Puttering in the Study

Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel - Anthony Doerr

This novel beggars description. Throughout, it is multiple stories ranging from medieval Eastern Europe and Constantinople to the Korean War, the 1970s, the near future, and the farther future. At the end, the author ties them together into a coherent story, but the process of getting there is exhausting because of the suffering contained in each of the component stories. So while it is a terrific piece of writing, it isn’t an easy or a pleasant read.

Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages - Dan Jones

This is my first Dan Jones book, and I really enjoyed it. It is a very readable account of the thousand years of history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the discovery of the New World. He frequently ties aspects of the Middle Ages both backwards into the Roman empire that preceded it, and forward into the present day, showing how medieval developments continue to play an important role in our modern world.

One brief example – he notes the enormous significance of both the development of the printing press and of the Protestant Reformation, but ties the two together in an unexpected way. In fact, it was the development of movable type and the printing press that made possible the sheer scale of the sale of indulgences which in turn led to the Reformation. I had never heard that before. But the book is full of interesting observations like this.

Quantum of Nightmares (Laundry Files, 11) – Charles Stross

Unlike the 10th installment of the Laundry Files, it only took me a couple of weeks to finish this one.  While it used much of the same cast as its Peter Pan–inspired predecessor, and added a Mary Poppins-inspired character, the plot and the characters made more sense this time around.  And the macabre touches made it fit a little better into the Lovecraftian universe that this series originally inhabited a little more consistently.

Still looking forward to seeing Bob Howard come back, which we are apparently promised in the next book, which is a prequel "novella."

Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities - Bettany Hughes

I really enjoyed this book.  It was a complete history of the city from its origins to the modern day.  It says a lot about the different empires that used it as a base, as well as the states that didn't - but still affected it greatly.

Dead Lies Dreaming - Charles Stross

This is the latest installment in the "Laundry" series, but has nothing to do with that agency.  Instead, it is exploring a spinoff set of characters, using Stross' latest conceit – adding an overlay from another literary work.  In this case, it is Peter Pan, with names and characters drawn from that story.

The biggest problem I had with this book was that there are so many similar new characters who aren't distinguished from each other and who – confusingly – all have nicknames, so that you almost need a chart to keep straight who's talking to who.  Further confusing things is that everyone who is in a relationship is in a same-sex relationship, so you can't even use the gender pronouns to identify who is speaking much of the time.

Toward the end it started making a little more sense as the action picked up, and I did enjoy the ending, which resolved a number of open issues.  But it took a long time for me to plow through this once because it was simply so dull.  But I did just purchase the 11th book, and even though it is using many of the same characters, it is making more sense.  This was draws from "Mary Poppins."  No, seriously.  It's a Lovecraft/Mary Poppins mashup.

Rereads: "Dune", "Declare", "Battle of Britain" and "Overlord" on Audible

I have recently noticed a tendency to reread books that I think I might enjoy - and more often, to start listening to them as audiobooks.  

Most recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert's Dune in advance of the new film.  I knew I had not read it since the mid-'90s, and that reading had not been especially successful, I remembered. 

The new reading was a disaster.  I was completely unable to read the book without seeing the visuals of the 1984 David Lynch film which, although I love it, was definitely getting in the way of experiencing the novel.  I also could see the tendency to want to skip over narration to get to dialogue, and suspected I was missing important parts of the book as a result.  I could already tell that I was not able to absorb anything of the characters in the book that was not from the movie.

To try to get around this, I downloaded the audiobook and began listening to that.  I can't say that I liked the audiobook per se – dialogue was mostly narrated, but occasionally characters would come in and be voiced separately, and to my taste poorly - but what it did was eliminate any carryover from the earlier film and allow me to focus on what the book and the characters were actually saying.  It's like watching a play – the actor can be doing an inferior job, but it's still Shakespeare.  I did end up reading the last few chapters in the hardback version, but by that time the characters were almost completely divorced from the movie's incarnations.  And I was getting impatient.

While I was reading Dune, I also remembered that I really didn't think I had adequately understood Tim Powers' Declare the first time I read it, and had probably skipped over important parts looking for scenes that had more action or supernatural involvement.  So I got the book for that and listened to it over the next several weeks.  Again, I think I got a much better understanding of the book, as I was forced to listen to everything in it, and not skip over parts that seemed duller.  At least now I know that I actually listened to everything in the book, and didn't skip over any important parts.

The next book, James Holland's Battle of Britain I started in hardback with the copy that Mr. Holland inscribed for me at the World War II conference in 2019.  I had just finished building a new tool Airfix 1/72 Hawker Hurricane and was starting on a new-tool Spitfire and wanted to reread a good book on the subject.  Within a couple of chapters I realized that I was not able to read as much as I wanted in the limited time that I have to read in the study in the evening, and instead got the audiobook and listened to most of the book that way.  The individual accounts got a little tiring after a while, but it ended up being an efficient way of getting the book read.  The hardest part was that a substantial part of the book deals with the battle of France, and it is almost midway through before you get to Fighter Command engaging the Luftwaffe over Britain beginning in the late summer of 1940.  Which began to conflict with the next book I listened to ...

Finally, several years ago I listened to Max Hastings' Overlord because I wanted to read something about the actual D-Day landings.  This is not the best book for that – it focuses on the battle for Normandy instead, and is similarly full of individual accounts that are not exactly what I was looking for – but Hastings does eventually provide commentary and analysis on the major questions surrounding the campaign. 

Central here is British general Sir Bernard Montgomery.  It is pretty well agreed that Montgomery made major mistakes in how he characterized and promised his forces' activities from D-Day to the end of the campaign, but Hastings takes the position that there was in the end nothing lost as a result, because neither Montgomery nor Bradley could actually have done anything earlier than they did that would have generated a faster, or better result.  Hastings is adamant that no advance against the German forces could take place until they had been written down by weeks of attrition.  If you agree with this viewpoint – and it seems sound to me – then much of that heat directed at Montgomery is warranted, but in the end irrelevant.  (Something you can't say about the German leaders and generals' action, I note).  He overpromised and did not manage expectations regarding what he was actually going to be able to do, but in the end it is difficult to see how that had a negative effect on the final outcome.  Hastings even goes so far as to decline to call the failure to close the Falaise pocket an error that had any effect because he believes that even if the forces allotted had closed the pocket, the desperate German forces would have blown through them anyway.

That's what I was in the end looking for.  What were the actions taken, are they subject to criticism, and what effect would different actions have had.

 

Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul – John Freely

This book describes the private lives of the sultans in and around Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the former Constantinople (1453-1922).

I was fascinated by our visit to Topkapi Palace several years ago, and this book puts a lot of color into the now empty chambers that were once occupied by the sultan and his servants and harem.  I still cannot keep the various occupants of the Ottoman throne separate, and in many ways this book doesn't help much because it provides only generic illustrations of some of them – and they were typically depicted similarly by artists. 

But I now know some of the different characters and stories, and have a better understanding of the motivations and tendencies of the various players surrounding the Ottoman throne.

Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil - The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific During World War II - Rear Adm. Worrall Reed Carter

This is a digital reissue of a 1953 book issued by the Naval War College Press that tells the story of the floating logistics train that made the Navy's drive across the Pacific in World War II possible. 

I can't overstate how impressive a job this book does in detailing what the Navy started out with, and where it ended up.  The daunting challenge of providing logistical support to a fleet that never went back to Pearl Harbor after January, 1944 is detailed, and the author explains what the support arm did, and how it expanded to meet the challenges as the fleet grew and moved further, and further away from established bases on the West Coast and Hawaii.

I am him absolutely looking for a paper copy of this now.

The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N.K. Jemisin

Yeaaahhhh, not quite.

This science fiction novel takes an interesting point of view, presenting a New York City where individuals become avatars of their borough and fight an existential threat from a parallel universe.

it has some really interesting character development, and some decent horror elements, but I never could buy into the central concept, in part because there were never any clear boundaries on what characters could and could not do.  It was hard to perceive the drama when you didn't know how impossible a situation was wasn't.

The Royal Navy and the Battle of Britain - Anthony J. Cumming

It's rare someone takes issue with Winston Churchill's statement about the Battle of Britain that "[n]ever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."  But this book does. 

Incidentally, according to Pug Ismay, Churchill's first attempt was "never in human history was so much owed by so many to so few."  Ismay asked "what about Jesus and his disciples"?  Churchill immediately added the qualifier "in the field of human conflict."

This 2010 US Naval Institute Press book takes issue with the credit given to the RAF fighter pilots for saving Britain from invasion after the fall of France, arguing that it was in fact the Royal Navy, and not Fighter Command that made an invasion of Britain impossible during the summer of 1940.  In fact many commentators include the RAF bomber pilots in "the few" since their spoiling raids on not just the cities of Germany, but on the German airfields in France and the buildup of barges for the cross channel invasion played a critical role in convincing Germany that an invasion was not possible. 

Where Cumming adds to the conversation is in his insistence that there is a blind spot when it comes to analyzing whether Germany could have in fact invaded Britain, and that is that the Royal Navy retained unquestioned control of the necessary waterways.  The situation was in fact analogous to the Napoleonic wars when Earl St. Vincent told the Board of Admiralty "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come.  I say only they will not come by sea."

But it was not in Britain's national interest to present itself to its potential savior the United States as impregnable and safe behind the unchallenged supremacy of the Royal Navy.  Instead, it was better served by presenting itself as in mortal danger, saved by young, handsome fighter pilots who were daily taking on the Luftwaffe and winning. 

But as Cumming points out, in many ways the RAF's fighters were not "winning".  They were unable to protect their own infrastructure, nor were they able to stop German bombers from attacking British cities that will.  What they were able to do was provide a stubborn defense on a daily basis which showed both Germany and the United States that Britain would not surrender, and could remain in the fight, albeit with American material aid.  While the terrible attrition that Fighter Command inflicted on the overstretched Luftwaffe would not be known for some time (it claimed more kills than it should have, but the actual effect of even roughly equal aircraft losses was catastrophic to the Luftwaffe in a way that was not known at the time).

While the book reflects a somewhat parochial interest, and is written with hindsight not available in 1940, when the advent of aerial bombardment and aerial assaults involving paratroopers made it unclear whether Britain was in fact safe from invasion, it does provide a useful additional insight into who actually should count among "the few".