Now reading (The Book Thread)

The Blitzkrieg Legend: The Campaign in the West, 1940, Karl-Heinz Frieser. Using access to German archives the author shows that there was no such thing as "Blitzkrieg" and that the victory over France in May '40 came as as much of a surprise to the Germans as it did to the British and French.

Irrationality, Stuart Sutherland: A wonderful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, exposition on how we're ALL of us irrational.

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts, Carol Tavris: ties in well with the above. How we justify our own decisions (usually by self-deception).

The War of the Running Dogs: Malaya 1948-1960, Noel Barber. The Malayan "Emergency", the first post-war war against Communism and one still cited as the "perfect" anti-insurgency campaign.

Aircraft Performance W. Austyn Mair. Principles and equations of aircraft performance.

Hitler's War, Harry Turtledove. The first in another series of "alternate histories" from Turtledove, this time it's "what would have happened if WWII had started a year early?". So-so: everyone (apart from the odd "Hai", "Bloody", "Tovarisch" or "Scheiss" to distinguish their nationality) talks and thinks like a modern-day American, and the author could have done with better reference books so he didn't make so many errors when giving the technical details of military equipment.
 
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AmishRakeFight said:
I've currently got a huge list of books sitting on my desk waiting to be read. The stack contains:

7) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens- Sean Covey
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They're making us do this course at college: words can't describe how much I hate it.
 
Atkinson & Hilgard's Introduction to psychology 15th edition, by Nolen- Hoeksema, Fredrickson, Loftus and Wagenaar.
 
How The Scots Invented the Modern World. Andy they did, really. Very canny those Scots! Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedommmmmmmmmmmm!!!!
 
Chabon On Life, Death, "Jewlaska", and tying off with a tefillin

• Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007, HarperCollins)

This book sat first in my brother's kitchen, then on a back room shelf, apparently unread for well over a year. I presumed someone had given him the book in a fit of ambition, and he had treated it with all the decorum such a presumption deserves. But, no. When I asked him if I could borrow it, he said, "Actually, I think it's yours. I ordered it from Amazon, and it came late because of the snow." And then, of course, he forgot about it. No biggie. Last year, a book like this would have depressed me. More than usual, I mean.

It is hard, speaking of presumption, to not try to guess after Chabon's intent with a story like this. Still, I recall a composition instructor at the University of Oregon who was infuriated by the suggestion that one can discern an author's intentions by the content and themes of the stories; I had and lost a row with her about O'Brien's The Things They Carried—apparently, odds are equal that one writes a depressing collection of war stories in order to celebrate their love of service in a place like Vietnam instead of exorcising even the minor demons that haunt one's memory of the experience. Of course, she was a poet, so take that for whatever it's worth.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is the sort of tale one might call "gritty". It seems rich with all manner of aggressive suggestion, but there is no guarantee that appearances are accurate indicators of reality, especially after only a few chapters. Still, it is not the underlying mystery that coaxes the reader along. Rather, it is a morbid fascination with a fantastical depiction of what one might reasonably consider Hell:

Russian shtarkers developed the Shvartsn-Yam during the mid-eighties, on purest quake-bait landfill, in the first heady days of legalized casino gambling. Time-shares, vacation homes, and bachelor pads, that was the idea, with the Grand Yalta casino and its jumping tables at the center of the action. But legal gambling is out now, banned by the Traditional Values Act, and the casino building houses a KosherMart, a Walgreens, and a Big Macher outlet store. The shtarkers went back to bankrolling illegal policy rackets, betting mills, and floating craps games. The swingers and vacationers gave way to a population of upper-lowlifes, Russian immigrants, a smattering of ultra-orthodox Jews, and a bunch of bohemian semiprofessionals who like the atmospher of ruined festivity that lingers in the neighborhood like a strand of tinsel on the branch of a bare tree.

The Taytsh-Shemets family lives in the Dnyeper, on the twenty-fourth floor. The Dnyeper is round as a stack of pie tins. Many of its residents, spurning fine views of Mount Edgecumbe's collapsed cone, the gleaming Safety Pin, or the lights of the Untershtat, have enclosed their curving balconies with storm windows and louvers in order to gain an extra room. The Taytsh-Shmetses did that when the baby came along: the first baby. Now both little Taytsh-Shemetses sleep out there, stashed away on the balcony like disused skis.

Landsman parks the Super Sport in the spot behind the Dumpsters that he has come to view as his own, though he supposes a man should not come to cherish tender feelings toward a parking place. Simply having a place to put his car that is twenty-four stories down from a standing invitation to breakfast should never pass, in a man's heart, for a homecoming.

(35-36)​

This is the sort of tale that will make separating the genuine from the invented a difficult task, but in the end it is a human story run, like so many others, through various filters to distill a certain blended elixir. For reasons I cannot possibly describe, Salinger's short, "Just Before the War With the Eskimos"° comes to mind. The disenchantment that is a human birthright is a common mash, and must be treated kindly in order to ferment properly.

For all that, though, it's an interesting, intriguing, and even enjoyable sort of depressing story. That probably says more about me than Chabon, but it's a start.
____________________

Notes:

° Salinger's "Just Before the War With the Eskimos" — Published, ironically, in 1948, the same year that, according to Chabon's story arc, Israel failed. But, no, that's definitely not the connection my mind asserts; I don't think I've ever known, until now, the actual publication date of the story.
 
Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont, and
Higher Superstition, Paul R. Gross & Norman Levitt.
Both are critiques of modern philosophy's (especially the French "postmodernists" and "poststructuralists") misuse and abuse of science.
 
Genre bendre

Just finished two by Emma Bull, War for the Oaks and Bone Dance. The former is a bit more specialized a flavor; it reads like what it is, an ambitious first novel drawn almost entirely from inside the author. Don't take me wrongly, it's a fine story, but even in the world of elvin and faerie fantasy, it's still a fairly unique context. The latter is an outstanding postapocalyptic tale that ... um ... I don't know, makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. Mostly it's just a kick to read.

For the moment, I'm just sort of picking through the David Hartwell-edited anthology, The Dark Descent. Somethin' to do, I guess.
 
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/dp/0316731161/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

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Just started reading this, midway through chapter one. So far I have learned why every station has a coffee shop and how economics determines which brand gets the monopoly at a certain station and how this is related to David Ricardo's analysis of the modern coffee shop and much of the modern world [1817]

Tim Harford blogs for the Financial Times.

http://timharford.com/
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Always the scholar! Don't you ever do anything just for fun?
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Its a pop economics book!

Before that I read:


A History Of The World In Six Glasses

Historian Standage explores the significant role that six beverages have played in the world's history. Few realize the prominence of beer in ancient Egypt, but it was crucial to both cultural and religious life throughout the Fertile Crescent, appearing even in the Gilgamesh epic. Wine's history has been recounted in many places, and its use to avoid often--polluted water supplies made it ubiquitous wherever grapes could be easily cultivated. Spirits, first manufactured by Arabs and later rejected by them with the rise of Islam, played a fundamental role in the ascendance of the British navy. As a stimulant, coffee found no hostility within Islam's tenets, and its use spread as the faith moved out of Arabia into Asia and Europe. Tea enjoyed similar status, and it bound China and India to the West. Cola drinks, a modern American phenomenon, relied on American mass-marketing skills to achieve dominance. An appendix gives some modern sources for some of the primitive beers and wines described in the text.
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Also an amazing book!

And:


Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues

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Which is just junk reading for pleasure

I read because I enjoy reading :p
 
Well I was halfway through The Great Book of Amber, Roger Zelazny's 10 volume fantasy series under one cover, and halfway through Mechanized Infantry Brigadier Simpkin's masterly treatise on the need for, and role of, the AIFV/ IFV/ MICV when my Amazon-ordered copy of The Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison arrived on my doorstep this morning. So now I'm halfway through that too.
And then I called in to a second-hand bookshop and found What Is Life? a limited-edition slipcase reprint of Erwin Schroedinger's 1943 lectures for £1.50!
And a leather-bound collection by H. G. Wells for the same price which contains The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Time Machine. Too good to pass up.
And for something lighter I also picked up The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlyn to revive old memories - it must be 30 years since I read T. H. White.
For good measure I also got Barrington Bayley's The Pillars of Eternity and The Garments of Caean in one volume.

So I'll likely not be buying any more books until the end of next week.
 
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`
Heh... ...Deathworld...

Isn't that the one where the people living on 'Deathworld' got them nutty holsters tricked out so the gun pops right into their hands any time they think about shooting something ?
 
Killjoy said:
`
Heh... ...Deathworld...

Isn't that the one where the people living on 'Deathworld' got them nutty holsters tricked out so the gun pops right into their hands any time they think about shooting something ?
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That's the one. Hadn't read it for years and then I found the trilogy on Amazon for something like £2.75 postage (from the States) and an actual cost of £0.01!
Meh, so it's second-hand and not exactly pristine but for that price...
 
Five Hundred Years After

Five Hundred Years After, by Steven Brust.

The charming sequel to The Phoenix Guards and the second of three (or five, as such) stories of the Khaavren Romances. I quoted its predecessor in a post the other day, and suddenly had a craving for these adventures. This was the first of the books that I found. I don't know how many times I've read this one over the last sixteen years, but it's still a rollicking good time.
 
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