What are we reading?

[MengJiao]

I am reading The Mirror and the Light. Which is the Final Book in the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel. The writing is excellent. Very atmospheric. I am also reading A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follet. It chronicles the upper class life in Victorian England. Definitely a pot boiler, but pleasant and easy reading.

   Sounds good!  I'm reading YA fiction cuz I have YA kids ( 7 and 10 which seems to be YA...I guess at 6 and 9 they were in Middle Grade books)...I recommended And I Darken to my daughter as "it has lots of impaling!"...Nope.  She prefers time-traveling goddesses and who can blame her?

   Speaking of time travel -- I'm kind of interested in phytosaurs (there's a whole room of their monstrous skulls in Albuquerque) so...Triassic Life on Land: the Great Transition is on the extra chair to peek at while waiting for games to load.

[z1812]

I am reading The Mirror and the Light. Which is the Final Book in the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel. The writing is excellent. Very atmospheric. I am also reading A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follet. It chronicles the upper class life in Victorian England. Definitely a pot boiler, but pleasant and easy reading.

   Sounds good!  I'm reading YA fiction cuz I have YA kids ( 7 and 10 which seems to be YA...I guess at 6 and 9 they were in Middle Grade books)...I recommended And I Darken to my daughter as "it has lots of impaling!"...Nope.  She prefers time-traveling goddesses and who can blame her?

   Speaking of time travel -- I'm kind of interested in phytosaurs (there's a whole room of their monstrous skulls in Albuquerque) so...Triassic Life on Land: the Great Transition is on the extra chair to peek at while waiting for games to load.

It is so good for Children to be encouraged to read when they are younger. It really opens up opportunities for them, not to mention developing vocabulary and articulation. The the thing I know most about Dinosaurs, is that I am slowly turning into one..........  ;)

[Gusington]

Just started Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943 - 1945: Red Steamroller by Robert Forczyk.

[Toonces]

Wolf Hall is fantastic.  I still haven't gotten to the other books in the series.

[Toonces]

I recently finished Toll's Pacific Crucible and The Conquering Tide.  Very good, and some interesting insights that I hadn't read before.  I have Twilight of the Gods queued up, but I might hold off on it to read some other books for a bit.

I've been working through The Official History of the Falklands War, but it's somewhat slow going.  It's a very long book, and it's quite detailed.

With respect to Ulysses, I got within 20 pages of the end and bagged it.  For those that don't know, the last like 50 pages of the book are one long run-on sentence from the perspective of the protagonist's wife.  I stuck with it for way, way too long, got the gist, and called it complete.  I'm just going to go ahead and say I'm glad it's over, and I have no desire to ever read that book again.  I did not enjoy the experience.

[Jarhead0331]

I'm just about finished with Fighter Pilot, the Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds. It is a fantastic book about a remarkable individual. i find that books about fighter pilots have the best anecdotes about life. Olds was a real character and a born leader. Highly recommended.

https://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Pilot-Memoirs-Legendary-Robin/dp/0312569513

[WallysWorld]

Saw an episode of "Air Warriors" on The Smithsonian Channel about the F4 Phantom and they had a segment on Robin Olds and his role in Vietnam specifically Operation Bolo.

[JasonPratt]

Always wanted to read Wolf Hall and anything by Ken Follett. One day.

This reminds me, I have the well-received adventure-game adaptation of Follet's Pillars of the Earth sitting around in my Steam library, and should get back to it someday. (I played it just long enough to get into the introduction, with the family in the snow in the woods trying to find something to eat, and liked it for that little bit but never got back to it.)


Meanwhile, aside from a couple other books, I'm finally back on Churchill's The Gathering Storm, about halfway through now.

[Jarhead0331]

Saw an episode of "Air Warriors" on The Smithsonian Channel about the F4 Phantom and they had a segment on Robin Olds and his role in Vietnam specifically Operation Bolo.

Funny you mention...if there is one criticism I have about the book it is that the chapter on Bolo is surprisingly brief. There is a fair amount of detail about the initial idea and the planning, but the actual description of the battle is extremely brief. I was really surprised and a little disappointed. Otherwise though, a really great and worthwhile read.

[ArizonaTank]

Recently finished The War Below: The Story of Three Submarines that Battled Japan by James Scott

https://www.amazon.com/War-Below-Story-Submarines-Battled/dp/1439176833/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1612559910&sr=1-2

This was a very enjoyable, and sometimes tense story of the USS Silversides, Drum and Tang. Three of the highest scoring US submarines in the Pacific. The book focuses on the boats and so describes the various skippers and crew who came and went during the course of the war.

The book does a great job describing the various patrols, the skippers, crew and the changing operational environment. Early war was target rich, but dud torpedoes, and the Navy's resistance to understanding the problem caused some skippers to quit. Mid-war, the Japanese started to pay attention to convoys and convoy escort methods and technologies. Late-war, there were very few cargo ships left, and skippers on patrol had trouble finding targets.

The narrative veers off course now and then...for example spending a bunch of time describing Midway; not really a submarine battle. But, these sections do help to fill in the overall course of the war, so aren't too off base.

The book does not strictly discuss war patrols. On the Tang's last patrol, literally the last torpedo in its lockers went wild, turned around and hit the Tang, sinking it in 128 feet of water off Formosa. Amazingly a handful of the crew were able to use the escape chamber to escape the sunken boat. The book describes the harrowing escape and subsequent internment in a Japanese POW camp. I was not even aware that those escape chambers ever really worked. I found this section to be very compelling reading.

Anyway, if you are interested the submarine war against Japan (from the US side), then this book is a sure bet.

[GDS_Starfury]

Just started Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943 - 1945: Red Steamroller by Robert Forczyk.

HA!  Im almost done with the 41-42 book.

[Gusington]

^I read the first one last winter. They are almost like textbooks for armor nerds, but somehow I love them. Tons of interesting WWII Eastern Front armored combat tidbits.

[PeaceFlower]

Finished,  "The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization"

A really good book in the same genre as Mark Kurlansky's
"Salt". Being that it takes an ordinary thing (wood) and tells
it's history throughout time, how it connects to other things
in surprising ways. You will be guaranteed to learn
some fascinating tidbits.

My favorite was how the the Royal Navy used manual labor to manufacture the wooden blocks their sailing ships required.
(Those wooden things that hold ropes/pulleys). So, some
chap decided to automate the process by building a steam
powered machine that automated the process. This  was
the first assembly line "Machine Tool". It reduced labor required by tenfold.

Most unusually, this machinery remained in continuous use from the early 1800's until 1964.

[Gusington]

^That's pretty interesting.

[z1812]

As an aside re: wood. I read this the other day. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientist-create-transparent-wood-as-clear-as-glass/ar-BB19J7oR