faggoty book read'n

[ivan]

if every anti-semite in the 19th century had been expunged the jews really would have been running the whole world, 'cuz there would have been nobody else left

 

i have a fig for dickens - even my favorite of his, tale of 2 shitties, i found too maudlin for my rare-rare-rarified taste - i learned the other year that he often threw conniption fits over damned yankees illegally copying his books and paying no commissions - we were the china of the day, and lord the englishman hates a coolie

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

[KaskadskyjKozak]

if every anti-semite in the 19th century had been expunged the jews really would have been running the whole world, 'cuz there would have been nobody else left

 

i have a fig for dickens - even my favorite of his, tale of 2 shitties, i found too maudlin for my rare-rare-rarified taste - i learned the other year that he often threw conniption fits over damned yankees illegally copying his books and paying no commissions - we were the china of the day, and lord the englishman hates a coolie

 

Agreed on Tale of Two Titties... uggh. Maudlin as fuck. There's a section in Oliver Twist like that too and it's annoying me... I want to get back to the swearin', drinkin', whorin' mainline story that sucked me into the plot

 

I really enjoyed Great Expectations. Those are the only three I've read so far.

 

 

[ivan]

while i didn't enjoy the text that much, the expereince of reading 2 Titties was great - i was illegally squatting in the sheltering brush near camp 4 w/ nothing but a small bag and a big bottle, crawling w/ skeeters n' anticipating the next day of bottle

[Jim]

In the Heart of the Sea

 

Read this before going to see the overwrought screen version including an exploding ship that never happened. Really Oppie?

[ivan]

shame the movie appears to have sucked - "sea of glory" was a great book, but then trying to shackle non-fiction to hollywood is as fraught with hazards as any exploration into the heart of darkness

 

course, that said, maybe that feller wrote 2 differetn books for ron howard to fuck up?

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

 

2016 Reading List:

January

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

february:

the hidden history of america at war: untold tales from yorktown to fallujah by kenneth c davis - meh, nothing too much that i hadn't learnt before, but a decent bit of pop history if nothing else - uses a clever device to anchor each section - if ya ain't read "savage wars of peace," the "water cure" chapter on the phillipines insurrection's pretty good

 

the martian by andy wier - alright, every now n' then ya gotta slum'it w/ a little fiction - the movie was good, the book a bit better perhaps - can't imagine living on potatoes w/o a sauce of some sort for months on end - 300+ sols w/ no booze - the horror, the horror

[Choada_Boy]

Currently: "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", Richard Rhodes, after "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", Ibid...

[KaskadskyjKozak]

 

Timeline, by M. Crichton.

 

Now on to "Into the Wild".

 

 

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

 

2016 Reading List:

January

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

 

february:

the hidden history of america at war: untold tales from yorktown to fallujah by kenneth c davis - meh, nothing too much that i hadn't learnt before, but a decent bit of pop history if nothing else - uses a clever device to anchor each section - if ya ain't read "savage wars of peace," the "water cure" chapter on the phillipines insurrection's pretty good

 

the martian by andy wier - alright, every now n' then ya gotta slum'it w/ a little fiction - the movie was good, the book a bit better perhaps - can't imagine living on potatoes w/o a sauce of some sort for months on end - 300+ sols w/ no booze - the horror, the horror

march:

the way of the knife: the CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth by mark mazzetti - hard to read a history of a secret war w/o a bit of a derision, but a damn-fine book nonetheless and plenty of source notes n' such for you fancy book-learned types - central premise: in the wake of 9-11, the military has increasingly sought to build up its spying capacities, subverting the official intelligence agency (cia) while simultaneously the cia has sought to expand it's military capacities (undermining the defense department along the way)

 

other central points:

 

pakistan also is riven by numerous intelligence agencies w/ military capacities, such that it can fairly be described as being actively for and against us at the same time

 

somali is so fucking batshit even AQ could't implant there due to confusion and suspicion

 

somali proverb:

"me and somali against the world

me and my clan against somalia

me and my family against my clan

me and my brother against my family

me against my brother"

 

i loved sorkin's "charlie wilson's war," yet this shows you the dark other side of what that looks like

 

the age-old conundrum - what really is war and how best is it pursued? can democracy survive in the face of eternal secretive stife?

 

the long-ships (red-orm) by frans bengtsson (translated by michael meyer) - holy jeebus, if you liked "the vikings" series, you gotta read this - first read 1/2 of it years ago on a road trip to zion but was rudely interuppted on the way back and couldn't finish it in time before being dumped in a drunken sandy heap on my doorstep - christ, save me from the Shaved Men

[tanstaafl]

 

the long-ships (red-orm) by frans bengtsson (translated by michael meyer) - holy jeebus, if you liked "the vikings" series, you gotta read this - first read 1/2 of it years ago on a road trip to zion but was rudely interuppted on the way back and couldn't finish it in time before being dumped in a drunken sandy heap on my doorstep - christ, save me from the Shaved Men

 

God yes. The Long Ships is one of my favorite books of all time and I can't count how many people I have foisted it on since I first read it. Never have more genial marauders gone a-Viking. The intro by Michael Chabon was pretty fabulous too.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

 

Don Quixote (currently in the 2nd book). It's starting to get really repetitive at this point, but I'm committed to pushing through to the end

 

The Revenant. I saw the movie and think this may actually be a case where, on balance, I like the movie better than the book.

[JBC]

Don Quixote (currently in the 2nd book). It's starting to get really repetitive at this point, but I'm committed to pushing through to the end

 

Good for you! I never was able to get all the way through it. Probably because it is a genre I truly detest. (The idiot who never learns from their mistakes continues to bumble through life.) Never had the patience for it.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Don Quixote (currently in the 2nd book). It's starting to get really repetitive at this point, but I'm committed to pushing through to the end

 

Good for you! I never was able to get all the way through it. Probably because it is a genre I truly detest. (The idiot who never learns from their mistakes continues to bumble through life.) Never had the patience for it.

 

He's mentally ill. I don't think it's possible for him to learn from his mistakes. Unless you mean SAncho - he's just a dumbass

 

[ivan]

(The idiot who never learns from their mistakes continues to bumble through life.)

that about sums it up for me....

[dougd]

The Revenant. I saw the movie and think this may actually be a case where, on balance, I like the movie better than the book.

 

+1

[KaskadskyjKozak]

(The idiot who never learns from their mistakes continues to bumble through life.)

that about sums it up for me....

 

LOL. Well, self-awareness is a point in your favor

 

[billcoe]

My mom made a comment about Grandma sewing Quantrills black shirts. So I thought I'd check in and update my civil war knowledge.

 

The Civil War (do I underline or quotation, confused) by Shelby Foote was excellent. Spoiler alert, the South loses. However, they do so in magnificent fashion. This is an excellent book and the writing is enough to make any history hater enjoy learning what occurred. I'd give it 5 stars except it doesn't even mention the battle Great grandfather was in (the Battle of Goods Farm) when he took a Reb bullet. Yeah, my ancestors fought both sides and the border war as well. Grandpa was a Pennsylvanian volunteer of the 42nd regiment, the Bucktails. The book is a great read, but my main criticism is that joe average is barely more than a small statistic which was the way it was I suppose: regardless........

 

That led me to Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare Western Border 1861-1865 which focus's more on the terrible Kansas/Missouri border war. You can read this book or watch Clint in The Outlaw Josey Wales to get a feel for what a Jayhawker, a Red Legs or Bushwacker's are. Basically it's horror story after horror story starting with John Brown and his band of abolitionists all but going door to door and murdering pro-slavery men in their front yards in 1856 and it goes from bad to worse from there. Just when you don't think it can get worse it does. Much of it recounted first hand by the victims. Neither side gave any quarter, and the stuff we read ISIS is doing often seems laughably weak in comparison.

Probably best to stay away from this otherwise solid work unless you want to wind up totally hating those fu(!$^ng G###da&&&ed low life Jayhawking Yankees and buying a rebel flag for your pickup truck window. If you have a bad opinion of Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson then maybe this is a book you should pick up and read. It's been said that some of the worse college sports team rivalrys to this very day are between Kansas and Missouri. I can see why.

 

Lastly: The Battle of The Crater by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen. I'd wanted to read their work "One Second After" but this was on sale cheap and that wasn't. They write well, but pass on this if you dislike disappointing stories. This is how the assholes in charge could screw up a wet dream. The Northern soldiers, hard rock and anthracite coal miners from Pennsylvania had all but locked this battle up with a brilliant plan to blow the hell out of a key southern fort after tunneling under it. The Civil War would literally be all but over except for some mopping up. The miners should have seen the writing on the wall right off when they only got a portion of the explosives and material they needed and requested. The attack was to be led by a black regiment that had gone through weeks of extensive and brutal training. It would be their first battle of the Civil War. They were psyched, trained, tooled up and were unquestionably going to kick Reb ass when on the very eve of battle Gen. Meade (they named a fort that is headquarters for the NSA) forced a change in plans for whatever reason. The trained troops would be last in if at all. !!!!!XXXX????? Decided to send in untrained, unmotivated white veterans of many battles. Bad bad idea. The death, destruction and horror of that order will all but turn a strong mans stomach. The movie Cold Mountain-Battle of the Crater has a great visual shot of what the explosion must have looked like. Spoiler alert, the Yankees light the fuse @ 1 min in.

[video:youtube]

 

Even after this, the south won the battle by a large margin. The reality was that the miner/soldiers didn't get but @ 1/4 of the gunpowered they requested. They didn't get the proper fuses either. They had to do like 51 or so splices to the POS fuse they did recieve. They lit it, and the explosion didn't come at dawn like planned. They waited a bit and then some poor bastard had to crawl back into the tunnel and relight it (hoping the fuse was truly out and not crawling slowly along). Thus, the entire Northern attack was on hold till it blew. Then when it blew the white troops that had subbed for the well trained black guys didnt' have either the equipment or knowledge they should have had. It was a Turkey Shoot due to near unparalleled stupidity on the higher ups part.

 

BTW Ivan, I want to trade you a book for your Vanderbilt book so don't discard it if you still have it sitting around. We need to start tying in together again and getting on it soon now that winter is all but gone away. My son swng through town recently and asked if I'd read "The Martian". When I replied negatively, he said "I've got the E-book, I'll leave it with you", and then he didn't. LOL

[ivan]

the most dissapointing civil war battlefield i've visited is "the crater" at petersburg - it just ain't that big these days

 

timely post there, big bill, the War of Northern Aggression ended this day 151 years ago - fine, ya'll won the war, but we're still winning the peace bitches

 

happy to hand over vanderbilt - thing's a damn bible but worth the read - it was my yosemite summer book a few years ago and helped ensure i got a good night's sleep

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

 

2016 Reading List:

January

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

 

february:

the hidden history of america at war: untold tales from yorktown to fallujah by kenneth c davis - meh, nothing too much that i hadn't learnt before, but a decent bit of pop history if nothing else - uses a clever device to anchor each section - if ya ain't read "savage wars of peace," the "water cure" chapter on the phillipines insurrection's pretty good

 

the martian by andy wier - alright, every now n' then ya gotta slum'it w/ a little fiction - the movie was good, the book a bit better perhaps - can't imagine living on potatoes w/o a sauce of some sort for months on end - 300+ sols w/ no booze - the horror, the horror

march:

the way of the knife: the CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth by mark mazzetti - hard to read a history of a secret war w/o a bit of a derision, but a damn-fine book nonetheless and plenty of source notes n' such for you fancy book-learned types - central premise: in the wake of 9-11, the military has increasingly sought to build up its spying capacities, subverting the official intelligence agency (cia) while simultaneously the cia has sought to expand it's military capacities (undermining the defense department along the way)

 

other central points:

 

pakistan also is riven by numerous intelligence agencies w/ military capacities, such that it can fairly be described as being actively for and against us at the same time

 

somali is so fucking batshit even AQ could't implant there due to confusion and suspicion

 

somali proverb:

"me and somali against the world

me and my clan against somalia

me and my family against my clan

me and my brother against my family

me against my brother"

 

i loved sorkin's "charlie wilson's war," yet this shows you the dark other side of what that looks like

 

the age-old conundrum - what really is war and how best is it pursued? can democracy survive in the face of eternal secretive stife?

 

the long-ships (red-orm) by frans bengtsson (translated by michael meyer) - holy jeebus, if you liked "the vikings" series, you gotta read this - first read 1/2 of it years ago on a road trip to zion but was rudely interuppted on the way back and couldn't finish it in time before being dumped in a drunken sandy heap on my doorstep - christ, save me from the Shaved Men

april:

for the common defense: a military history of the united states by allan millet and peter maslowski - recently got appointed an adjunct professor by cwu so i can teach an american military history class on my high school campus - thought i'd get to pick my own textbook and rattled this one off before discovering i have to use another, much longer one - not the most spellbinding of a page-turner, but then it's a textbook i suppose and by it's very nature then inclined to prefer boring generality to exciting detail - only 600 pages but it konked out shortly after vietnam - think there's a newer version that covers the good olde shrub years

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

 

2016 Reading List:

January

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

 

february:

the hidden history of america at war: untold tales from yorktown to fallujah by kenneth c davis - meh, nothing too much that i hadn't learnt before, but a decent bit of pop history if nothing else - uses a clever device to anchor each section - if ya ain't read "savage wars of peace," the "water cure" chapter on the phillipines insurrection's pretty good

 

the martian by andy wier - alright, every now n' then ya gotta slum'it w/ a little fiction - the movie was good, the book a bit better perhaps - can't imagine living on potatoes w/o a sauce of some sort for months on end - 300+ sols w/ no booze - the horror, the horror

march:

the way of the knife: the CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth by mark mazzetti - hard to read a history of a secret war w/o a bit of a derision, but a damn-fine book nonetheless and plenty of source notes n' such for you fancy book-learned types - central premise: in the wake of 9-11, the military has increasingly sought to build up its spying capacities, subverting the official intelligence agency (cia) while simultaneously the cia has sought to expand it's military capacities (undermining the defense department along the way)

 

other central points:

 

pakistan also is riven by numerous intelligence agencies w/ military capacities, such that it can fairly be described as being actively for and against us at the same time

 

somali is so fucking batshit even AQ could't implant there due to confusion and suspicion

 

somali proverb:

"me and somali against the world

me and my clan against somalia

me and my family against my clan

me and my brother against my family

me against my brother"

 

i loved sorkin's "charlie wilson's war," yet this shows you the dark other side of what that looks like

 

the age-old conundrum - what really is war and how best is it pursued? can democracy survive in the face of eternal secretive stife?

 

the long-ships (red-orm) by frans bengtsson (translated by michael meyer) - holy jeebus, if you liked "the vikings" series, you gotta read this - first read 1/2 of it years ago on a road trip to zion but was rudely interuppted on the way back and couldn't finish it in time before being dumped in a drunken sandy heap on my doorstep - christ, save me from the Shaved Men

 

april:

for the common defense: a military history of the united states by allan millet and peter maslowski - recently got appointed an adjunct professor by cwu so i can teach an american military history class on my high school campus - thought i'd get to pick my own textbook and rattled this one off before discovering i have to use another, much longer one - not the most spellbinding of a page-turner, but then it's a textbook i suppose and by it's very nature then inclined to prefer boring generality to exciting detail - only 600 pages but it konked out shortly after vietnam - think there's a newer version that covers the good olde shrub years

the conquering tide by ian toll - listened to this one on cd, all 28 hours of it - sure made the long drive back from san franny and out to the wind river go by quickly - if you liked rick atkinson's liberation trilogy, you'd dig this one big time - the story of the american pacific experience from '42 to '44 - gripping depictions of naval battles as well as guadalcanal - well worth the read

[genepires]

the good father. noah hawley

[ivan]

2015 reading list:

january:

the generals: american military command from world war 2 to today - thomas ricks - got a copy from my pops, well annotated w/ his neat handwriting - basic premise, the quality of army generals has degraded since the days of marshall due largely to the institutional abolishment of relieving incompetent officers - the glorification of tactics over strategy, generals becoming glorified squad leaders - the classic rut, an organization devoted to doing what it's always done, rather than what it should be doing now

 

February:

warlord: a life of winston churchill at war, 1874-1945 by carlo d'este - a big old tome at 700 pages but every page was great - never had learned much of his early life and enjoyed that bit the most - an insufferable child w/ serious daddy issues - thought an idiot boy by most, notable only for the bizarely intricate games he liked to play w/ thousands of toy soldiers - games in which no else could play, unless they swore to obey him and be defeated - a thoroughly lackluster student who only late in life took to academics w/ a vengeance

 

a total pain in the ass to be with, never without a contrarian opinion on any subject at hand since his earliest days - many who worked w/ him couldn't bring themselves to like him, yet were thankful for the opportunity - "When you first meet him, you see all his faults. It takes a lifetime to appreciate his virtues."

 

great quote of his on monty, a man every bit as aggravating as himself:

"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

 

and, in response to monty's claims to extreme health as a result of his tee-totaling: "well i both drink AND smoke, and am 200% fit"

 

taken captive in the boer war, he escaped, perhaps by betraying his fellow captives who's plan he horned in on and then ruined by his hasty flight - rose to prominence as a curious mixture of soldier and self-aggrandizing journalist in india, sudan and south africa - was a renowned polo player in his youth as well, totally reckless

 

didn't know that, after eviction from high office in the wake of gallipoli, he rejoined the army and got posted to the front line in france for a spell - he had a great taste for danger that persisted throughout his life, evident in ww2 by his watching the nightly bombings of london from the rooftops

 

 

 

march:

the irish war: the hidden conflict between the ira and british intelligence - tony geraghty

 

seemed appropos for the month of st paddys - despite the sub-title, a good primer on the entirety of irelands troubles with her big brother next door - the auther often injected into the action as he was an ex-soldier turned journalist who got the shit beat out of him while on assignment in the 6 counties during the 70s on after - written just a year or so after the good friday peace accord, wonder how old boy feels a decade plus on? seems like the shit worked, despite inevitable cynicism

 

the physical force tradition, often carried about by folk who couldn't rightly explain what it would amount to - the insanity of terrorist movements that attempt to speak for a people that repeatedly reject them in public referendums - brendan behan: the first item on any irish republican agenda is "the split!" - "my owld alarram clock" - semtex - the reliable "honeypot" assassination technique - the classic case for extra-judicial killings - sinn fein: "ourselves alone"

 

finished while being flung through the Deep Space and Wastelands of idaho and u-tard at the onset of yet another glorious spring break

 

april:

the hard way around: the passages of joshua slocum by geoffrey wolff - a piece of road mercy from some friend of tvash's - me, mid-blizzard, the only book i'd brought for the trip kicked only 2 days in - a fine read and breezed through quick - an odd lad i'd never heard of - product of a dying generation, the last of the age of sail - as an old man he undertook the first solo circumnavigation of the globe - lauded widely abroad, he returned to derision and suspicion, disappearing into the Deep Blue Sea soon there, never to be seen again

 

fine quote it contained from dr johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

 

may:

sphere - michael crichton

 

yeah,yeah, i know - fiction is the weak focus of a fool's mind - reckon it weren't no better than the movie, but it made the miles go by...

 

 

death grip: a climber's escape from benzo madness - matt samet

 

didn't care to read a climber's story, which i expected given my wife'd picked this up from the library thinking "oh, it's about climbing, you'll love this"

 

more the melancholy story of a dude born to madness n' drugging n' only late in life able to sort his shit out and get on the mostly straight n' sorta true - seems mandatory reading if you're on any prescription meds meant to slather over the demons you done tried to dodge too long - dug the writing style as it's of my own sensibilities, though sadly beyond my abilities i'm afeared

 

enjoyed the erstwhile assertion: there were few sporto-retards in the way-back that weren't harboring a hard-edged eating disorder

 

june:

moby dick - herman melville - forced to read it as a child, i enjoyed it far more voluntarily as an adult - the "monkey rope" chapter was particularly appropriate for a climber, as indeed the rationale espoused in the opening paragraph for the need for adventure in a drab and dreary world

 

july:

margaret thatcher: power and personality - jonathan aiken - obeys the classic law of all biographies: if'n you don't hate'em to begin w/, you will by the end is it possible to be reckoned great in the estimation of the world without being a godawful grand jackass?

 

august:

the worldly philosophers - robert heilbroner - a history of economics and plenty enjoyable - every economist from adam smith on a prisoner to the prism of the current day, all of them purporting to paint the picture beneath the flower, but finding their portrait stained with the pollen of the blossom they were fingering along the way

 

october-november:

 

gudacanal diary by richard tregaskis - super quick and enjoyable read, published in the midst of ww2 - knew a good bit about guadacanal but enjoyed reading a first hand account of a feller who spent the first 2 months of what was a half-year adventure there - sparse story-telling - everyone of us lost in the immensity of a great event we can't help but understand only the tiniest toe of...

 

big boy rules by steve fainaru - the story of the kidnapping and murder of american "mercs" in iraq during the early days of the war there - war made into a for-profit exercise - "like being in the army minus all the bullshit" - when the laws of nations and of militaries can't touch you, all there is are "big boy rules"

 

december:

tank by patrick wright - a beautifully succinct title, albeit a far too common one, for a thorough history of a simple concept: a big buncha metal meant to smash whatever might have the misforturne to run against its treads

 

wright's a damned englishmen, a race so ostentatiously intelligent it leaves you needing to take a turn of 30 minutes or so of fox news soon thereafter in order to defuse the noxious spirits that accompany such high-handed n' haughty language - in spite of his race though, i actually found the book quite charming, though on several occasions, feeling overwhelmed by bullshit, i resorted to rooseveltian speed-reading and only read topic sentences for page after page

 

it's not a military history per se, though clearly that's the skeleton of the thing - more a semantic tour de tank, considering the evolution of the concept of tank as reflected not so much on the battlefield as in human culture, art and history - the whole jungian thang really

 

turns out patton was really the merest tip of the ice-berg in terms of the tendency of tankers to be bat-shit crazy - j.f.c. fuller the bastard father of a would-be brazen killer, and holy shiite muslims, that boy was a puzzle - a foppish intellectual, who before the great war was a grand poobah in the church of aleister crowley (my favorite k2 mountaineer), fuller went from preaching the deep-deep crazy of magick to, after the epoch-announcing battle of cambrai, singing the world a siren tune about the transformative impact of the tank - wierd little bitch that he was, he refused a posting that would have allowed him to put his brazen ideas into practice and drifted off into being little more than a deranged imam belting out bullshit from the loftiest of towers - he inspired many a german and russian and american and israeli tanker though, and so the myth grew - for his part, by ww2 he was a confirmed british-nazi (shit, those fuckers were even worse than the bland kraut-variety!) and spent those grand days under house arrest or some-such

 

not sure the library's gonna take this one back - my supposedly sealed coffee cup exploded next to it in my school bag one day and turned half the pages a deep and rudish brown - if those fucks down in the league office give me any slack for it though, i'll point out it's a book about an ugly, nasty, beat-up thing, and so a virginal quality in the tome itself never could do - really they should pay ME for the coffee this poor boy sacrificed for the cause

 

2016 Reading List:

January

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - listened to this one as an audio book actually, which was spectacular, given it's narrated by the author hisself, a man with a voice which just fucking screams "i am a really, really old, really, really wise mother-fucker"

 

a more favorable portrayal of the brothers than birdmen, which looked equally at glenn curtiss and at a much longer period (mccullough's book ends a few years before wilbur's premature death and thus skips their transformation largely into businessmen and patent cry-babies ) - their sister katherine and father, a noted clergymen, also get a lot of attention - interestingly, though brought up by a man of faith, the faith their father taught them (unsurprisingly, given their accomplishments) was an exceedingly scientific one - their childhood home had no bible quotes on the walls nor bookshelves limited to religious texts, but instead was filled with far-ranging tomes on nature, literature, art, etc. - the reverend was perfectly fine with them skipping school if they decided to instead to read a book or tinker with an invention or walk through the woods

 

highly recommend this in audio-book form for all ye miserable commuters out there

 

february:

the hidden history of america at war: untold tales from yorktown to fallujah by kenneth c davis - meh, nothing too much that i hadn't learnt before, but a decent bit of pop history if nothing else - uses a clever device to anchor each section - if ya ain't read "savage wars of peace," the "water cure" chapter on the phillipines insurrection's pretty good

 

the martian by andy wier - alright, every now n' then ya gotta slum'it w/ a little fiction - the movie was good, the book a bit better perhaps - can't imagine living on potatoes w/o a sauce of some sort for months on end - 300+ sols w/ no booze - the horror, the horror

march:

the way of the knife: the CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth by mark mazzetti - hard to read a history of a secret war w/o a bit of a derision, but a damn-fine book nonetheless and plenty of source notes n' such for you fancy book-learned types - central premise: in the wake of 9-11, the military has increasingly sought to build up its spying capacities, subverting the official intelligence agency (cia) while simultaneously the cia has sought to expand it's military capacities (undermining the defense department along the way)

 

other central points:

 

pakistan also is riven by numerous intelligence agencies w/ military capacities, such that it can fairly be described as being actively for and against us at the same time

 

somali is so fucking batshit even AQ could't implant there due to confusion and suspicion

 

somali proverb:

"me and somali against the world

me and my clan against somalia

me and my family against my clan

me and my brother against my family

me against my brother"

 

i loved sorkin's "charlie wilson's war," yet this shows you the dark other side of what that looks like

 

the age-old conundrum - what really is war and how best is it pursued? can democracy survive in the face of eternal secretive stife?

 

the long-ships (red-orm) by frans bengtsson (translated by michael meyer) - holy jeebus, if you liked "the vikings" series, you gotta read this - first read 1/2 of it years ago on a road trip to zion but was rudely interuppted on the way back and couldn't finish it in time before being dumped in a drunken sandy heap on my doorstep - christ, save me from the Shaved Men

 

april:

for the common defense: a military history of the united states by allan millet and peter maslowski - recently got appointed an adjunct professor by cwu so i can teach an american military history class on my high school campus - thought i'd get to pick my own textbook and rattled this one off before discovering i have to use another, much longer one - not the most spellbinding of a page-turner, but then it's a textbook i suppose and by it's very nature then inclined to prefer boring generality to exciting detail - only 600 pages but it konked out shortly after vietnam - think there's a newer version that covers the good olde shrub years

 

the conquering tide by ian toll - listened to this one on cd, all 28 hours of it - sure made the long drive back from san franny and out to the wind river go by quickly - if you liked rick atkinson's liberation trilogy, you'd dig this one big time - the story of the american pacific experience from '42 to '44 - gripping depictions of naval battles as well as guadalcanal - well worth the read

2017

 

february -

the civil war: a narrative, vol. 1-3 - shelby foote - sigh...finished the last of these million n' a half words this afternoon, the work of something like 5 months of continuous study - sigh....i can't imagine what will fill the empty place - somehow like the war itself ending with all the requisite revulsion n' nostalgia somehow intermixed - so many incredible stories, wrought in the most poetic of fashions, and both the subjects and the word-smith long, long dead and turned to ash - we will not see their likes again?

 

can't believe i grew up so deeply enamoured of ken burns' series, which featured foote so extensively, and borrowed from his narrative to the point of nearly co-opting it entirely, without having dared to take up the trilogy - guess i was a bit intimidated as it's damn near 3000 pages in total, but in the end as compelling if not more than patrick obrian - like setting out on a circumnavigation of the world in a wooden vessel, you must make a companion of the long journey ahead, lest it drive you loopy

 

shit...guess i only ever read one book of bruce catton, maybe it'll do the trick?

 

muchias gracias to bill coe for lending me the set - i can't claim to return them in anything like original condition, but the burgundy stains and the dog-ears on every page containing a map (far too fucking few in vol 1-2) sure does lend it that lived-in look

[Lucky Larry]

Was

Not Scholarly like Ivan but, wha happen? Uh not here. Autobiography of a Brown Skinned Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta. Very Fast Read. Lots of wacky acid trips, growing up Hispanic, vomiting blood, booze, speed, cigarettes, lawyering. Other stuff I don't remember, duh, there you go again.