new year, new books
Jan. 7th, 2015 12:24 pmLet's see. I spent the week of Christmas in a bit of a fog due to a cold, which remarkably did not transform into an unpleasant sinus infection. Then I spent the week of New Year's on vacation from my vacation. Having trouble getting back into the swing of a semiregular regular routine, now.
What are you currently reading?
Frances FitzGerald's Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. I'd picked up the wargame of the same name on a whim earlier in the year, and the book was cited as an important and useful source for the game, and I happened to stumble across it in early December in the thrift store. I'm about fifty pages from the end. It's good, I think: I knew basically nothing about Vietnam or the war going into it. I'm coming out with the impression that there was no good way for the Americans to interfere or to "stop the rise of Communism," and they still managed to go about it in the worst possible way. FitzGerald puts much of the blame for this on Westmoreland, who persisted in fighting a conventional Western war in a situation that was none of those things, and on Johnson, who created a culture where no one involved could say anything negative about the 'pacification' efforts or suggest a change of direction.
(The title comes from the I Ching hexagram for 'Revolution.')
I've also started reading Kameron Hurley's God's War, because I snagged it and Infidel (the sequel) for free in ebook a couple of years back. Three chapters in, it's good stuff: gritty Muslim-influenced SF.
What did you recently finish reading?
Before that I blasted through The Wire: Truth Be Told, which![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
uilos got for my birthday, which gives you an idea of how long I've been at the FitzGerald book. It's a companion to the TV series. I skipped the episode recaps but the rest of it is really good stuff: interviews and essays with various people involved in the making of the show, and on how it ever got made in the first place, and all that.
What do you think you’ll read next?
Ebook, Infidel, and then I'll likely pick up Rapture, the third of the trilogy.
Hard copy, William Gibson's The Peripheral, because I promised semilocal J-- that I'd read it next and also because I really want to. I like Gibson's recent contemporaryish novels a lot (well, I liked Pattern Recognition and Zero History; I felt like Spook Country was a lot of buildup for next to no payoff, but it's also important backstory for ZH), and I'm looking forward to what he does now with SF.
What are you currently reading?
Frances FitzGerald's Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. I'd picked up the wargame of the same name on a whim earlier in the year, and the book was cited as an important and useful source for the game, and I happened to stumble across it in early December in the thrift store. I'm about fifty pages from the end. It's good, I think: I knew basically nothing about Vietnam or the war going into it. I'm coming out with the impression that there was no good way for the Americans to interfere or to "stop the rise of Communism," and they still managed to go about it in the worst possible way. FitzGerald puts much of the blame for this on Westmoreland, who persisted in fighting a conventional Western war in a situation that was none of those things, and on Johnson, who created a culture where no one involved could say anything negative about the 'pacification' efforts or suggest a change of direction.
(The title comes from the I Ching hexagram for 'Revolution.')
I've also started reading Kameron Hurley's God's War, because I snagged it and Infidel (the sequel) for free in ebook a couple of years back. Three chapters in, it's good stuff: gritty Muslim-influenced SF.
What did you recently finish reading?
Before that I blasted through The Wire: Truth Be Told, which
uilos got for my birthday, which gives you an idea of how long I've been at the FitzGerald book. It's a companion to the TV series. I skipped the episode recaps but the rest of it is really good stuff: interviews and essays with various people involved in the making of the show, and on how it ever got made in the first place, and all that.What do you think you’ll read next?
Ebook, Infidel, and then I'll likely pick up Rapture, the third of the trilogy.
Hard copy, William Gibson's The Peripheral, because I promised semilocal J-- that I'd read it next and also because I really want to. I like Gibson's recent contemporaryish novels a lot (well, I liked Pattern Recognition and Zero History; I felt like Spook Country was a lot of buildup for next to no payoff, but it's also important backstory for ZH), and I'm looking forward to what he does now with SF.