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What are you reading - Part II


jrlx

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The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins. 

I'm up to page 60 now, and so far it's all been about the political background in Britain and Argentina that led up to the conflict.

I must say that it has been very comprehensive, and the British side reads like a bad episode of Yes Minister.

Page 61 starts off with Argentina in 1981. We shall see how it goes from there tonight.

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4 hours ago, psdavidson said:

Titus Alone, 3rd book in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series

It seems a bit strange so far ......

 

Could be worse. The last words of Titus Flavius Vespasianus (not the Titus in your book) were "I have made but one mistake." What could it be? Reading the Gormenghast Trilogy? Or maybe not executing his little brother while he had the chance...

 

Cheers,

Bill, your resident armchair Classicist   

 

PS. Did you read the first two books in the series?

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1 minute ago, Navy Bird said:

Did you read the first two books in the series?

Yes, I did

Titus Groan could have done with some edits. Some of those sentences alomost got themselves lost in their wanders

Gromenghast nipped along quite quickly

 

1 minute ago, Navy Bird said:

"I have made but one mistake." What could it be? Reading the Gormenghast Trilogy?

That thought has crossed my mind a few times since I starter the trilogy almost 2 months ago

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Titus Groan & Gormenghast were so much better than Titus Alone, and Titus Awakes.  I'd happily re-read the first two again, but won't bother with the others.

 

54 minutes ago, Navy Bird said:

Could be worse. The last words of Titus Flavius Vespasianus (not the Titus in your book) were "I have made but one mistake." What could it be? Reading the Gormenghast Trilogy? Or maybe not executing his little brother while he had the chance...

 

Linsey Davis' Falco series is quite fun & engaging and alludes at times to the sibling rivalry that you mention!  Its explanations of Roman life & social structure were also great background before reading Robert Graves' I Claudius and Claudius the God (I had seen the TV series as a child, and keep meaning to re watch it!)

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32 minutes ago, Paul H said:

Linsey Davis' Falco series is quite fun & engaging and alludes at times to the sibling rivalry that you mention!

 

That's been on my list for quite some time. I really need to get on with it.    :)

 

Cheers,

Bill

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There was also a radio series on the Beeb (which is what introduced them to me), so whenever I read it, I am always thinking of Anton Lesser's voice for the title character!  That appears on iplayer every so often, and is worth listening to as well. 

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52 minutes ago, Paul H said:

Linsey Davis' Falco series is quite fun & engaging and alludes at times to the sibling rivalry that you mention!  Its explanations of Roman life & social structure were also great background before reading Robert Graves' I Claudius and Claudius the God (I had seen the TV series as a child, and keep meaning to re watch it!)

Must have a look at Falco

I think I have I Claudius either on Kindle or Audible (or possibly both)

I may go there next but if it's Audible, I'm only part-way through the James Herriot books so would need to wait

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15 hours ago, Paul H said:

Linsey Davis' Falco series is quite fun & engaging

They are really good books. And when you've read all 20 of those, there's the Flavia Albia series (She is, the adopted daughter of Marcus Didius Falco). 10 so far with the next one due next spring.

 

I'm currently reading the Karen Pirie series by Val McDermid, an author I'd not read before - the first book 'The Distant Echo' was so superior to the television adaptation that I bought the other five books.

 

Authors I buy automatically every year are Bernard Cornwell (especially the Sharpe series), Ian Rankin (Rebus), Simon Scarrow (Cato & Macro) plus Lindsey Davis. Nothing like a good fiction book to while away the dark evenings.

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4 hours ago, Nigel Bunker said:

Karen Pirie series by Val McDermid

Funnily enough, they came up at 99p each on Kindle today. 6 more added to the book stash. (another one where I'll need more years to complete than I probably have left)

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10 hours ago, psdavidson said:

Funnily enough, they came up at 99p each on Kindle today

I paid just over £50 inc p&p for hard back copies in Fine or Very Good condition, as I vastly prefer hardback to paperback. I'm not a fan of Kindle as I find hardbacks easier to read. Just a problem of me getting older. Ex-libris would have been cheaper but you never know what you're going to get with those.

 

Regardless of the format you read them in, psdavidson, I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I have.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/30/2022 at 11:04 PM, Nigel Bunker said:

I paid just over £50 inc p&p for hard back copies in Fine or Very Good condition, as I vastly prefer hardback to paperback. I'm not a fan of Kindle as I find hardbacks easier to read. Just a problem of me getting older. Ex-libris would have been cheaper but you never know what you're going to get with those.

 

Regardless of the format you read them in, psdavidson, I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I have.

I found the early e-ink readers, the ones that aren't backlit, were really easy on the eyes and for me as easy to read for long periods as paper... as long as you had good light. Advantage was all my books in one place and no struggle to keep a page open if hands were busy doing something else (I often read while eating). But if the light isn't good, they are harder to read than a book.

 

I'm sold on the early Kindles, but I'm not sold on newer, backlit ones. I am not convinced they'll be any less tiring to read on than a tablet.

 

 

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Started in on Max Hasting's, "All Hell Let Loose", picked up after a recommendation on here. 120 pages so far & enjoying the way it flows. This followed a bit of chick lit from Katherine Schole's book "Lioness". A feel good bit of gentle romance set in a wild life situation in Tanzania. very enjoyable, she is an author who does her home work & writes a plausible plot line. It was good therapy after the angst of On the Road. ;) :D

Steve.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I cannot believe that since Nov 12th no one is reading a book, magazine, newspaper, kit instructions, or the list of ingredients on a dairy milk bar !!

 

I’ve just started reading State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 by Dominic Sandbrook.


This book is the third in his series of histories of modern Britain, spanning the years 1956 to 1982.


He melds political history with social history in a very good way, and at no time does he polemicise about the events and people he writes about.

 

My interest in these books comes from the fact they cover the period of time from when I was 6 to 32. Such a lot happened I had no idea about!

 

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1 hour ago, Whofan said:

I cannot believe that since Nov 12th no one is reading a book, magazine, newspaper, kit instructions, or the list of ingredients on a dairy milk bar !!

 

I’ve just started reading State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 by Dominic Sandbrook.


This book is the third in his series of histories of modern Britain, spanning the years 1956 to 1982.


He melds political history with social history in a very good way, and at no time does he polemicise about the events and people he writes about.

 

My interest in these books comes from the fact they cover the period of time from when I was 6 to 32. Such a lot happened I had no idea about!

 

 

I very much enjoyed the Sandbrook books; as someone who was born in 1983, they have helped me to blend in here seamlessly. No one suspects.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/13/2022 at 12:12 AM, stevehnz said:

Started in on Max Hasting's, "All Hell Let Loose", picked up after a recommendation on here. 120 pages so far & enjoying the way it flows.

Four weeks later, finished, an amazing read, the nuts & bolts of collating everything that went into it beggar belief. It is truly a triumph of research but more importantly a superb narrative. I would recommend it as an over view of what WW2 was all about unreservedly. Now about to start "A History of RAF Servicing Commandos" by Kellet & Davies.

Steve.

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I recently finished Peter Caygill's Lightning from the Cockpit and Javelin from the Cockpit, as well as Never Ready, by Kenton White, about the UK's ongoing attempts to cut corners on its NATO and other defence commitments during the Cold War. All three were interesting in their own right, but the lattermost held a kind of awful fascination for me. Thank heavens all that corner-cutting nonsense and trying to squeak by ended in 1991...😬*

 

 

* Though in truth, I can understand the other side of the argument, like the old joke "the armed forces aren't to defend the country, they're to make the voters feel like the country's defended." People want a robust military, but there's a substantial cost, both financial and opportunity, associated with it, and national resources are finite. The counterargument can easily run that as undermanned the fighting services were, and as unreliable as their equipment was, they did fine in both of their major wars in 1982 and 1991, and the money that might have bolstered them was spent well on other things. The RAF may have lacked any aircraft that could dogfight between 1988 and 2006, but as embarrassing as that would have proved in a war against an enemy with an air force, there was never any need for dogfighting during that time. Given the length of time it takes to produce a weapon and bring it into service, however, not developing or maintaining a capability (or doing so!) is always a gamble that the world will develop in the way you hope. 

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Just finished reading  the Kindle edition of Colditz by Ben McIntyre. Excellent read and revealing a lot of what was happening behind those cold gloomy walls.  Interesting section at the back abouti the codes used when the inmates wrote letters home and a snippet about the Colditz Cock glider showing the only photo ever taken of it and its demise. Worth having a read

 

PS: I was inspired to read this after  following the readings on R4( radio4) a couple weeks ago.

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  • 4 weeks later...

As the result of a note in Max Hasting's book All hell Let Loose I mentioned above, I got a copy of The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer from the library. Hell, what a read. I'm very aware of the controversy surrounding the authenticity of it but if this is a roman, it's a damn good one & having read some of the pros & cons about it, I'm happy enough to come down on the side of the pros. Not quite light holiday reading but compelling reading all the same, cleaned up in 5 days. 

Steve.

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Over the Christmas period I've read the last three books in Rory Clement's Tom Wilde series (Hitler's Secret, The Prince and Spy, The Man in the Bunker).  For those that don't know, the series starts in 1936 and so far has run to 1945, Tom Wilde is an Irish American history professor at Cambridge who by various means ends up getting roped into MI6 then US Intelligence work in a battle against Nazi's and Nazism in the British establishment as well as the odd Soviet spy.  They are set against some of the darker aspects of the times and are quite violent in places but I can't help but thinking the series would make a damned good TV franchise.

 

Moving on now, being a Twixmas baby, I got a few books for my birthday on the 29th, I'm currently dividing my time between A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Tribals, Battles and Darings by Dr Alex Clarke.

 

The former is a novel about a Russian aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, is placed in internal exile in attic rooms at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow starting in 1922.  We see how he adapts to his change in circumstances, it has a wry humour and I can't help but like Rostov.

 

Tribals, Battles and Darings is subtitled The Genesis of the Modern Destroyer, it takes you through the development, use and history of the types and how each class led to the following classes.  It looks at the restrictions placed on the Royal Navy  by the various interwar naval treaties and how the RN developed the Tribals to get the best use of their tonnage limits vs their commitments to Empire.  For thos that don't know him, the author Dr Alex Clarke is a renowned expert in the field and has his own You Tube channel if your interested (you'll be amazed at how much Irn Bru he quaffs during his broadcasts).  Also, many of the photos in the book come from the Drachinifel Collection.  Drachinifel is a naval historiographer and specialises in the period from the age of sail until 1950, his You Tube channel is definitely recommended.

 

Finally, my daughter gave me a new Siouxsie and the Banshees compilation album which she accompanied with the suitably gothic Dracula by Bram Stoker.

 

That should see me through until Rory Clements releases the next Tom Wilde book later this month.

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12 hours ago, Wez said:

Over the Christmas period I've read the last three books in Rory Clement's Tom Wilde series (Hitler's Secret, The Prince and Spy, The Man in the Bunker).

Wez,

 

I#ve also read the entire Tom Wilde collection, and like you have found them verywell written and plotted, and I fully agree with yu that they would make excellent tcv series.

 

Possibly even films, but let's stick with a decent adaptation for tv.

 

I'm also waiting for Bad Actors, The latest Mick Herron Slow Horses book to come out in paperback, 

 

And I'm hankering after this one, which received a good review in the Guardian recently;

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wings-War-Fighter-Allies-Believers/dp/1524746320/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3NUMI6QJ0KQD0&keywords=wings+of+war&qid=1672701217&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIzLjA3IiwicXNhIjoiMy4wNSIsInFzcCI6IjEuODEifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=wings+of+war+%2Cstripbooks%2C144&sr=1-1

 

the story of the P 51.

 

Currently being read;

 

Hirohito's war, by Francis Pike, a dense, detailed book about the Pacific war 1941 to 1945.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm about halfway through Harrier 809 by Rowland White. It's a good contrast to Sharky's Sea Harrier over the Falklands yet compliments it at the same time.

 

Today we were delivering to the Lincoln RNA club (Royal Naval Association) and from their bookshelves I bought The Secret War by Max Hastings.

In hardback and with an awful lot of pages. It's WW2 BTW.

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