What are you Reading Now?

Going on a bit of a WW2 history binge at the moment.
Kursk 1943 The tide turns in the East. It's about the Battle of Kursk [July - August 1943]. It was the last big offensive by the Germans on the Eastern front. To put it oversimply... Both side made guesses on what the other side was doing. The German guesses were mainly wrong, The Soviet side was right more of the time. In hindsight [always 20/20] the Germans were doomed to fail and might have tried something else somewhere else, but the war machine is hard to steer.
I've just started Normandy '44 by James Holland. It covers the first 2-3 months of the battle for France. It is 650 pages long so may take a while. The bit I'm looking forward to is the story of the battle for Tilly-sur-Seulles, It was and is a small town [village really] that because of it's location was fought over for nearly 3 weeks with hundreds of dead on both sides. I've been there and it is a beautiful sleepy place that was really friendly to a weary tourist.

 

I read Max hastings' book 'Overlord' a while back. Though long and very detailed, what it did hammer home, and what I never knew before, was the staggeringly high casualty rates on the allied side. Not on the beaches but in the breakout from them.

If you haven't read it yet, Antony Beevor's 'Berlin; The Downfall' is a good, if not particularly cheery account of the final days of the Third Reich.

 

It seemed to be a deliberate tactic. Not the actual deaths, but the attrition. The allies could replace their losses the Germans could not.
Hürtgen Forest was much the same. A meat grinder for both sides.

There was a good [and again not cheery] documentary series on the fall of Berlin. It took accounts from personal diaries and public records to build up the narrative. Some of that was truly harrowing.

 

I recently finished Viktor Frankl's book Mans Search For Meaning about his time in WW2 concentration camps. He quoted Nietzsche, which summed up much of what he found. "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

 

Started reading the Berserk manga not long ago. About a 3rd of the way through overall. Love it, I love the very dark and brutal fantasy, but still very tied with the lighter pretty side. The artwork is fantastic too.

 

I finished The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015)

A story taking place in England in the decades following the death of King Arthur, it is initially told in extremely classical prose with an omniscient, self-aware POV that adresses the modern reader directly, but this is not overbearing, and as the story progresses the narrative does get into more modern techniques (like the occasional switch to 1st person POV, and occasional bits on non-linear storytelling).

Overall it feels very much like a subtle mixture of authentic medieval literature, with a lot of scenes and symbols that feel weirdly unfamiliar and never get explained (but still draw a consistent story in the end), and of modern sensibilities and considerations about the impact of war, memory, grief, vengeance.

This is not a sprawling epic; the stakes are somewhat high but are told mainly from the point of view of an elderly couple on a journey to meet back with their son. It has very much a mood of weariness, of an age coming to an end. As such it can feel a bit lacking in liveliness. There are occasional action scenes, but they do not invoke much thrill or emotion, as if seen through a clouded mind (but this fits well with the themes of the story).

The overall atmosphere reminded of the movie Excalibur with very much a strong sense of mystery and even dread associated with the supernatural. I liked it enough, but not sure I would re-read it. 7/10

Next up I'll probably read Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

 

Finished Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Overall I found it just ok. There are some very clever twists to the "classic D&D adventure" that this is riffing on, but that means in the process of getting there we still have to go through a number of scenes that I found rather dull and tired. The bits written from Enth's perspective are really good but I'd have wanted a lot more of those. The prose is fine, serviceable but on the good side of the "average" line. Not mad at all I read this but that's not something I see myself ever going back to. 6/10

 

Stargazer by Anne Hillerman
A detective/mystery tale set on and around the Navajo Tribal Lands in the south west of the USA.
A taut sparse tale that lets you imagine the details.
Anne Hillerman has taken the world her father described in his Leaphorn and Chee tales and made them her own without loosing what was loved [at least by me] about the originals.

 

Clash Of Kings by George R.R. Martin

 

I'm on a Jules Verne kick at the moment, reading stuff I hadn't since I was a teen. One can see most of the things people have complained about in science fiction (especially hard SF) for the past century and a half already in his novels, digressions into science and world building at the expense of plot. Fun, none the less, thanks to plenty of imagination. Right now on 'Around the World in 80 Days' which actually does have a good and interesting story—maybe his best effort in that sense.

 

The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger but also The Book of Judges from the Bible as I was reminded of it whilst reading the latter. Gunslinger certainly starts out as a humble beginning for being King's magnum opus.

 

I just finished Tom Jones—a novel I've somehow missed opening till now, though I'm a pretty big fan of comic/satirical British novels in general (Thackerary, Trollope, etc). It proved to be very much my sort of book and I'll probably have to watch that I don't start emulating Fielding for a while. The intrusive narrator, par excellence.

 

I’m right in the middle of the Leviathan trilogy. It was my favorite series in middle school, and my cousins gifted them to me recently, so it’s a nice throwback, if slightly obscure.