"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I know this project has gotten a lot of flak from different quarters, and to some extent I can understand why.

But I am astonished and grateful for the immense amount of (fairly obscure) material it contains. While I'm on this eastern Sudan 1884 kick, I've been delving, and I've come up with some gems.

One is Bennett Burleigh's "Desert Warfare" and his "Kharthoum Campaign, 1898". BB was one of the principal war correspondents of the period, and he was "embedded" (to use modern concepts) with both the Suakin and both the later Khartoum expeditions. Also available is "Days and Nights of Service" by E. A. De Cosson, one of Sir Gerald Graham's staff officers on the Suakin Expedition. Also "Under Crescent and Star", by Andrew Haggard, a British officer in Egpytian service who was stationed at Suakin. "The River Column" by Maj Gen Brackenbury, who commanded part of the relief force sent to rescue Gordon. "The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" and "With the Camel Corps Up the Nile" by Lord Edward Gleichen. "With the Indian contingent in Egypt: 1882", a war correspondent's memoir of the Arabi Revolt. "The War in Egypt", the Times' account of the same. The US Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence report on the same. Steevens' "With Kitchener to Khartum", a war correspondent on the 1898 expedition. And the anonymous memoir of a British Army officer from the same campaign.

And, finally (so far) the edited letters and diaries of Sir Gerald Graham, whose expedition in 1884 I'm particularly interested in.

If I had credentials, I might be able to get to a university library and get access to copies of these books. If they had them. Or get them at the Library of Congress (especially if they were published in the US). And some are available through Project Gutenberg. But to be able to simply Google and have the book right here in front of me... that is priceless.

I confess when some visionaries early int he public discussion of the possibilities of the Internet suggested that a day like this might come, I was skeptical, perhaps even dismissive. How could people find the time to do all this, much less the data storage? But someone has. All hail Google!

I recently discovered that Phillip Jose Farmer's "Riverworld" books have been translated into not one but two TV movies. Thanks to the magic of WiFi streaming Netflix, I was able to watch the second of these (two 1.5 hour episodes intended to be the pilot of a new TV series that never lived). ( It had its good points and its bad points. )

My friend Rocky is a real, live published author! His book Their Magistrates and Officials: Executive Government in Colonial Maryland, 1715-1775 has been published by Lexington.

I'm amused to see it's also advertised on websites from here to Japan, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Who knew that there was interest in early American politics on Formosa?

And, for the delectation of my book-loving friends...

Abe Books' List of Top 101 Weird Titles

I won't say which of these I plan on ordering for friends for this holiday... ;-)

So, the first couple of HMGS cons I went to I came back with loads of figures. There are so many dealers, and so many potential new or expanded periods one could get into, it was hard to resist buying loads of stuff.( Read more... )

Need to post a book update, but I've been rereading a number of Laurie King's Russell/Holmes books. Right now I'm on "The Moor", which always makes me want to take a trip to Dartmoor.

Kind of interesting (OK, well, to book geeks like me).

Top 50 downloaded free books from ibilio.org, as quoted by PG.
( sorry, the number rankings didn't transfer, but they're in order from #1 )

from Joe Haldeman's Live Journal

Gay and I have a slight but measurable chance of doing something along those lines. A small house went up for sale only a block away, just over the city line. I guess it's on the order of a hundred grand, maybe less. It would have room for tens of thousands of books. (And a cool office.)

We're already renting storage space for 5000+ books, which is a couple of hundred a month and just evaporates, no equity. At 4.5%, a 30-year mortgage on $100,000 is $507 a month. So it's roughly twice the payment to store those books, plus a few thousand of the ones hanging around the house, and get me a nice little office in the bargain. Maybe a backup guest bedroom.

But it's kind of nice, living without a mortgage.

Peter, Scott, what are your opinions of (a) Bernard Cornwell's HYW books and (b) the movie The Reckoning (made from Barry Unsworth's 'The Morality Play')?

The former, of which I've read one now, seem moderately well researched, but are still at his usual mediocre level of writing (limited characterisation, lack of complexity, gratuitous--and yet somehow colourless--ultraviolence, hackneyed dialogue, cardboard cut-put Good and Evil characters).

The latter, which I watched recently, seemed rather well done all in all, and a pretty decent reflection of what I can recall from the book (read it when it came out, some time ago). Some of the attitudes are maybe a little modern (and Willem Defoe's attempt to sound English is awful!), but the material culture looked better than the Hollywood usual.

I'm still looking for time to make that elusive massive personal update, as well as lots of and footy and gaming and other posts, but I wanted to write a huge thank you to peaceful_fox, who took time out of her busy (and wonderful-sounding!) trip to France to pick up several pressies for me as a thank-you for making WWII book recommendations.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I love talking/writing about books and history, so I was only too glad to make some suggestions when she posted asking about D-Day books. But, thoughtful and kindly person that she is, she wanted to say thank you, and collected a whole pile of postcards, site brochures, and a couple of books on places she and her husband visited on their trip and sent them along to me as a gift of appreciation.

What a sweet and considerate thing to do! Thank you so much, m'dear!

Best wishes!

Me