another book read and another one that will not be read

[winterbadger]

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (8) The first volume in Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice saga, and the basis for the first season of the television program Game of Thrones, this book held few plot surprises for me. (I could swear I read it through once before I saw the series, but I'm not positive now that I did.) But the writing is entertaining enough and the story engagign enough that it was still enjoyable to read, even after seeing Season One of GoT twice (once when it aired and once before Season Three aired). I don't know that I have a *great* deal to say about it. I think Martin's character development and plotting are good, and his dialogue decent. His description is evocative. Overall I would rate his books highly (though as entertainment more than great writing. He's good and fun to read, but he's no Dorothy Dunnett or Patrick O'Brian).

The one thing that bothers me occasioanlly is his inability to pass up the occasional ridiculous construction that's meant to awe the reader. The Wall--seven hudred feet high? Really? Ridiculous. Not only impossible for the society that he describes to create, but also totally pointless. Wide enough for cavalry to ride up and down? Why on earth would you put cavalry on top of a 700' high wall? Mounting massive catapults? For what? There's no possible way that, fromt eh top of a 70' high wall, you could actually *use* catapults in any practical way. Same with The Eyrie--not only would it be nearly impossible to build the sort of fortress that's described in the book, but it would be ridiculously hard to keep it supplied and in use as the sort of court residence that's suggested. And, really, why would you bother? The whole point of fortresses is not to protect a small band of people--it's to provide a stronghold for a garrison that controls the area around it. Anyone up in the Eyrie would no more be able to project force down into the Vale than a NYPD squad on the top floor of the Empire State Building would be able to patrol a district around the foot of the tower. In both of these cases, even if someone *could* build what's described, no one *would*. A small force of soldiers would be able to pen up anyone in a fortress like that and have the run of the land around it.

Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror by Yossef Bodansky. (removed) This is the second time I've tried to read (listen to) this book, and I'm officially giving up. It's simply a very poor book. That's unfortunate, as it's an important topic, especially for anyone interested in counterinsurgency or terrorism/counterterrorism (CT). But Bodansky is not only a very shallow author, he's an atrociously bad writer as well. Before learning anything about him, I'd assumed he must be Russian, simply because he fetishizes language in a ways that I'm used to see in writers coming from totalitarian states. (In fact, Bodansky is an Israeli who's become an American citizen.) One example: he can't ever describe the anti-Russian forces in Chechnya as anything other than "the Islamist jihadist terrorists". Now, arguably all those descriptors are true characterizations of some of the actors some of the time, but he uses the unwieldy phrase as a club to beat the reader into submission with at every turn. There are times when some one or more of those descriptors are *not* appropriate for an actor, but Bodansky can't part himself from his formulation. And, while he's ready to implicate Russia's missteps (let's be frank, bumbling), he seems unwilling to acknowledge (at least in the portion of the book I was able to get through) that Russia has employed terrorism itself in the conflict. In fact (one of the other reasons I suspected he might be Russian), he seems strangely schizophrenic when describing Russia as an actor in the conflict. He can hardly deny their frequent mistakes, but the early portion of the book also seems to be praising Russia as some sort of CT hero, experienced in ways that other nations are not. In fact, from it's track record in the modern era, Russia has demonstrated a signaler inability to effectively deal with CT situations and an amazing deafness when it comes to the related field of counterinsurgency (COIN).

Another quirk of Bodansky's usage is that he refers throughout to "Chechenization," by which he means the spread of Salafist insurgency through liberation struggles that also transform the Muslim societies in which they take place by replacing traditional local strains of religious and cultural practice with fundamentalist Arab practices. This is a process demonstrably taking place in the Caucasus and in other regions of Salafi insurgency around the world. But "Chechenization" not only suggests exactly the opposite of what he's using it to mean, it already has a totally different and well established meaning in the context of this struggle (similar to "Vietnamization", it is used to mean the replacement of foreign CT/COIN forces--in this case Russians--with local ones--in this case, Chechens).

Bodansky is also unable to do what any good analyst (whether of current affairs or history) should be able to do: he isn't able to survey the material from all the involved sources and provide a single, unbiased narrative. Almsot all of what he writes about the rebel forces is written *in* their stilted, artificial, propagandistic language. He seems to accept insurgent claims (of their strength, of their accomplishments, of narrative flow) without question. He doesn't synthesize. He seems to be acting as a reporter, and as a rather one-sided an uncritical reporter.

So, I'm still interested in this conflict, but I think that my interest will have to wait until I can read some of the more, erm, competant purveyors of information on it. Looking just at what's available on Amazon, I think some accounts from people with firsthand experience (like Arkady Babchenko, who served in the Russian Army in Chechnya, or Anna Politkovskaya, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, who reported from the area) or from people with a little more credibility as analysts (like James Hughes, Matthew Evangelista, or Robert Shaefer)

Currently in progress:
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin
With Machinegun to Cambrai by George Coppard
General George Washington: A Military Life by Edward G. Lengel
Raiding on the Western Front by Anthony Saunders
Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War by Michael S. Neiberg
The Western Front: Ordinary Soldiers and the Defining Battles of World War I by Richard Holmes
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz

In limbo somewhere
In the Skies of Nomonhan: Japan versus Russia, May - September 1939 by Dimitar Nedialkov
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas Desjardins
Knights of the Cross; or, Krzyzacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Laxdaela Saga
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
Shards of Empire by Susan Schwartz
The Lily Hand And Other Stories by Edith Pargeter
Understanding China by John Bryan Starr
The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688-1691 by John Childs
Theoretical Criminology by George B. Vold et al.
In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation by Francois Furstenberg
Doom Castle by Neil Munro
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Comments

[kmusser]

Minor spoiler regarding the Wall in GoT, but it's made clear at some point that the thing was built via magic, not normal means, he even makes it a possible plot point (dispel the magic and the Wall comes down - hasn't happened yet, but he suggests that it could).

[winterbadger]

Yeah, but that still doesn't explain *why* someone would expend that much effort on something so pointless. Dragons, obviously, can fly, so it doesn't matter how high you make the wall--it won't stop them (vide Harrenhal[l]). Anything less three-dimensionally mobile than dragons doesn't need a 700' wall to be stopped. And anything put on top of a 700' high wall will just be effectively useless in fighting people on the ground. (Even something you drop off a 700' high wall at people below has little chance of landing anywhere near where you mean it to go--and has taken huge amounts of energy to get up on the wall to begin with).

Also, unless there's a lot more magic cleverly hidden so as to make it look like human effort, the amount of manpower needed to power the lifts that take men and supplies to the top of the wall would be much greater than what is represented in the books or the TV show.

It's understandable that a writer wants to create something that will strike awe in the reader. But he needs to employ some common sense and, sometimes, do a little research.

I'm reminded of the D&D GM I knew in college who told us that our party of adventurers were approaching very big mountains. We asked how big they were. Our GM, who had been brought up in Chicago and come east to the Berkshires to go to college, said, "Quite high, maybe two or three thousand feet high!"

This was an educated guy; of course he knew about the Alps and the Himalayas. But within his personal frame of reference, he had never seen a mountain that he couldn't walk up in a day. :-) So, ad-libbing without notes or research, he defaulted to what made sense within his personal frame of reference.

Just a couple of data points of human, non-magical construction.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the tallest structures on Earth for centuries, was less than 500' high. And it was only 30' to a side. Probably the tallest structure on Earth for millennia, the Great Pyramid of Giza was only 480' high, and its base was about 750' wide.

The Great Wall of China (which is, of course, not a single wall but a series of connected fortifications) is about 4,000 miles of actual wall. The most solidly built and most advanced sections are no more than 20-30' high. It was begun about 2200-2300 years ago, though most of what remains is only about 500-600 years old. Amusingly, the Chinese have even lost track of bits of it; three or four years ago, they found about 200 miles of it that had just been abandoned and forgotten, much of it covered over by sandstorms.

[kmusser]

My point was since it was magic, we don't know that it was a lot of effort to put up - who knows, maybe a 700 foot wall is a piece of cake for a wizard. It clearly was too much effort to maintain/defend which is why its defense has largely been abandoned by the time of the book. I agree that catapults on the top are kind of silly, the show replaces them with what look like they might have been balista-like things on swivels - potentially more useful, though probably still difficult to aim - of course if your opponent is a horde of undead maybe aiming isn't all that important.