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Just finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I enjoyed it, even laughed out loud at several parts. Next I'm going to finish reading The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman. I've been reading a different, and shorter, work of fiction after I finished each of the four parts. Only one part left to read now.
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Jan 6, 2021 02:16
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Finished The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman. I wasn't really into it, but my opinion of it is colored by the fact that I read other books in-between each of the four parts. Maybe if I'd stuck with it I'd have enjoyed it more. As it is I went in expecting it to be from Richard III's POV but it jumps around a lot between characters as well as time and space. Chapters might take place months or years after each other so it felt like important things were being skipped over. Penman tried to set everything in locations that still existed and that could be visited which I think is part of the reason it felt disjointed. Anyone have recommendations for other works of fiction in the time period? I have Wolf Hall and its first sequel that I haven't got around to reading yet but does anyone have other suggestions? Bilirubin posted:He raises an interesting point but one without a clear answer. Several times he states that the Black man will not truly be free until the White southern man frees him. I would agree with this--the racism that keeps Blacks oppresses (this was published in 1948) is from the heart and one cannot legislate a change of heart--especially not imposed by the North. But, I didn't get a real firm grasp on what, exactly, would lead to this changing of the heart either than time or mutual encounters, which many (personified by Beat Four) would never be inclined to do. So, I don't see a real way out from his perspective. You've hit upon the problem which is that only time can change things, but it won't necessarily succeed. Certainly not for everyone.
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Jan 14, 2021 04:31
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A History of The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century by Sir Charles Oman. It's exactly what it says. It's an older book, published between the World Wars, so if you're looking for a history of the period there's more modern scholarship, but I came to it because I saw it mentioned in other books I was reading so if you're going to commit to reading about the period you're either going to start off with this or come around to it because it keeps popping up.
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Jan 25, 2021 03:47
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Finished The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated by R. H. Fuller with revisions by Irmgard Booth. It was an interesting read. I'll be discussing it more in the religion thread. I don't know if anyone who isn't already interested in theology would be interested in reading it, but if you are then I'd say definitely give it a read.
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Feb 7, 2021 00:50
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Finished The Military Revolution by Geoffrey Parker yesterday. It's a rather important book in the realm of military history because it defends a thesis that in the 16th and 17th centuries Western Europe's changes in warfare represented dramatic breaks with the past which paved the way for Europe's conquest of the rest of the world. Even if you don't care about the whole debate it provides a nice overview of various changes that happened around 1500-1800. Most of the changes he writes about are technologically driven, but he does account for social changes that not only arose as responses but that in some cases led to the technological developments. It isn't a very long book, about 200 pages so if you want to dip your toe into military history this is a good place to start, just be aware that a lot of people dispute many of the arguments he makes. The edition I read, the 2nd revised, addressed some of those critiques at the end.
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Feb 12, 2021 03:47
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Finished The Red and the Black by Stendhal, translated by Horace B. Samuel. I liked it, but I wasn't super into it. My copy comes with various commentaries about it, and there's a review from the Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1899, which sums up how I feel about it really well: "As a study of a certain type of vicious humanity, "Red and Black" has its uses, and, it has its passages of undoubted power, though the book is too wordy and too misanthropic for wide popularity".
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Feb 19, 2021 08:59
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I gave up during book seven. Can't remember where exactly.
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Feb 27, 2021 03:30
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Finished The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir. It's a history of the titular wars starting with the origins of the conflict, the usurpation of Richard II by Henry IV, and goes until 1471 when the House of Lancaster was wiped out. Weir wrote another book about the later conflicts of 1483-1487 prior to this one, which I have but haven't read yet. Weir has written a lot of biographies and so she writes a lot about the personalities of the nobility. Overall it was a good introduction to the conflict, but there isn't a huge amount of depth with regard to things like "bastard feudalism". She does address myths that arose after the Wars, like how Henry VI was the subject of literal hagiographies after his death that made him out to be far better than he was.
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Mar 2, 2021 05:12
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Athiest Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart. Published in 2009 when the New Atheists were a lot more prominent, the subtitle of the book was the author's desired title, but according to him his editors went with something that would move more copy by inciting controversy. Hart calls it an historical essay rather than a history since he's a theologian and philosopher, and he's not making any pretense to objectivity in writing the book. He argues in favor of the "Christian Revolution" which is the idea that the civilization that Christianity created represented a radical and rather unprecedented break from the Hellenistic pagan civilization it replaced, even if you can identify the existence of certain features in said pre-Christian society. Hart doesn't devote a whole lot of space to attacking the "Four Horsemen", since he finds them rather pathetic as philospohers/theologians (an attitude that is apparently common even among atheist thinkers) but uses them as an introduction to discuss the Christian Revolution and common arguments against it. The book isn't a triumphalist narrative, he frequently points out where and how Christianity as it is practiced has failed to live up to the claims and concepts derived from it. Even if one isn't a believer I think the book is a worthwhile read, Hart touches on a lot of interesting topics and while the book is short and thus he only briefly covers any one thing, he manages to convey a lot of information in the short amount of space he devotes to his chosen topics.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:16
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TommyGun85 posted:In all fairness, the four horsemen dont consider themselves to be philosophers or theologians...they are scientists. Dennett and Harris philosophers are according to their Wikipedia pages. But whether or not they identify as philosophers or theologians, when their work engages in philosophy and theology Hart finds them wanting and does offer some explanations as to why, although he doesn't go into great length since just dealing with those four isn't his primary concern.
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Mar 7, 2021 05:33
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The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir. This one was written several years before The Wars of the Roses, which Weir was inspired to write because of all the research she did for this book. Unlike its prequel this one isn't just a chronicle, covering the people and events of the first War of the Roses. Weir makes the case that Richard III was responsible for murdering his nephews and goes into detail arguing about which sources she thinks are the most accurate and why. I don't know how much new information has come to light in the 30 years since the book was published, I think they found Richard III's body but I don't know if anything has come to light on his guilt or innocence. Weir doesn't just cover the reign of Richard III, she goes a bit into the two Henrys that followed him to see the consequences of the Princes' deaths decades after the fact. Like I said I don't know how much the historiography of the deaths of the Princes has changed, but unless it has been completely up ended then I think this book is a good read for someone who wants to see a specific position argued forcefully. ScottyJSno posted:Flashman: The Flashman Papers, Book 1 by George MacDonald Fraser. I started reading this several years ago, but I stopped for some reason, I can't remember why. I think the author wanted to shock people about how awful things were just a century ago, but I've also heard that he got more defensive about the empire in his later life.
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Mar 16, 2021 04:14
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Finished The Persistence of the Old Regime by Arno Mayer. It's really good but it was a slog to get through the first chapters because he just throws all sorts of numbers and statistics out (without including a single chart) so I couldn't read very much at once since I needed to reread drat near every sentence, and eventually language stopped making sense because of semantic satiation. The topic of the book derived from a lecture Mayer delivered about how a resurgence of conservatism in Europe starting in the 1870s lead to the World Wars. As part of the lecture Mayer said that prior to World War One Europe was still pre-modern and enough people disputed his claim so he wrote the book to provide his evidence for the claim.
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Apr 9, 2021 23:15
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Finished Matchlock to Flintlocks by William Urban. I didn't care for it. It was short and mostly just provided a narrative of the wars of the period. At times it mentions the role of mercenaries and how they changed over the period as the state grew more powerful and could take over more functions from private interests, but he didn't go into too much detail about all of that. He would talk about a war, then abruptly bring up mercenaries so that it was like reading two different works stuck together incohesively.
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Apr 17, 2021 05:17
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The Jefferson Rule by David Sehat. The book covers the history of invoking the Founding Fathers in American politics. Towards the end the book got a little too polemical once it started talking about the Tea Party, but the earlier chapters were really interesting. I read the book because of SelenicMartian's Bioshock: Infinite LP. I wanted to find out how big a deal the Founders were in 1912, since the game is set on a floating city that worships them.
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Apr 23, 2021 22:40
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Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I read it as a kid, and on rereading I didn’t care for it. The most interesting part was the scholar’s notes at the beginning describing the historical context and impact of the novel.
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May 7, 2021 22:55
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Candide by Voltaire, translated by Henry Morley. Another book I read when I was younger. I enjoyed it a second time around, unlike Ivanhoe. As a work of comedy I liked it, but I lack any familiarity with the works of Leibniz so I can’t grade it as a satire.
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May 13, 2021 21:09
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The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough, by David Chandler. Despite its name it's mostly focused on tactical and organizational developments in European armies from 1688-1748 instead of covering the whole breadth of warfare in the period, so look elsewhere if you want a focus on grand tactics and strategy. Regarding the topics it does cover it was very interesting to learn more about a period that's mostly seen as a prelude to Frederick the Great and Napoleon. I don't think a novice military history reader would enjoy the book much because of how specialized the topic is, and that the author assumes the reader has a basic understanding of the period already so he throws names around without giving much context. If you want to know more about the period then you should definitely read the book.
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May 20, 2021 00:56
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War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 by Jeremy Black. It's about conflict between European and non-European military systems, and intra-non-European conflicts. Black argues against the view of technological teleology, that the West conquered the world just because it had superior technology. Black instead focuses on how other factors like political, operational, and organizational capacity contributed as much or more than technological superiority. For example: European sailing ships, which were one of the areas where Europe was inarguably ahead of other continents, had more trouble fighting war canoes operating in riverine and coastal environments than fighting against war galleys armed with cannons on the open ocean. The book was kind of like a coffee table book (lots of pictures, glossy pages) but had much more text than I expect to see in that kind of book. This isn't merely a history of warfare in the world, and for such a short book it covers individual topics in brief, but I think it makes a strong case for Black's thesis.Major Isoor posted:Either way, ohhhh yeah, managing to buy a series of books that perfectly match size, cover and artstyle is like a drug - perfection! 👌 I know the highs, and the lows of that all too well.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:41
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The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 by A. J. P. Taylor is a diplomatic history of the European Great Powers during the last period of the European Balance of Power. As a diplomatic history Taylor focuses on the actions of ambassadors, foreign ministers, and monarchs but the book isn't a great man history as he frequently mentions how public opinion shaped their decisions more and more as time passed. The book was published in 1954 so a lot of the sources he used could have been superseded by additional material, but since Taylor says that most diplomats were just winging it and even says that the mark of a master diplomat like Bismarck is that they don't plan things out far in advance but respond to events by trying to delay and do as little as possible, I don't know how much has actually been changed by new archival material.
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Jul 13, 2021 17:23
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Firearms: A Global HIstory to 1700 by Kenneth Chase. Despite the title it isn't as wide ranging as it sounds. The book is actually about answering one question: Why did Europe perfect firearms when China invented them? The short answer is geography. The slightly longer answer is that Western Europe and Southern China were both well suited towards the use of firearms but while Southern China was politically subordinated to Northern China and saw its resources used to fight steppe nomads, against whom guns weren't that useful, the resources of Western Europe weren't used to defend Eastern Europe in the same way so they could keep fighting each other and refining the technology.
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Jul 25, 2021 22:06
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Flashback by Dan Simmons is one of those "In the not so distant future everything in America has gone to hell because of Obama" books that conservatives wrote during his presidency. I read it because while I've never read anything of his I've heard how well regarded his work like the Hyperion Cantos is. I hoped that, coming from a real author, this one wouldn't be a slog to get through. And when it wasn't being a right wing screed it was decently written. There's a sci-fi detective story about an ex-cop being hired to solve a cold case murder because he's addicted to the titular drug that allows you to relive past experiences and worked on the case before being fired for his addiction that serves as the plot which held my interest, but then that plot comes to a halt while Simmons tells you that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, that Muslims breed like rabbits and destroy whatever country they become the majority in, that welfare states are doomed to inefficiency and bankruptcy, or whatever else he wants to complain about. There's also very little about the setting that's integrated into the story, for example the main character's son, one of the two other POV characters, mentions that everyone learns the Qur'an in school now and about how Islam is a religion of peace but it never comes up again. You'd think at the very least there'd be some Arabic loan words making their way into slang or something like that but it has no bearing on the plot or characterization. I could go on, but just avoid the book. Do not recommend.
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Aug 9, 2021 01:47
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The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. I finished this several days ago, but I’m not sure what to think of it. There are some parts that made me laugh, but a lot of the descriptions became incomprehensible.Hexel posted:I just finished The Powdermage Trilogy after actively avoiding it for years because of flintlocks. Why is that?
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Sep 5, 2021 20:26
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War in the Eighteen-Century World by Jeremy Black. While too short to sufficiently argue all of his points, the book does a good job of showing the interconnectedness of military operations in the period. Nadir Shah gets a lot of attention since the various wars and peaces between Iran and its neighbors, Turkey and Russia in particular, had huge consequences for their ability to wage war and intervene in other conflicts.
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Sep 13, 2021 17:48
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Narmi posted:I like stories that focus on kingdom building/progression, which is a pretty niche genre, Do you mean stories about changing how a society functions over time? Or where someone/someones deliberately change it?
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Sep 15, 2021 02:52
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Narmi posted:That's one take on it. Though "kingdom building" (or "nation building") is kinda a catch-all for stories that measure the main character's progression by essentially "measuring" the land they control. Not just obtaining more land, but resolving political tensions, natural disasters, wars, as well as technological and social development. Essentially, they're climbing from the bottom to the top of the political/social hierarchy, and implementing change as they do so. So a story where a character becomes more powerful politically, rather than by learning new spells or gaining more magic items, or in terms of non-fiction you want biographies of politicians. There’s a three part biography about Josef Stalin by Stephen Kotkin. I haven’t read them yet but from what I’ve heard about them they seem well received, and there’re few people in history who’ve risen as high as Stalin.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:59
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The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching A coffee table book about various fake islands and continents. Not much text but lots of period maps and other illustrations. I worked my way through it a few sections a day, most of which aren't longer than four pages, while reading other books.
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Oct 15, 2021 02:38
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lifg posted:Which fake was your fav? The Sea of the West. It’s related to the Northwest Passage but instead asks “what if the Midwest was water?”
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Oct 15, 2021 16:37
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Neat. My favorite phantom geographical feature that didn't get its own article is the Dragon's Tail. It grew, or rather shrank, out of the idea that the Indian Ocean was actually a land locked sea. Once it was determined that that wasn't the case the Dragon's Tail stuck around because map makers thought there had to be some kind of landmass that was mistakenly believed to extend further than it did. You also see the idea linger around on Africa too, with eastern Africa extending out horizontally to create a pseudo enclosure. After Columbus some maps tried to stick the Americas onto Asia with Mexico becoming the Dragon's Tail but that didn't last long. For one it meant there was nowhere to put Japan.
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Oct 18, 2021 16:56
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Funny, I’m about halfway through Burr myself. Did you also start reading it after seeing Hamilton?
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Oct 30, 2021 06:33
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Sinatrapod posted:Well, I started it because I really liked Creation by Vidal, which I picked up on an audible sale, but when it came time to try another Vidal book, Hamilton definitely influenced the decision. It’s interesting to compare the two portrayals because they seem to agree to agree on a lot of character details, but come to different conclusions.
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Oct 30, 2021 17:01
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Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker. It's about how much things sucked in the 17th century. They were really bad. Along with all the obvious problems such as war, disease, and climate change, a common problem was that there were too many college graduates.
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Nov 19, 2021 05:14
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Burr by Gore Vidal. I enjoyed it, but I mostly enjoyed it as a work of history rather than as a novel. At the end of my copy there's an afterword from Vidal where he explains why he wrote a historical novel instead of a history book, and he also says a little about how his own views diverge from Burr's (Vidal likes Jefferson more, and Jackson less than Burr did) which I think would have improved my reading experience if I had known that when I started because I wasn't sure where Burr ended and Vidal began.
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Dec 10, 2021 22:29
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With Musket, Cannon and Sword: Battle Tactics of Napoleon and His Enemies by Brent Nosworthy The title says it all. But not really. Nosworthy argues that military historians tend to neglect studies of tactics, either focusing on the big picture where battles are only worth mentioning as to who won or lost, or dismissing them as unworkable in the real world and unnecessary to study. Nosworthy argues that many tactics were practical and used regularly in battle but also pays a lot of attention to psychological factors intertwine with them, not just how to tactics were executed in the field but why they were used, which frequently involved exploiting psychological responses. His prior book covers earlier 18th century tactics so there's a lot of attention paid to how Revolutionary and Napoleonic tactics grew out of them. The French get the most focus of the book, with the British and France's other enemies getting less specific attention but given how the French were the most innovative in this period that does make some sense. I recently got my hands on his previous book The Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics 1689-1763 which I'm going to read next, and I'm curious to find how much the two books operate as companion pieces.
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Jan 16, 2022 06:43
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The Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics 1689-1763 by Brent Nosworthy. As I thought it would have been better to read this one first, but it was still very interesting. The book focuses primarily on the development of the Prussian and French armies, which would synthesize into the Napoleonic "Impulse" system. One key difference between the two states was the unification of all military and civilian decision making in the person of Frederick the Great in a way that wasn't done even under Louis XIV, much less Louis XV. While Frederick did a lot to advance the system of linear warfare he was only able to go so far because of ideological limitations. He wanted to keep as much of his army's functions under his control as possible which meant that while he made some great improvements such as training his cavalry so that they went from being the worst in Europe to the standard all armies imitated or creating the first system that could be called a 'doctrine' for his officers, this was all done to ensure that his officers behaved exactly how he wanted them to, or to make his soldiers operate as formations instead of individuals so they would enact his plans as he envisioned them. This also lead him to not adopt reforms he himself pioneered, such as faster methods of deploying the army from columns into lines before battle, because it would require greater initiative and independence among his officers. There're a lot of diagrams at the end of the book, and I would have preferred more of them, and for them to be integrated into the chapters. He spends more time going into the specifics of maneuvers and formations than in With Musket, Cannon and Sword but uses a worse formatting than that book which did include diagrams in the relevant chapters, along with definitions of all the terms, which makes me think he learned how to make reading the book more convenient.
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Feb 16, 2022 07:14
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Bilirubin posted:it exemplified the impermanence of all things espoused by some philosophies. Leaves a lot to think about. The only thing that lasts forever is that nothing lasts forever.
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Feb 19, 2022 07:32
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Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life by Nick Mamatas. The book is a collection of essays by Mamatas on the subject of being a writer, not just of fiction but of non-fiction too. As the title suggests the advice he gives is about how to make a living as a writer, not how to become the next Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, so along with telling you how to write there's advice on how to submit to publishers and to lower your standards of success so you have a realistic idea of what living like a writer entails.
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Feb 26, 2022 22:18
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War in European History Updated Edition by Michael Howard. It's a short book where each chapter covers what the author considers a different period of warfare in Europe and the social and technological conditions that led to it. The book raises some interesting ideas, but its brevity means that many of them aren't developed beyond the sentence or paragraph they're brought up in.
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Mar 16, 2022 16:58
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The Worm Ouraboros by E. R. Eddison. A fantasy novel that was published 15 years before The Hobbit. I didn't enjoy it but I found it to be an interesting read because it not only preceded the works of Tolkien and Lewis but was influential on them and many other writers. I wanted to see how much it resembles and differs from later fantasy novels but then I remembered I hadn't read much fantasy since I was a child, but I was still able to recognize genre conventions that this book helped create so it was at least a useful read if not an enjoyable one.
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Apr 20, 2022 00:53
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Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. It was too short. I didn't hate it but I can't think of anything much to say other than that there wasn't enough material to hold everything together satisfyingly.
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May 7, 2022 00:12
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The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. Perhaps the first Gothic novel ever written, I found the story itself to be okay but enjoyed reading the editor's notes and commentary about the historical context of the novel and the cultural and political significance of Gothic-ness.
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Jul 5, 2022 04:29
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