50books 2011: catching up
Mar. 8th, 2011 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerI've not entered a number of titles as I finished them.
Taliban by Ahmed Rashid (2/50): A good short history of the end of the anti-Soviet War and of the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the rise of the Taliban. If you have any illusions about the Taliban being (a) popular, (b) an indigenous religious movement, (c) representative of the Afghan people, (d) able to cooperate or share power with other groups, this book serves as a useful corrective. It's an interesting read especially because it was written before 9/11, so it doesn't have that knowledge of the larger role that the US would play in Afghanistan in the last 10 years. Rashid is a tremendously good journalist (IMO) and a great writer.
Generation Kill by Evan Wright (3/50): I saw the series that HBO made of this book by a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with a Marine unit at the leading edge of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It seems that they did a good job of retelling his story; this adds some deails, but the television version (as I recall it) hits the high points and does a good job of translating the characters that Wright describes to the screen. It's a good look at the first stages of our war in Iraq and a good look at the alternately dysfunctional and chaotic but also highly organized, proficient, and professional goatrope that is the US military.
The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan (4-6/50): Re-reads of the beginning of the series that I love to hate. Still as appealing, in curious ways; still as annoying and tiresome in others.
A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne (7/50): Long and comprehensive account of the Algerian civil war in the 1950s and 1960s that not only ended in the withdrawal of the last (signficant) European power in North Africa but also came close to plunging France into a civil war of its own. This requires a separate post.
The Three Musketeers (8/50): A re-read. Fun, but to be honest, I also find Dumas a trifle tedious. Even when I'm reading one of his books whose plot isn't world famous (like The Black Tulip, which I read last year), I find myself muttering "OK, OK, get *on* with it," as I plod thorough his overblown prose and gothic tedium. He paints some memorable scenes, but he does it by employing impasto. The story is engaging and the characters are classic, and there are details of a certain degree of interest that are generally elided when the tale is told in film, but it seemed like a VERY long time ago that I started reading this from time to time on my iTouch.
Books "in progress":
Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day by Paul Johnson
The Grand Scuttle: The Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919 by Dan Van der Dat
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Theoretical Criminology by George B. Vold et al.
Understanding China by John Bryan Starr
Taliban by Ahmed Rashid (2/50): A good short history of the end of the anti-Soviet War and of the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the rise of the Taliban. If you have any illusions about the Taliban being (a) popular, (b) an indigenous religious movement, (c) representative of the Afghan people, (d) able to cooperate or share power with other groups, this book serves as a useful corrective. It's an interesting read especially because it was written before 9/11, so it doesn't have that knowledge of the larger role that the US would play in Afghanistan in the last 10 years. Rashid is a tremendously good journalist (IMO) and a great writer.
Generation Kill by Evan Wright (3/50): I saw the series that HBO made of this book by a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with a Marine unit at the leading edge of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It seems that they did a good job of retelling his story; this adds some deails, but the television version (as I recall it) hits the high points and does a good job of translating the characters that Wright describes to the screen. It's a good look at the first stages of our war in Iraq and a good look at the alternately dysfunctional and chaotic but also highly organized, proficient, and professional goatrope that is the US military.
The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan (4-6/50): Re-reads of the beginning of the series that I love to hate. Still as appealing, in curious ways; still as annoying and tiresome in others.
A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne (7/50): Long and comprehensive account of the Algerian civil war in the 1950s and 1960s that not only ended in the withdrawal of the last (signficant) European power in North Africa but also came close to plunging France into a civil war of its own. This requires a separate post.
The Three Musketeers (8/50): A re-read. Fun, but to be honest, I also find Dumas a trifle tedious. Even when I'm reading one of his books whose plot isn't world famous (like The Black Tulip, which I read last year), I find myself muttering "OK, OK, get *on* with it," as I plod thorough his overblown prose and gothic tedium. He paints some memorable scenes, but he does it by employing impasto. The story is engaging and the characters are classic, and there are details of a certain degree of interest that are generally elided when the tale is told in film, but it seemed like a VERY long time ago that I started reading this from time to time on my iTouch.
Books "in progress":
Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day by Paul Johnson
The Grand Scuttle: The Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919 by Dan Van der Dat
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Theoretical Criminology by George B. Vold et al.
Understanding China by John Bryan Starr
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 06:52 pm (UTC)I am curious to see what you think of George R. R. Martin. I haven't read anything of his, and his name keeps on popping up in lists of what my friends are reading.
I am currently reading Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh. Have you read it?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 09:01 pm (UTC)GRRM... I have to say he's a bit like Robert Jordan in my mind. He's not as annoying...quite. He's not as derivative. But there are things that bother me about his writing--they just aren't constant as in Jordan's.
One example: the Wall (which closes off the lands of Martin's primary civilisation from the frozen north where only bandits live. OK, 0 on the originality scale, but more than that, 0 on the believable scale, as he says is is SEVEN HUNDRED FEET HIGH. An entire wall that runs for hundreds of miles that is as tall as the Met Life Tower? One and a half times the height of the Washington Monument? Preposterous. Stupidly preposterous. And how do people get to the top of the wall? They get in an iron cage that someone hand-cranks up to the top of the wall. In a few minutes.
Another example. There's a tournament. All the knights that enter it wear helms of fantastical shapes. Setting aside some of the other silly ways in which this tournament is unlike real medieval ones, all the fantastic crests on these helms are *part of* the helmet and made of steel. This would make the helms ridiculously heavy, unbalanced, and impractical to wear. It would endanger the wearer just to put it on. Historical helms had decorations like these, but they were made of leather or cloth or light wood and tied on. The first time they were struck--boof!--off they went. These metal crests absorb blows and remain integral parts of their helmets, which should break their wearers' necks.
Like Jordan, Martin tells an interesting story and creates some interesting characters, but he uses far more banal, predictable fantasy-character stereotypes, and he lacks any trace of subtlety and some fairly basic (I would have thought) common sense.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 06:59 pm (UTC)Like the other things, this highlights to me that he's throwing in elements that he doesn't know anything about for "colour". To me, that's a real problem. The larger context of the episode also bothers me--that he can't just tell the reader something simply or subtly, one time. He has to hammer you with it, beat you over the head with it, until you scream, "Enough, OK! I get it! The girl is a tomboy. Can we dispense with the three other scenes where she argues with her nursemaid or her sister who want her to learn to be ladylike? You've gotten the message across."
I like elegance and economy in writing. I dislike heavy-handed repetition.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 07:08 pm (UTC)Josh
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 07:17 pm (UTC)