Jump to content

What are you reading - Part II


jrlx

Recommended Posts

I'm working my way through this book! Its the book to read before Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg bring out their next miniseries and Is actually a VERY good book, very informative, lots of things I didnt know and tons of background, its very absorbing indeed. WELL worth a read!

IMG-0151.jpg

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just finished reading Execution by Simon Webb. Its the history of the death penalty in Britain. Quite gruesome reading material and not everyones cup of tea but quite fascinating all the same. The death penalty in the UK didn't actually come off the statuate books until 1998! 

 

Regards,

 

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now that I've finished th biography of  Ray Davies (who appears to be a man you shoudn't ever work with- funny thing is he's incredibly creative, and I recently read a bio of Stephen Jobs of apple, who eerily also appeared to be a man you shouldn't have worked with but was also incredibly creative) I happened to pick up thelatest DCI Alan Banks book by Peter Robinson (Not dark yet), the latest Jack Reacher (Better off dead) and the latest   Charles Cummings (Judas 62)..

 

Hmmmm, which one to read first?

 

Judas 62 is currently on the bedside cabinet.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Lives of Beryl Markham, by Errol Tzrzebinski, a warts & all biography of the famous Aviatrix. It appears to be enormously well researched, is an easy read, mostly fascinating, at times titillating, she was famously amoral, with some excellent aviation name dropping. The pedant in me has picked up on a couple of howlers, a photo of her standing by The Messenger, the Vega Gull she used on her Transatlantic flight, was in fact the starboard engine of a DH 84 Dragon & later it mentions that the De Havilland factory hadn't yet started work on her Vega Gull, well, they wouldn't have, would they. ;) :D

It is a miserable little paperback I have, picked up at a book fair, but I've enjoyed it enough to buy a hard back volume of it. I have a Dora Wings Vega Gull to build as The Messenger.

Steve.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've just finished re reading Fender - the inside story by Forrest White who was general manager during the golden era pre-CBS.

 

Love that sort of stuff.

 

spacer.png

 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I finished Judas 62, which was effectively two books linked by a single plot, and couldn't resist reading the new DCI Banks book - Not dark yet while the wife commandeered the new Jack Reacher.

 

I've now started White Heat, the second volume in Dominic Sandbrook's history of Britain from 1956 to 1982.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. Continuing my love hate relationship with Hemingway & admitting to being snagged by the cover illustration of Kilimanjaro rising above the African Plains, this collection of short stories gave me more than expected. Identifying the few Nick Adams stories with a young Hemingway, I'm keen now to lay hands on a collection of these published after Hemingway's demise.

Now I've put this aside. I'm getting into The Jaguar boys by Ian Hall, appropriate seeing as I have one on the go at this time.

Steve.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Jb65rams said:

Just finished James Holland’s “Battle of Britain”. Have read a number of his books and do enjoy them. Also his history podcast is a good listen.

 

Just need to pick something from my to do pile.

 

What are you reading?

 

 

Wild Blue is an excellent book; gets better for me each time I read it! 👍

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very slowly reading as a bedtime book, the 'Tales of Para Handy' by Neil Munro. Lovely stories about a way of life that has disappeared. 

Listening while modelling to Jerry Pournelle's 'Janissaries'. An interesting story about a group of US soldiers fighting as mercenaries in Africa who end up on an alien world inhabited by humans who had previously been brought to the planet. Thus there is an encounter with late Romans, Celts and Mycenans. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Jb65rams said:

Just finished James Holland’s “Battle of Britain”. Have read a number of his books and do enjoy them. Also his history podcast is a good listen.

Just need to pick something from my to do pile.

 

Sorry, that's not a pile, that's a tower... and full of good stuff! But I do feel there's a genuine danger of you coming to one night suffocating under the weight of scholarship... 😜

best,

M.

 

  • Like 1
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Two books I picked up recently at a local junk market for £3 each. I did think I had overpaid for two pulpy looking old books, but I wasn't disappointed with either of them! I do love personal accounts.

 

 

Woman Pilot
'Jackie' Moggridge
 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb8oilZMaEA/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

 

What an amazing book, I couldn’t put it down! I’m ashamed to say I had not heard of Delores ‘Jackie’ Moggridge (nee Sorour), the incredibly gutsy lady who learnt to fly as a teenager, served as a radar operator in the WAAF before being invited to the fledgling ATA as their youngest ferry pilot. She flew more types of aircraft than any other ferry pilot in her insatiable desire to fly. After an exiting war she struggled being a housewife and mother, so eventually ended up joining the RAFVR as a weekend pilot, fighting the gender stereotyping of a staid 50s Britain by getting to fly jets!
After austerity measures disbanded the RAFVR Jackie again looked for flying work but struggled to overcome prejudices, eventually taking on a dangerous job ferrying MkIX spitfires from Israel to Burma!
An incredible book. Jackie is honest about overcoming her own racia lprejudices as well, coming from a privileged white South African family.

Also a local connection, during her time in the ATA jackie was based just down the road from me in Hamble airfield, at the 15th Ferry Pilots Pool, an all woman unit.
A brilliant read.

 

 

 

Wind in the Wires

Duncan Grinnell-Milne

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CbbIgX_ov5S/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet


Well, that was £3 well spent! An excellent account of being a pilot early on in the war, around the battle of Loos in ‘15, when air fighting was still in its infancy, flying the Shorthorn and BE2c.
Grinnell-Milne force lands in enemy territory at the end of ‘15 and spends the next two years in captivity. After many failed escape attempts he finally succeeds and retrains as a fighter pilot for the last couple of months of the war. The difference in the machinery and strategy is startling. A well told account and one I’m surprised I had t heard of before, although I was aware of his boldly pained blood red SE5 “Schweinhund”!

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/11/2019 at 11:28 AM, Head in the clouds. said:

Just about to start ' A Grim Almanac of Lincolnshire'. It is about the strange, heinous and macabre goings on in Yellowbelly land over several centuries.

 

An everyday story of country folk, then?

Edited by Seahawk
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"The Distant Summer" by Sarah Patterson, daughter of Harry Patterson aka Jack Higgins.

I first came upon mention of it reading his recent obituaries, a book she wrote while still at school & helping her dad with research for "The Eagle Has Landed". Bloody amazing. I found it a gripping, incredibly moving, beautifully put together work showing a maturity of prose & thought outstanding in one so young. Afaics, it was the only book she wrote although she may be the author of a heap of healthy eating tomes according to Goodreads, though I'm not convinced. Either way, it is a beautiful read & would well lend itself to movie treatment imho. Its depiction of the trials that the young men of bomber command went through is exceptionally well done. 

Steve.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This was a very interesting read, by a Frenchman flying Halifaxes from Elvington near York during the last 12 months of the war in Europe. It's his diary entries he kept at the time. I didn't know about Roy before, but he's written several books, including a novel based on his experiences in Bomber Command. He's more interested in what makes men tick, rather than the nuts and bolts of bombing missions. Fascinating.

Also, as well as the fear of flak and fighters over enemy territory, collisions with other bombers in the stream, especially in bad visibily, was a real danger too. When casualty figures were announced, it was only those from enemy action. So many crews died in collisions. Operational losses where 51%, but non op were a sobering 12%. Roy definitely highlights the terror of flying in bad visibily, not helped by himself being involved in a collision early in his tour.

 

 

spacer.png

  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

This one

Forgotten Voices of The Holocaust: True Stories of Survival From Men, Women and Children Who Were There by Lyn Smith  

 

Not for the faint hearted, Some horrendous tales are in here. Mans inhumanity to man.

So sad to think that some of these incidents are happening again in Eastern Europe.

 

I probably won't read this one again, so if anyone would like it for the price of postage, please get in touch.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Two Penguin volumes on the go currently.

Norman Ohler's:

spacer.png

- is fast-paced, full of surprises, and a stark reminder of how important it is to avoid narrow simplifications of the past. An irony lost on the Daily Mail's endorsement of course....

 

Jeanette Winterson's phrase: 'Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns' could apply to the above as much as to the subject of Artificial Intelligence that she brings a novelist's sensibility to here:

spacer.png

It also contains chapters entitled 'Hot for a Bot' and 'Coal-Fired Vampire' which, quite honestly, was enough to make me buy it in the first place....

 

 

 

 

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The new Richard Osman Thursday Murder club, interesting premise.

 

I also have the final (third) volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher on the bedside cabinet, too; love her or hate her, her story is extremely interesting. 

Edited by Whofan
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Currently half way through Fighters in the Shadows by Robert Gildea which is a critical, historical examination of the French resistance during WW2 and how the  narrative got skewed to exclude the efforts of women, religious groups, foreigners and non Gaullist groups from the official view.

 

The bravery and fearlessness of some of the protagonists is both inspiring and humbling, the duplicity and complicity amongst so called leaders is staggering and appalling.

 

So far, we're just getting into 1943,I'm expecting things to get rather more vicious as the war progresses.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been laid up for a couple of days with the nasty tummy bug doing the rounds just now & after it got the rest if the family I kinda knew I'd be next. The upside was plenty of time for reading. Two books by Hugh Popham polished off. Read first but a later book was Cape of Storms, side fishing trawlers in the Barents Sea mid 1950s some beautiful writing in it, very much enjoyed. The other was an autobiographical volume of his WW2 experiences as a FAA Sea Hurricane & Seafire pilot, enjoyable on a different level but not as polished as the later volume imho. Maybe to be expected given his ages at their writing.

Steve.

 

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reading a history of the Luftwaffe from its inception to its collapse, Matthew Cooper's The German Air Force 1933-1945: An Anatomy of Failure right now.

 

One of the Luftwaffe's most important officers, Walter Wever, died before the war in an air crash; two more, the WWI ace Ernst Udet, in charge of procurement, and the ardent Nazi wunderkind Hans Jeschonnek, chief of staff, died by suicide during the war; Göring the same, but afterwards. Incredibly, none of the senior officers who survived to be interviewed or write memoirs between the 1950s and 1970s made any of the bad decisions or mistakes, and always argued against them but were overruled. Amazing! What are the odds? 

  • Like 3
  • Haha 7
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...