What Are You Reading

[ronymark]

Recently i start reading One Day by David Nicholls. I was reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is very funny novel. I enjoyed it.

 

[hollyhamine]

I like to read love story books and some comedy books.I also like to read the books from which i can learn some good lessons and can applied which is helpful for living good and relaxed life.

 

[TCMfan25]

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Tough without a Gun the Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart < Read this!, and a series of historical volumes on Victorian to post WWII Britain.

 

[marxalot]

A mixed bag- The Brothers Karamazov, Android Karenina (a book which I received from a friend, relieving me of my dilemma regarding wanting to read this alternate version of C-19 Russia but not wanting to financially support the alteration of Tolstoy), Berlin (a history of the city from 1880-1989), and Batman: Detective Comics.

 

[JennyLou]

I am attempting to read as many books as I can before I go back to school to finish my degree. The last book I read was In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler's Berlin. I always enjoy Erik Larson's books. I love the details and depth he writes about event. His books feel like your reading a novel. The only cristiism I have is that it ended abruptly. I felt that he could have elaborated on the departure of the Dodds family from Berlin and their life after.
The next book I hope to read, if I can find one, will be about the rescue of Bat 21 during the Vietnam war. I think there are two books out there written about it: Bat-21 (1985) by William C. Anderson and The Rescue of Bat 21 (1999) by Darrel D. Whitcomb. I'm not sure which one would be better reading or if the local libraries have them.

 

[shazzabanazza]

Im going to try a new author tonight. Kate Kingsbury Sarah's Song is the name of the book

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

JennyLou, may I suggest www.worldcat.org ?While not every library has all of its listings in there, most do. (some things are missing) . But The Rescue of Bat-21 is at the LA Public Library, and Whittier Public Library has it in large print. Bat-21 is at the Covina Public Library, the Azusa City Library, and several others. If none of those are places you use, remember- Interlibrary Loan is your friend!

And while it doesn't have your books, www.openlibrary.org occasionally has ebooks I want to read. Right now I'm reading In Love and War by Admiral James Stockdale on it. It doesn't have When Hell Was In Session, so I'll have to hit ILL for that one. Read them both years ago, and they are still just as harrowing to read as when I was in college.

 

[JennyLou]

Thanks for the info Bluebird Marsha. I just ordered the two books from the LA Public Library.

 

[AmateisGal]

Letters from Home by Kristina McMorris. It's her debut novel - set on the U.S. homefront and European front.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

B-29 Hunters of the JAAF (Osprey Aviation Elite 5)
by Koji Takaki & Henry Sakaida
(Botley, Oxford UK: Osprey Publishing, 2001)

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

Oh goody, fresh in the mail today: The Lucky Bag of 1930. It's the U.S. Naval Academy yearbook. One of my altars of WW II hero worship. I know Sam Dealey and Dudley Morton are in there (that's why I ordered it), now I'm grazing to see who else was in that class.

 

[Diamondback]

A gal who's into subs, Mush Morton and Sam Dealey?

*head over heels* (from another WWII/Military History junkie, actually planning a Masters in WWII Studies)

Back to Shattered Sword at the moment. Ms. Marsha, if you haven't read this it will turn your understanding of what went right and wrong at Midway on its head... rather pricey, but I found it worth every penny for an Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures wargaming scenario I'm working on. (Despite initial test indicating major glitches, I'm still working on it.)

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

Thanks for the recommendation Diamondback; I'll get my hands on that ASAP. Back in high school, Midway was the subject of my first "real" term paper, so it was sort of the beginning of my WWII addiction. I recently took a financial seminar, and when I prepared my budget, Books: Military got its own line entry. Fortunately the class was full of book people- they had their own foibles to account for! I'm still in need of good first editions of O'Kane and Lockwood's books. Actually there's a good many first editions I'm in need of.

fftopic: Have you been over to http://www.navsource.org/ ? I've really only looked at the Fleet Subs in depth, but they have a bunch of other stuff too. They recently added a couple of short video clips that show Wahoo coming back into dock at Pearl with Morton and O'Kane.

 

[Diamondback]

Get over there occasionally, NS, NavWeaps.com, CombinedFleet.com and various records at History.Navy.MIL are all key sources in my efforts on the WWII miniatures-wargaming board I moderate. (I'm not so picky about first editions and actually prefer reprints, because I buy books to read--as in, "intensive study"--and I put downright brutal amounts of wear on them in the course of doing so, it's like the hardcopy dissolves as the data is seared into "archival memory" for some reason.) Autographed copies are a different story, and those I try to make sure I also have a "beater copy" for serious hardcore research or recreational reading. (Three paperback copies and two pain-to-get-back-then widescreen VHS's of Jurassic Park all "died" by my hand from this effect, for one example, and the technothriller that inspired my ENGL 103 final argumentative research paper racked up a similar copy-count.)

Funny thing is, my core specialties are more focused on the war in the air, Patton's drive across Europe (my great-uncle was one of his scouts who was assigned a secondary "special mission" of hunting and killing SS) and most of all the Southwest Pacific, "MacArthur's War" (which my Masters thesis basically is about tearing apart and reverse-engineering the mind of the architect thereof, so as to better understand the neuropathology and psychology that guided him for both better and worse), and yet here I am hip-deep in naval wargaming.

 

[Almost Vintage]

Just finished Some Must Watch.

 

[Harp]

--as in, "intensive study"--
... my core specialties are more focused on the war in the air, and most of all the Southwest Pacific, "MacArthur's War" (which my Masters thesis basically is about tearing apart and reverse-engineering the mind of the architect thereof...

____________
Col. John Boyd's post-Korea analysis of fighter tactics led to a
paper simply titled, "Aerial Attack Study", which he further
developed through equation Ps=[T-D/W]V as the Energy-ManeuverabilityTheory.
The EM honed further by Boyd created his Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle,
more commonly known as the OODA Loop.
If you are interested in the analysis of aerial warfare, Boyd's work is crucial.

 

[Corto]

More than halfway through John Buchan's "Greenmantle" ("sequel" to The 39 Steps).
Aside from some offensive politically incorrect stuff, this is an excellent vintage WWI-era spy thriller about British intelligence operators tasked with unmasking the nature of a German plot in the British Middle East during 1915. Fantastic stuff.

 

[Diamondback]

____________
Col. John Boyd's post-Korea analysis of fighter tactics led to a
paper simply titled, "Aerial Attack Study", which he further
developed through equation Ps=[T-D/W]V as the Energy-ManeuverabilityTheory.
The EM honed further by Boyd created his Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle,
more commonly known as the OODA Loop.
If you are interested in the analysis of aerial warfare, Boyd's work is crucial.

The old LTC-turned-prof who mentored me described Boyd as "the man who defined modern air combat tactics"--I need to see if I can find a copy of his work anywhere around the various Pentagon sites I haunt...

Thanks for the reminder, Harp!

 

[Allen]

I'm currently reading Fred Astaire's autobiography, and am about to start on George W. Bush's. I'm a big fan of autobiographies, it's interesting to see the careers through the eyes of the people that lived them.

 

[WH1]

The old LTC-turned-prof who mentored me described Boyd as "the man who defined modern air combat tactics"--I need to see if I can find a copy of his work anywhere around the various Pentagon sites I haunt...

Thanks for the reminder, Harp!

Remember Col Boyd never published any books on his concepts, it was all contained in slide presentations such as "Patterns of Conflict". His work is being documented and continued by individuals such as Dr. Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney, who were close associates of his.

You can find some of the best information on his work on the Chicago Boyz website: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/

I suspect Harp frequents the above site.