Amph What book are you reading right now?

Just finished Star Wars: Riptide, now starting Millennium Falcon.
I really enjoyed the duology with all the crazy variables, force clones, time travel, Rakata technology, Darth Krayt, etc. Was entertaining. I wish there were books set in the Infinite Empire time period.

 

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1645) – John Milton

Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity is one of Milton’s earliest poems, written when he was only twenty-one, but not widely published until some years later. I think it’s incredibly telling in a way and very prophetic of Milton’s career as a whole. Because Milton takes an incredibly hackneyed subject, the birth of Jesus on Christmas, and does something deeply personal and pretty weird with it. Not that anything is wrong with a traditional poem about Christmas, but we’ve all heard about a thousand of them. Probably not any quite like this though, which features scenes in the underworld and the domains of pagan gods. It’s no wonder that William Blake did illustrations for this poem, as it has some surprisingly striking imagery that has nothing to do with the typical Christmas images we’re all familiar with. Still, it’s definitely simpler than his other works, but it does highlight a talent on the rise. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – one of Milton’s earliest poems is creative and surprising; it’s simple, of course, but Milton brings a personal flair to a tired subject. 3 ½ stars.

 

Actually starting to read The Children of Hurin now.

 

Love that book. If they'd found a way to add The Wanderings of Hurin on to it, maybe just as an appendix or something, that would have been great. I guess if the story your telling is The Children of Hurin, just putting Wanderings on at the very end is anti-climactic, but Wanderings deserves better than just being buried deep in the middle of that ten volume History of Middle Earth. As an appendix would probably have worked.

 

James Cagney: The Authorized Biography by Doug Warren with James Cagney (1983). I'm liking this book a lot because Warren sat down with Cagney three years before the actor's death to coax out family details about Mr. and Mrs. Cagney's Irish/Norwegian brood in turn of the century NYC, interviewed producers such as Jack Rose to gain insight on backlot shenanigans, and caught impressions from Cagney's surviving friends such as Pat O'Brien and Ralph Bellamy. Pat O'Brien, a gregarious sort who lost the girl to Cagney in every movie I've seen them teamed in, termed his friend "the faraway fella" who concentrated on his family and friends and gloried in horses, sailing, and farming. Oh sure, Warren got a few names wrong, such as 1936's "Ceiling Zero," a Cagney aviation picture, being written by Frank Weed rather than Frank Wead, whose story John Wayne portrayed in 1957's "Wings of Eagles," but the tone and details in the book outweigh quibbling.

 

L’Allegro (1645) – John Milton

These delights, if thee can give
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.

Milton wrote this poem in concert with another that is of more melancholy bent; more on that later. For now, I’ll just say that I find this poem to be less impressive than a lot of people do. It’s essentially an exploration of a kind of joyous celebration and it’s hard to do that kind of thing in poetry without coming off as a little precious or twee. Milton is talented enough to still get off some good lines and give most of the poem a genuinely happy feeling though, but it is kind of limited by the fact that there’s no real tension in the poem and no variation in the mood or tone. This poem was probably written right after Milton’s graduation from college, so he was young and able to get carried away with exuberance, I suppose, but it’s just significantly a lesser poem than any of his other early classics. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – early Milton has some nice moments, but the exploration of happiness has no real tension or variation in tone to recommend it; definitely a lesser work, even among his early output. 2 ½ stars.

 

Moving on, The Redemption Of Time, A Three-Body Problem Novel

So this is interesting as things now get dealt with on the scale of the universe. There is essentially god and a devil of some sort that just do this universe thing over and over and over. It did have a stretch of an uninteresting part near the last bit of the book, but otherwise I was pleased.

Now, Dragonslayer by Duncan Hamilton which looks to be not as cliche as the title is. A quick flip through the first bit and we see a point of view from the dragon and it was enough to grab me.

 

Finally reading The World of Ice & Fire. Lots of pretty pictures in it.

 

Am reading "The Twentieth Wife" by Indu Sundaresan, to be followed by "The Feast of Roses". These historical fiction novels are rich in historic context and compellingly vivid characters.

 

Origin by Dan Brown.
His stock characters are irritating me just 30 pages in. My FIL and husband's aunt both said it was better than Brown's other books though so I'm giving it a chance.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William Shirer. This 1960 work is a classic early history of the Nazi regime. It’s massive, based off captured German documents and supplemented by Shirer’s experience as an international reporter in Berlin and Vienna during Hitler’s reign, and full of details. But I didn’t love it.

The focus is a bit uneven; Shirer, who didn’t arrive until Hitler was in power, goes into the early, street-brawling days of the disreputable party, but appears somewhat baffled how they became a mainstream force and sort of glosses that over to the point where they take power. At that point there’s a little discussion of Nazi domestic policy, but the book is quickly taken over by foreign policy, chronicling Hitler’s land grabs and then the war. There’s very little sense of what it was like living under such a tyrannical regime, of the propaganda and repression, and all the sense of horror is limited to one late chapter covering the Holocaust and all of the various massacres of foreign populations.

It feels like Shirer is a bit limited by his perspective as a journalist; he focuses on the world-politics events he reported on as a foreign correspondent and largely skims over the experience of Germans and Jews. He’s also subject to the journalistic class’s rather narcissistic presumption of knowledge; he’s quick to talk about what the German people did and didn’t support, what they believed, as if he as a foreigner chatting with the privileged classes can speak for what was being said at dinner tables throughout Germany. He’s a bit quick to presume that living in Germany and sifting through some documents gives him all the answers.

As an explanation of the Nazis’ rise, it’s interesting but limited; as coverage of their regime’s foreign policy and the war it’s solid and insightful; as an exposé of the horror of the Nazi regime it falls short. Aside from that one chapter, it rarely creates a sense of horror at Nazi barbarity; Shirer’s condemnation is consistent, but more in the tone of baffled, laughing contempt for buffoonish, grotesquely ignorant thugs. It’s a solid book, but I’m sure better histories have since been written.

 

The Shadow Rising. Finished The Dragon Reborn last night, and up to 100 pages in Shadow Rising already. Good stuff!

 

Rereading The Eleventh Son by Gu Long. This was the source material for Shaw Brothers' Swordsman and Enchantress, and I immediately fell into this world again where the title character, the bandit Xiao Shiyi Lang and The Enchantress, Feng Seniang set off after the fabled Deer Carver sword and eventually become embroiled in much stranger adventures.

Gu Long immediately sucks you in with clever characters whose bugnuts martial arts skills are secondary to how human they are.

It's a much easier read than Jin Yong's long winded -and for me- uninteresting tales populated with more characters than I need to know about. I finished that Legends of the Condor Heroes book one and it just isn't my thing. Maybe it's a cultural element I am not understanding, but my opinion of these two beloved wuxia authors live action adventures is the same: I much prefer Gu Long adaptations over Jin Yong stories. Even Sun Chung tripped over his attempt at adapting a Jin Yong tale, so I hope that more Gu Long stories will be officially translated.

At any rate, happy to be revisiting the adventures of Xiao and Feng.

 

A fine review on an enormous book on an enormous subject. War correspondent Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary (1943) covers only the first weeks of the campaign to retake the island and I don't recall if he presumed knowledge from his readers, but the smaller focus of the book sure isn't like covering the entire Nazi regime. It sounds funny, but Hogan's Heroes gave me insights as to the war in that this silly TV show portrayed the sense of conflict (Heroes being locked up), Nazi power structure (Klink always looking over his shoulder lest Gestapo officer Hofstetter report him if his "perfect record of no escapes" be broken), the congenial Germans who went with the flow (Schultz and his love for bribe-making LeBeau's cooking), and wider general strategy glitches (everyone being terrified of being shipped to the Russian front). Well, that's visual media acting for you, but one Scholastic Books offering called simply The Story of the Second World War by Katharine Savage was a YA book that I read as a girl and have always remembered due to its broad scope, with some memorable smaller paragraphs such as on the Kassel, Germany, Nazis hanging captured parachutists early on, resulting in Allied bombers saving back one bomb on their return to base runs later on to "give one to Kassel."

 

I finished Red Sister a week ago. It was quite good, ****/***** out at least, I think the next has the potential to be even better once most of this setup is out of the way. I already bought the follow-up novel. But now I'm taking a break and have moved on to another book in my backlog in the space fantasy genre (having recently read Skyfarer by Brassey and Skyward by Sanderson, the latter of which follow-up novel is a certain purchase when it comes out later in the year.)



Trading In Danger
by Elizabeth Moon
Vatta's War series #1
space opera genre

 

Finished Millennium Falcon, now reading Fate of the Jedi: Outcast.

 

If you're truly game I would suggest committing to the intense five book regiment of both volumes of Ian Kershaw's Hitler and then Richard J. Evans' exhaustive Third Reich trilogy. You can probably read the latter on its own, but Kershaw is 1. extremely influential on Evans (by Evans' own admission), 2. useful for understanding the singular personality influencing the events, and 3. really good. In total one arrives at an interesting thesis that historical and material developments in Germany allowed a Hitler, and given a Hitler, Germany obliged him. A singular event only possible because of how unsingular it was. It makes sense in context.

 

Non-fiction - Endeavour by Peter Moore. It's the story of the ship that carried Captain Cook on his first great voyage. Not bad so far.

 

What did you think of it?

 

Morrissey's autobiography.

its just as you'd imagine , relentless complaining.

 

Millennium Falcon? I thought it was an engaging story, I was confused by the ending, I guess there were really no bad guys the whole time. Also a pretty abrupt ending. But I did enjoy it. The idea was good, I always like learning new 'history' in Star Wars.

 

Millennium Falcon leads nicely into Fate of the Jedi.

 

It does. I'm disappointed the Tobb Jadak part of the story wasn't continued though. Or was it? I don't think it is.

 

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle. I figured I could use something cheerful after 1150 pages of Nazis, and what could be more cheerful than this? I can’t tell you how many times I took this out of the middle school library, but it’s been a while.

Pyle’s Victorian adaptation of the various Robin Hood stories into one fairly coherent episodic novel is a classic of the boys’ adventure genre, a relentlessly fun series of adventures through a cheery evocation of Merry England. It’s still my favorite iteration of the Robin Hood story, and I’m pretty pleased with the illustrated, leather-bound Barnes and Noble edition I picked up.