ever the author gets around to editing it for print publishing.)

Without going into story spoilers, I continue to recommend it for anyone interested in epic superhero sci-fi / fantasy. The plotlines were mostly tied up well, which is impressive considering the number of sideplots and levels of main plot going on -- I thought a few things might have been dropped by the wayside (primarily concerning a hint that a major arc villain had been cloned and the original is still waiting in stasis somewhere, although maybe that's a mistaken impression), but the author was also setting up lines for a sequel series someday. The final fate of the heroine seemed a bit of a narrative cheat to me -- concerning a detail I won't go into -- but was otherwise fitting.

Longblade might especially appreciate it as a fellow Aquaman fan, since the concept could be construed as: what if Aquaman had no other powers than control of sealife, only that was bugs instead, and was also a teenaged girl? (Incoming jokes in 3... 2...)  ::)

The eventually-huge cast of characters is juggled nicely, with plenty of different kinds of tactical and strategic plotting. Cataclysmic threats are well established yet also frequent yet usually there's enough downtime between threats to appreciate a gain in competency in dealing with lesser problems. By the last several story arcs, all focused on dealing with one single uber-threat, this structure breaks down and leads necessarily to some crisis-fatigue; but on one hand the author wants to emphasize just how much of a final threat the situation is, and on the other hand incorporates crisis-fatigue into the characters, too, so makes a feature out of what might well otherwise be a drawback for the reader.

My strongest complaint is that the author never seems to bother to learn to improve his or her punctuation and capitalization problems, and occasional other minor grammar problems, which to me seemed consistent over the course of about 1.6 million words. I could look past it for the quality of the work otherwise, but I was never not-distracted by it.

I will definitely be donating ten-large-books' worth of money to the author for his or her efforts (the author goes by the handle "wildbowpig" or more often "wildbow"), and I sure don't mind plugging it for anyone interested in the genre. If reading teen-high-girl fiction is not to your taste, well it wasn't for me, either, but that goes largely by the side after the first 'book' worth, and I think readers will find much else to appreciate along the way. (If on the other hand you like that sort of thing.... well, it goes largely by the side after the first 'book' worth, so...  :P )

My best compliment is that, toward the end, I actually dreamed about the plot situation (generally speaking) once or twice, which is something that rarely happens.  8)

Back to reading Christian-history works for my other hobby for a while.

[airboy]

I've recently read:
A US History of the 1920s.
PJ O'Rourke's collection of stories about cars.
Several SF novels.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I'm reading To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944 by Stephen McFarland.  It's a very detailed look at the tactics, the technical constraints, and the mindsets of the command staffs and how they shaped the battle for air superiority over the day skies of Western Europe.  It's quite good so far.  It's provided me with a lot of new information as to how and why the forces of the USAAF, the RAF, and the Luftwaffe were shaped prior to and during the war.

[Martok]

Finally picked up my own copy of Red Storm Rising the other day.  Haven't read it forever, so I'm looking forward to this. 

[JasonPratt]

^^ One of my favorite books ever. 

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

A quote for you guys hatin on Guns of August

"Other groups in the Turkish government would have preferred an alliance with the Entente, if it had been obtainable, in the hope of buying off Russia , Turkey's age-old enemy. For ten centuries Russia had yearned for Constantinople, the city Russians called Czargrad that lay at the exit of the Black Sea.
...

Turkey had one asset of inestimable value— her geographical position at the junction of the paths of empire. For that reason England had been for a hundred years Turkey's traditional protector, but the truth was that England no longer took Turkey seriously.
...

England was at last beginning to tire of the fetters that bound her to what Winston Churchill amicably called "scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless Turkey."The Turkish reputation for misrule, corruption, and cruelty had been a stench in the nostrils of Europe for a long time. The Liberals who had governed England since 1906 were the inheritors of Gladstone's celebrated appeal to expel the unspeakable Turk, "the one great anti-human specimen of humanity,"from Europe. Their policy was shaped by an image half Sick Man, half Terrible Turk. Lord Salisbury's sporting metaphor after the Crimean War, "We have put our money on the wrong horse,"acquired the status of prophecy. British influence at the Porte was allowed to lapse just at the time when it might have proved beyond price."


2014 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition Copyright © 1962 by Barbara W. Tuchman

:P

[Toonces]

^ Heh.

That is exactly where I am in the book right now- I read that paragraph last night in fact.

I'm still slogging through it.  It actually is getting better now that we're through all the foreplay at the beginning.