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Oh, that sounds lovely, I'll have to read it. And the Radiohead dude likes it too, this is great. I'm also pleased that you can get it legally for free, since it's difficult for me to legally obtain free books in English here. When I get out of work I just want to chill out, and German is still work for me. I go to the library, but they don't have a lot of things I want, which right now is true crime. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jun 11, 2014 |
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Jun 11, 2014 23:09
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You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:23
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cheerfullydrab posted:You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious. I read one, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially people interested in the time period.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:40
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cheerfullydrab posted:You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious. I read the first one. I'd rank it far above Turtledove, at least.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:43
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cheerfullydrab posted:You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious. quote:The plot situation allows pragmatic, American, union-oriented, political thought to grind against the authoritarian, religion-driven societies of an unconsolidated Germany barely out of the Middle Ages. Baroque Cycle's supposed to be good, though; I knew a dude in college who loved it. To really do justice to this world and these people though, I'd have to request Flannery O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy. Maybe they could get a handle on the unique blend of misery, elan, and the routine acceptance of really weird poo poo. Like, in some guy's memoirs he'll casually mention that a soldier among his enemies was a wizard and called up a fog on a particular day, which is why they lost that battle. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jun 11, 2014 |
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Jun 11, 2014 23:47
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cheerfullydrab posted:You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious. I read it but I don't think I would recommend it to anyone, the non-fiction section they have in the grantville gazette is okay as people research a lot about stuff in that time period and do a fair amount of math and explanations about topics and how it might relate.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:48
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:I read the first one. I'd rank it far above Turtledove, at least.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:51
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Chillyrabbit posted:...the non-fiction section they have in the grantville gazette is okay as people research a lot about stuff in that time period and do a fair amount of math and explanations about topics and how it might relate.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:55
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cheerfullydrab posted:As someone who has read almost every book Turtledove has written and is not proud of it, reeeeally? Yes. I'm in no way saying they are good books, but they are a hell of a lot more fun than anything of Turtledove's that I've read. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who actually knows anything about the Thirty Years War (Although I really want to read Hey Gal's reaction to the, shall we say, overly positive, portrayal of Gustavous Aldophus. The Europeans aren't really portrayed as stupid or reactionary and even the villains are plenty pragmatic, they are just greedy and trying to kill the Americans/ steal their technology. The books are more than a little optimistic about the possibility of Liberal Democracy in 1630's Germany, and the section where the Grantville priest defends Galileo is dire, but the first couple books are perfectly fine airplane novels. Most importantly, while neither Turtledove nor Hey Gal, please read them, I want to see someone's head explode through the internet. Edit: Mixed up Eric Flint and John Ringo, do not read books written by John Ringo. Patrick Spens fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 00:23
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HEY GAL posted:Yeah I'm really hard up for people like that in my daily life. Eh it appealed more to me as it gave decent primers on topics so if I was interested I could ask questions here or read up the sources more. I think its perfectly acceptable for lay people to read.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:30
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cheerfullydrab posted:As someone who has read almost every book Turtledove has written and is not proud of it, reeeeally? Definitely, and how are you not insane? The first time I read a Turtledove book I was thinking "decent plot but this guy's writing style is really repetitive." I read a bunch more and it got unbelievably repetitive. Being in a remote cabin with a hurt leg and a stack of Turtledove books made for one lousy summer.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:32
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HEY GAL posted:Baroque Cycle's supposed to be good, though; I knew a dude in college who loved it. The Baroque Cycle is pretty fantastic. Just be aware that you're looking at ~2500 pages.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:09
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Patrick Spens posted:Yes. I'm in no way saying they are good books, but they are a hell of a lot more fun than anything of Turtledove's that I've read. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who actually knows anything about the Thirty Years War (Although I really want to read Hey Gal's reaction to the, shall we say, overly positive, portrayal of Gustavous Aldophus. The Europeans aren't really portrayed as stupid or reactionary and even the villains are plenty pragmatic, they are just greedy and trying to kill the Americans/ steal their technology. The books are more than a little optimistic about the possibility of Liberal Democracy in 1630's Germany, and the section where the Grantville priest defends Galileo is dire, but the first couple books are perfectly fine airplane novels. Most importantly, while neither Turtledove nor I quite enjoy these books in a pulpy sort of way they have their problems certainly but they're miles better than anything published by Turtledove. The main problems are that the main character is a massive Mary-Sue a union organizer who ends up becoming president of the US and then Prime minister of Germany. The books get incredibly  at times and Flint can't write a good villain to save his life because anyone smart enough to be a threat must convert to the good guys team right? I mean if they're smart they should wear a white hat and sometimes he gets more than a little preachy. Some of Flint's co-authors on the series though range from mediocre to downright terrible. Virginia someone or other was president of the US Genealogical Society and I swear her book had 400 pages of characters discussing their 3rd cousins twice removed and about 5 pages of actual plot.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:19
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Ferrosol posted:Virginia someone or other was president of the US Genealogical Society and I swear her book had 400 pages of characters discussing their 3rd cousins twice removed and about 5 pages of actual plot. Patrick Spens posted:Hey Gal, please read them, I want to see someone's head explode through the internet.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:25
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Definitely, and how are you not insane? The first time I read a Turtledove book I was thinking "decent plot but this guy's writing style is really repetitive." I read a bunch more and it got unbelievably repetitive. Being in a remote cabin with a hurt leg and a stack of Turtledove books made for one lousy summer.
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Jun 12, 2014 01:55
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I kinda enjoyed the 1632 series, to be honest - in a sense they introduced my teenage self to the early modern period, which I hadn't looked at in any real detail before. And I do enjoy the concept of it and the weird little interactions that come out of mixing two timelines together...but I'm starting to get real tired of Flint himself. He's remarkably optimistic about how willing 17th century Germans are to not only accept, but whole-heartedly take up the American Way (because it's so much BETTER than the shitsack they had before, see) in its entirety, and only a handful of unimportant extremists and bigots ever object within the society itself. Not to mention that Flint has a tendency to make half the book basically the good guys saying to each other "Oh man, we're so amazing, we're going to steamroll the bad guys with amazing technology and they'll never even know what hit them, heh heh heh." And then they steamroll the bad guys who flounder around being amazed by the inconceivable. The fact that he cooperates with other writers actually helps somewhat, a lot of the time - other writers tend to help counteract his Mary-Sue tendencies and his belief that everything will work out fine and all the 17th century Germans except for the idiots will learn to love being American. Though, there was that one lady who kept discussing an extended redneck family in interminable detail to the point where I literally missed the climax of the book and had to flip back a few pages to realize what just happened. I still like the series for all that, though, I just can't resist the concept.
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Jun 12, 2014 02:45
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HEY GAL posted:Look, if I ever wrote fiction about this poo poo it'd veer very quickly into detailed discussions of fabric shipments. This is the book I want to read. I just ordered a book about the Saturn V, and I hope to god it's all stories about ullage manoeuvres and dust covers and abort modes and guidance computers and other things nobody cares about.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:04
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Is it Stages to Saturn? Because that book is all about that stuff.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:06
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Tomn posted:I kinda enjoyed the 1632 series, to be honest - in a sense they introduced my teenage self to the early modern period, which I hadn't looked at in any real detail before. And I do enjoy the concept of it and the weird little interactions that come out of mixing two timelines together...but I'm starting to get real tired of Flint himself. He's remarkably optimistic about how willing 17th century Germans are to not only accept, but whole-heartedly take up the American Way (because it's so much BETTER than the shitsack they had before, see) in its entirety, and only a handful of unimportant extremists and bigots ever object within the society itself. Not to mention that Flint has a tendency to make half the book basically the good guys saying to each other "Oh man, we're so amazing, we're going to steamroll the bad guys with amazing technology and they'll never even know what hit them, heh heh heh." And then they steamroll the bad guys who flounder around being amazed by the inconceivable. This is like standard time travel alt-hist poo poo and the only thing that Flint brings to the table is that he's a modernist socialist so makes it about an entire society that espouses his ideals instead of a single ubermensch. I stopped reading halfway through one of them after they built a few ironclad monitors and smash through a few forts with zero tension.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:16
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HEY GAL posted:Look, if I ever wrote fiction about this poo poo it'd veer very quickly into detailed discussions of fabric shipments. If you want to and if no one has you might be able to just that for 5 cents a word writing a non fiction article. But then again its 5 cents a word....
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Jun 12, 2014 04:23
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I liked the part of the 1632 series where David Weber and Flint cross-invaded each other's stories to rehabilitate each other's strawman political bad guys, mostly because watching libertarian/monarchist Weber try to write a sympathetic super-rich capitalist was amusing in a terrible sort of way. I think the best part of alternate history stuff is getting me interested in whatever time period it's set in because the real history is usually much more interesting than the books. Same thing happened to me with his Belisarius series; that was a pretty cool real life period that I wouldn't have gotten interested in if it weren't for the books so I'm glad I read them, but I have no particular desire to re-read them ever.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:43
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I got started on alternate history and now I prefer reading historical fiction, particularly if it's well-researched. Old historical fiction like A Tale of Two Cities is cool because you can see the author's political views influencing the texts and that itself is a piece of history.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:37
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Is it Stages to Saturn? Because that book is all about that stuff. It sure is. And Apollo by Charles Murray is on it's way too, stuck in shipping limbo right now.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:44
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If you like that, Asif Siddiqi has a two volume set in a similar style on the soviet program. It used to be one book but now it's sold as two, they're "Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge" and "The Soviet Space Race with Apollo".
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Jun 12, 2014 06:02
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I actually own all the 1632 books as well as the Grantville Gazettes. I like them, but I like Destroyermen as well, so take it with a grain of salt.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:10
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Speaking of historical fiction, I am just having the most difficult time finishing Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. At first it was all the sex scenes that just caught me off guard, but thankfully the actual outbreak of war put a stop to that. But now were in 1917-1918 and he's making the goddamn Russian Revolution sound boring, which I didn't know was even possible. It's all committees this and Lenin yelling that and it turned into a real slog. Some parts were kinda good though - the depiction of Welsh coal miners and life in pre-war London was something that I hadn't gotten from more academic texts.
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Jun 12, 2014 06:53
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If you want a good yarn in the general period of the Russian Revolution (actually the Polish-Soviet war of the 1920s) then I can't recommend enough the book Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. Its English translation reads like a Louis L'Amour western, and it's all about that weird weird time in the interwar period where two relatively poor states went to war against each other. It's based on Babel's wartime newspaper dispatches, but fictionalized (not sufficiently fictionalized to save poor Babel from the Purge, though). Babel ended up embedded with a unit of Cossacks.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:Speaking of historical fiction, I am just having the most difficult time finishing Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. At first it was all the sex scenes that just caught me off guard, but thankfully the actual outbreak of war put a stop to that. But now were in 1917-1918 and he's making the goddamn Russian Revolution sound boring, which I didn't know was even possible. It's all committees this and Lenin yelling that and it turned into a real slog.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:21
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Grand Prize Winner posted:If you want a good yarn in the general period of the Russian Revolution (actually the Polish-Soviet war of the 1920s) then I can't recommend enough the book Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. Its English translation reads like a Louis L'Amour western, and it's all about that weird weird time in the interwar period where two relatively poor states went to war against each other. It's based on Babel's wartime newspaper dispatches, but fictionalized (not sufficiently fictionalized to save poor Babel from the Purge, though). This is a fantastic book, but also super sad, grisly, and extremely Russian. It's a great read, but not a bedtime read.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:22
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It was the only book from a revolutionary Russian lit class I actually enjoyed. The Foundation Pit was too slow and I found Master and Margherita nigh incomprehensible.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:28
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Grand Prize Winner posted:It was the only book from a revolutionary Russian lit class I actually enjoyed. The Foundation Pit was too slow and I found Master and Margherita nigh incomprehensible. If you enjoyed Red Cavalry then be sure to check out One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's post-revolutionary, but very much in the same vein of literature. It's incredibly compelling, and it was basically the first time any book talking about Stalin's work camps was published and distributed. The author was in a gulag himself before writing the book. It was super politically sensitive to read it, and there weren't enough copies around, so everyone read it really quickly and then passed it on. If you read it, emulate them and read it all in one sitting, preferably somewhere a little cold and out of the way. An amazing book - he won a Nobel Prize in Literature - but too bad he was declared an enemy of the state for writing it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich edit: The author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who also later wrote The Red Wheel, which was recommended earlier. Kaal fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 07:35
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Thanks the book recommendations, I'll have to add those to me wishlist Grand Prize Winner posted:It was the only book from a revolutionary Russian lit class I actually enjoyed. The Foundation Pit was too slow and I found Master and Margherita nigh incomprehensible. My girlfriend actually has the latter book and raved about it despite not having a larger interest in Russian history or history in general. Maybe I should borrow it.
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Jun 12, 2014 08:11
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Phobophilia posted:This is like standard time travel alt-hist poo poo and the only thing that Flint brings to the table is that he's a modernist socialist so makes it about an entire society that espouses his ideals instead of a single ubermensch.
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Jun 12, 2014 09:19
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I just googled 1632 series. Somebody makes real money of this?
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Jun 12, 2014 10:08
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Grand Prize Winner posted:It was the only book from a revolutionary Russian lit class I actually enjoyed. The Foundation Pit was too slow and I found Master and Margherita nigh incomprehensible. Master and Margarita really suffers from poor translations. I've been told that there's a particularly bad English one which tends to be the one people end up reading.
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Jun 12, 2014 10:28
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There's also a 2005 Russian mini-series of M&M. It's fantastic (literally) but all the fantasy elements are also a cover up to a more realistic depiction of being a nonconforming author in Stalin's Russia: mental breakdowns, burning your own manuscripts etc. are all out of Bulgakov's life, and the story wasn't published until after the his (and Stalin's) death. Here's a 240p version on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t6W9hkXV6g
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Jun 12, 2014 10:50
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Manuscripts don't burn.
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Jun 12, 2014 10:54
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alex314 posted:I've heard a joke about Rokosovsky: Depends. I mean, Rokosovsky did some really Major stuff. Early on, he was a part of the Kiev Military district, where he treated some warnings about the upcoming Invasion (received 48 hours or so in advance) as seriosu buisness and acted on it. He later wrote that he was lucky to not be in the very western most Units, because nothing he could have done would have saved his Units if he was there. He did some outright amazing stuff and Yartsevo during the battle of Smolensk, which allowed parts of the Red army Units there to retreat out of encirclements (by no means all of them got out though). It also seems that, when forbidden by Stalin to retreat for now, it was Rokosovsky who came up with a "we arent retreating, we are actually attacking the German Panzers in our rear" ploy (together with Timoschenko, who had the political power to not get shot for that stunt) to creativly retreat a bit earlier. Rokosovskys main achievment there was to Keep the Yartsevo corridor open. Stavka gave him roughly 40 dudes, one Radio car and one anti Air car for this. The majority was stragglers he found and promtply indicted into his "Yartsevo grouping". WHen he found a Tank unit that actually had ist ordered allotment of tanks (such things were ridiculously rare), he allegedly did a "MUAHAHAHAHAHAH". When being told that those tanks basically all sucked, he responded with "yeah, they do, but do the Fritzes know that?". He also pioneered some new anti tank tactics there. He was at Moscow, where he annoyed the gently caress out of the Wehrmachts finest with a bunch of suspiciously competent penal batallions. He was in Charge of liquidating the Stalingrad pocket (Operation Ring), and imho performed well enough. Interestingly, later on he prefered threatening encirclements, and then harrying Germans while they retreated out of potential encirclements, to actually encircling them. At Kursk, he commanded the northern part of the Salient and defeated Models Heeresgruppe Mitte so decisivly that Stavka could sent the entire Steppe Front that was in reserve against Heeresgruppe Süd to reinforce the struggling Vatutin against Manstein. Bagration was also his gig. And it was a really effing big one.
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Jun 12, 2014 15:02
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Yeah, if even half of what I've read about Rokosovsky was true, he was one of the more competent commanders of the entire war. The whole Yartsevo thing is the stuff of cheesy military fanfiction. Brilliant but politically suspect commander disgraced after retreating against orders, is given a non-existent force, and manages to scrape together an ad-hoc army and leads them to achieve major strategic goals?
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Jun 12, 2014 15:23
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Fangz posted:Yeah, if even half of what I've read about Rokosovsky was true, he was one of the more competent commanders of the entire war. The whole Yartsevo thing is the stuff of cheesy military fanfiction. Brilliant but politically suspect commander disgraced after retreating against orders, is given a non-existent force, and manages to scrape together an ad-hoc army and leads them to achieve major strategic goals? He is fighting incredibly exaggerated villains, too.
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Jun 12, 2014 15:50
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