Grand unified books thread

[mongers]

Yes, highly recommend The Anarchy.

I finished it in a little over a week due to how addictive a read it was. It's not the most in-depth of the Company's operations, nor internal workings, but is absolutely essential reading for putting their actions (especially military campaigns) into context of India at the time they operated. I have yet to see anything come anywhere near as close to covering the indigenous side of the story as Dalrymple has.

Yes it's a very good read, enjoying reading the footnotes, he's used an impressively wide range of sources.

[Syt]

Finally finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin. I posted about Children of Time further up the thread: https://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,124.msg1222535.html#msg1222535

This took me a lot longer to get through (per the post above, I started reading it in 2020 ). It's IMHO still an excellent book, but its pacing felt a lot different, leading to me taking long pauses.

It starts with a new generation of explorers from the world of the first book traveling to a distant star system to investigate a signal from what might be another sentient race, and resembling Old Earth standards. They arrive in the system and are faced with an enigmatic octopus race with whose culture and communications are completely alien and make contact difficult. On top of it, the cephalopods regard the new arrivals with suspicion, as they fear they're linked with a cataclysmic bane that nearly destroyed their civilization.

The first 35-45% of the book are fairly slow. We follow the explorers as they try to figure out what's going, interspersed with flashbacks to when the Old Earth terraformers first explored the system, but compared to the previous book it felt to me not as engaging. Around the half point, though, things pick up considerably. More of the system's history is revealed, and it turns into a bit of The Thing or Cosmic Horror for a bit, before finally revealing the full backstory, and going through climax and resolution. This second half was excellent, and I read it in two sittings.

In November, the 3rd book of the series will come out, and I will definitely pick it up. One thing I enjoy about these two books is how Tchaikovsky tries to put the readers into the minds of non-human, alien cultures, and how their development went. It's a refreshing change from mostly humanoid races that more often than not are built around one or a few human cultural traits amped up to 11.

[Gups]

Reading A Small Town in Germany by Le Carre. I'm about two thirds of the way through and it's so good.

The first few chapters in particular are, I think some of the best I've read by Le Carre. It's set in Bonn during the 60s protests and with the UK trying to enter the Common Market. A junior diplomat goes missing with a load of sensitive documents, so London sends someone to investigates him. After the initial set up there's a series of chapters which is just him talking with one other character in the embassy to re-create this potential spy's life. It's incredibly well done - building up character from all of the different perspectives, with the tonal shifts and subtext of, for example, what starts as a conversation and ends as an interrgation.

I'd read the Karla trilogy, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and some recent Le Carre but this is really inspiring to properly go through the Cold War era novels. But I really recommend this if anyone's not read it.

I read a Le Carre or two a year but don't think I've tried this one yet. Outside of the Karla trilogy, A Perfect Gentleman is probably my favourite

[Habbaku]

Yes, highly recommend The Anarchy.

I finished it in a little over a week due to how addictive a read it was. It's not the most in-depth of the Company's operations, nor internal workings, but is absolutely essential reading for putting their actions (especially military campaigns) into context of India at the time they operated. I have yet to see anything come anywhere near as close to covering the indigenous side of the story as Dalrymple has.

Yes it's a very good read, enjoying reading the footnotes, he's used an impressively wide range of sources.

[grumbler]

Just finished All the Lies They Did Not Tell by Pablo Trincia.  I was aware that there had been a Satanic Panic in the US (the McMartin Daycare case).  I knew that the panic was based on the work of a Canadian quack psychiatrist and his patient (later wife) but was unaware that the whole thing had spread to Europe, with even worse results than in the US.  This book is about the alleged Satanic Rituals being carried out by an Italian priest and an ever-widening circle of families.

What makes the story so bizarre is the control one woman, a child psychologist, had over the proceedings.  She somehow convinced a gullible judge that "children never lie," and, based on "confessions" that the children made after months away from their families and in the psychologist's care, had nineteen children removed from twelve families. She saw the trial and conviction of several of the parents and drove the priest to an early grave.  Even after all of the convictions were overturned the state refused to return the children, arguing that they were happy in their new homes.  The biological parents were forbidden, under threat of imprisonment, to contact their children by any means until they were eighteen.  Yes, even though everyone was cleared, the state (in the form of this child psychologist) determined that the parents should permanently lose custody of the children, and the birth parents had (at least at that time, the mid-1990s) no standing to appeal custody decisions of the child welfare authorities.

It was a bizarre and depressing story throughout, and the extent to which the courts entertained those bits of child testimony that were not ludicrously impossible (like the parents having dug up children's graves in the local cemetery when the cemetery had clearly not been disturbed) but not allowing the absurd bits to impugn the credibility of the children was astonishing.  It does put the QANON insanity in a new light, though.  QANON is just a repackaging of these old and thoroughly discredited panics.

[Razgovory]

A bit like cel with film, the news finally prompted me to read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. She's a Belarussian oral historian - although I'm unsure on whether what she writes is non-fiction or fiction - who wrote Boys in Zinc about Afghanistan, an oral history of Soviet women of WW2 and of Chernobyl. Needless to say she's been in and out of exile because of this (she is also, I think, the head of Belarus PEN).

This book is incredible. Her basic perspective is that people from the Soviet system and post-Soviet system are basically from different planets. There are some chapters that are snatches of conversations and recollections - kitchen-talk pre and post collapse of the USSR - while others are an extended single narrative. As you'd expect many are heartbreaking: the woman born in the Gulag then moved into the orphanage system, the woman whose family was made homeless when their flat was sold from under them by gangsters. There's junior party officials and a Tajik woman who tries to help migrant workers in Moscow and other snatches of life.

It's an extraordinary read - all the reviews would probably describe it as polyphonic as it tries to sound out what the Soviet system was, who the people it made and who it left in its aftermath. But it's mainly just these small human stories that lie beneath the big history.

This book is very depressing.  Dguller and Solmyr's life must have sucked.

[Syt]

Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

In the future: mankind has split into two main factions, the rich Solans who fled Earth's collapse to new colonies on Mars, and the Exodans, a migrant fleet who took to the stars. The sides have uneasily reconciled and are junior partners in the larger galactic community (GC). The GC have signed a treaty with the Teromi Ka, one of the Teromi clans that are constantly fighting in shifting alliances around the galaxy's core. The GC hope to secure a permanent foothold and access to near endless fuel resources.

Space travel is mostly conducted through gateways created by tunneling ships that basically create stable wormholes for ships to travel quickly between worlds.

The book follows the human and alien crew of the tunneling ship Wayfarer who are hired to create the new gateway to the  Teromi Ka and their one year journey to the construction site.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, but I assume it will not appeal to most Languishites.

If you like grimdark settings, high stakes action, intrigue, betrayal, inter-personal conflict, and steadily escalating plots that lead to a huge climax - you won't find any of those here.

It's a mixture of road trip and slice of life, largely episodic, chronicling the journey. The characters are quirky, positive, friendly, supportive of each other, all the time, and it's actually quite saccharine; but it's something I needed, I guess. There might be some smaller or larger crises along the way but they all end up fine. It does provide a fair bit of world building, though.

It occasionally brings up some darker themes. E.g. there's a human sect who refuse any modern medicine/gene therapies and try to live as natural - think cavemen - as possible on a recovering Earth. But there's another human faction who have created a society targeted genetic design, creating a dispossessed  underclass of people designed for menial tasks in the process - this informs the backstory of two characters, but isn't covered in huge depth.

Overall it was a very pleasant read. I'd recommend it to people looking for a more positive reading experience, something more akin to slipping into a warm bath or wrapping yourself up in a blanket. It's good escapism that overall doesn't create a lot of emotional turmoil. And I'm actually looking forward to reading the next three books in the series.

[Razgovory]

Thinking about reading a WW2 memoir from the German side.  Something written by either an enlisted man or junior officer, translated into English preferably available on Kindle.  Any suggestions?

[Admiral Yi]

I own Panzer Commander, the memoirs of Hans von Luck.  He ended up a general commanding 7th Panzer at the end of the war but obviously started out...not a general.

Good section on his time in a Russian POW camp.

[grumbler]

Trying to find anything in Kindle is going to be tough - the publishers came out with these long before digital books, so the digitalization process is literally scanning them in an OCR scanned and then editing.  That's expensive.

Soldat is a good book on the way a lower-level German NCO and then officer saw the war.

[Jacob]

Finshed SPQR by Mary Beard and The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry, both of which I liked. I haven't read much popular history recently, and in some ways the two books are fairly similar in terms of approach and tone.

Both books build pretty solid narratives, tracing the cultural, social, and institutional developments of their subjects (Rome from founding to Caracella's grant of universal Roman citizenship and the European "Dark Ages" respectively). Solid list of references at the end as well.

Both books do - to my eyes - credible jobs. Even better, I got them from the library.

[Gups]

Thinking about reading a WW2 memoir from the German side.  Something written by either an enlisted man or junior officer, translated into English preferably available on Kindle.  Any suggestions?

Not sure if it quite fits your spec but Robert Kershaw has a couple of well-reviewed WW2 books from a German eye-witness POV. One on Barborrosa and one that has just come out about Dunkirk and the invasion of France.

I also spotted a memoire by a guy called Hans Hoeller which sounds like waht you are after. 

[mongers]

Just stopped reading a book because of the breathtaking arrogance displayed in the author's introduction.

[Sheilbh]

Name and shame

Anyone know any good books about Robert Maxwell? Just been listening to John Sweeney talking about him and it sounds incredible but also a centre left media baron who was even more malign than Rupert Murdoch, his great rival

Edit: Plus even the bare outline of his life sounds incredible.

[mongers]

Name and shame
....
snip

Nothing interesting just a recent book about woodland/wildlife signs, weather forecasting and so on, but reading the intro he came across as boasting of special/superhuman powers, though I'm probably being unfair on him.

It's this one.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38483559-wild-signs-and-star-paths