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I'm reading a Warhammer 40K novel, Faith and Fire by James Swallow. So far, it's interesting. Though I don wonder how the hell humankind is surviving in the 41st millennium while being so completely tripping-balls stupid.

weemadando wrote:Let me know if you think that the war was real or not. I have always argued that the war wasn't actually real, but just another level of control placed on society.

But that's a brilliant book anyway.

Now I just need to find my copy of Brave New World again.

No clue. After all, he got that Brotherhood book from O'Brian, who was Thought Police. Perhaps none (or just very little) of that was true, to the point that Eastaisa and Eurasia didn't exist.

Very interesting book though.

I finally managed to get Triumff. Bloody hell, I have not laughed so much in a very long time, I kept getting funny looks on the bus! I'm only twenty pages in, but I'm already hoarse!

The Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow - 242 pages discussing the theory that there are many New World (and a few Old World and other examples) fruits and nuts that are intended to be eaten/dispersed by now-extinct species.

I'm coming towards the end of Chasm City. I'm beginning to guess the hidden revelation.

I just finished The Road, and it's pretty good. Pulitzer prize good, actually. I was tipped off to its existence by the recent movie version of it, so I picked up the book from the local library. The movie looks pretty good too, maybe I'll check that out.

Now I'm getting into Who Wrote the Bible. I reserve judgement.

I'm moved onto reading Iain (M.) Banks' The Crow Road and Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant.

Was without internet for a while so went on a bit of a binge. I sort of lose track of what I've read of Len Deighton; I thought I'd got through Funeral in Berlin before and happily discovered that I hadn't. I finished it and An Expensive Place To Die. Can't say I thought either was his best work, out of the nameless spy books only Horse Under Water and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy were really enjoyable. His style of writing and particularly his dialogue are great in all his books, but only those two matched the Samson books (and contemporary work like le Carre) for a realistic feel, IMO.

Also finished the final book in Phillip Reeves' Mortal Engines series, A Darkling Plain. Enjoyed it despite not having read the other books for a while; I've read Mortal Engines so many times the details are firmly embedded but the stuff from the next two books is less clear. My main criticism is that, with so many characters now involved, it feels a bit rushed and Reeve chooses to focus on some of the newer characters whereas my interest lay primarily with Tom and Hester. Despite that I think the ending was well done and in particular the conception (and growth, for that matter) of Mr Shrike's finale was superb. Like His Dark Materials, is a series ostensibly written for children that is gripping even for adults. Lacks the intellectual fire and literary polish of Pullman but that's more than made up for by Reeves' imagination.

Also was reading Kennedy's Wars by Lawerence Freedman but it's been put on hiatus; I'm up to the final section dealing with Indochina and I want to read it in some depth, notes and all, rather than just casually as I had with the other sections. Great history though, reflecting Freedman's background in political science, and it'll be interesting to stack up against other literature dealing with the subjects at hand. It got put on hiatus in favour of re-reading Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. I love it but I have to admit it also leaves me feeling a touch sad; Fforde got the balance of absurd inventiveness and serious subject matter just right in this one, the other books in the series suffered from being a bit too daft.

Finally, started on The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. It's generally considered a classic of Australian history and so far (I'm about a quarter of the way through) it hasn't disappointed. Colonial history is generally seen as dull but I love it, and Hughes does an excellent job of evoking the Australian landscape and the struggle of the convict settlers in adapting to it. It's also making me desperately want to review some other works: although he only alludes to it, Hughes trashes the thesis Blainey put forward in The Tyranny of Distance of Australia as an essentially maritime creation, and his focus on the landscape (and everything else, really) stands in stark contrast to Manning Clark's treatment of it in the first volume of his History. Finally, just this morning I read Hughes' opening treatment of the settlement of Tasmania; matter-of-factly, he describes white settlement as a genocide and reals off some numbers to support the claim. I need to go back and read Macintyre's History Wars, because the issue of Tasmania was the basis for the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and I'd be interested to see what role Hughes' work (especially given it's publication date - 1988, the bicentennial) played in the general debate.

Crossbow and Overcast by James McGovern is the next on my pile which I should be starting in on tonight.

wait you have time for reading with a newborn???

Here and there. Plus I get plenty of time to read at work during breaks.

Policing America's Empire by Alfred McCoy. McCoy also wrote The Politics of Heroin many years ago. His current work looks at the American colonial experience in the Philippines and how the expansion of police power in Manila destabilized the political system and percolated back to the United States. Also drew up a comparison of the colonial experience in the Philippines with the current experience in Iraq.

'The Fighting Temeraire' by Sam Willis just arrived today

Generation Kill, as well as The World's Worst Battleships and Tactics of the Crescent Moon

Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, and Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.

I'm half way through Deception Point. I haven't read it in a long time...and it's boring.

irishmick79 wrote:Policing America's Empire by Alfred McCoy. McCoy also wrote The Politics of Heroin many years ago. His current work looks at the American colonial experience in the Philippines and how the expansion of police power in Manila destabilized the political system and percolated back to the United States. Also drew up a comparison of the colonial experience in the Philippines with the current experience in Iraq.

Interesting. Could you expound on how the expansion of police power destabilized the political system and went back to the US? A comparison between what the Murricans did in my home country, compared to what's now going on in Iraq, would be nice to see also.

[R_H] wrote:

weemadando wrote:Let me know if you think that the war was real or not. I have always argued that the war wasn't actually real, but just another level of control placed on society.

But that's a brilliant book anyway.

Now I just need to find my copy of Brave New World again.

No clue. After all, he got that Brotherhood book from O'Brian, who was Thought Police. Perhaps none (or just very little) of that was true, to the point that Eastaisa and Eurasia didn't exist.

Very interesting book though.

There was a pretty big discussion on whether that was the case or not a while back. I'd definitely take a look, now that you've read the book.

I'm currently reading Climate Change: Picturing the Science by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe. It's a very good introductory work to climate change, and very accessible.

I just finished The Healing of America by T.R. Reid, where he goes around and examines several universal health care systems (France, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Canada) in addition to the lack thereof (India), as well as some of the newer systems (Taiwan, Switzerland). It's a good introductory book to each of the systems, and a very, very easy read - I greatly enjoyed it, and learned something. It's obviously not an in-depth, massive examination of each system, but not bad.

I'm kind of on a non-fiction binge right now. Maybe that will change once I start reading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn (since reading The Gathering Storm, I've wanted to see what some of his original fiction is like).

Diary of a Century by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. I can't believe he took a photo of his wife sitting on a toilet during their honeymoon.

The Vampire Genevive omnibus - Jack Yeovil (Kim Stanley)
The Brass Verdict - Micheal Connely
Hyperborae - Clark Ashton Smith

Shroom Man 777 wrote:

irishmick79 wrote:Policing America's Empire by Alfred McCoy. McCoy also wrote The Politics of Heroin many years ago. His current work looks at the American colonial experience in the Philippines and how the expansion of police power in Manila destabilized the political system and percolated back to the United States. Also drew up a comparison of the colonial experience in the Philippines with the current experience in Iraq.

Interesting. Could you expound on how the expansion of police power destabilized the political system and went back to the US? A comparison between what the Murricans did in my home country, compared to what's now going on in Iraq, would be nice to see also.

Basically, his thesis is that when the Americans showed up in Manila in 1898, they inherited and expanded upon the police apparatus already under development by Spain. They learned a lot about intelligence and counter-intelligence in their anti-insurgency campaigns against filipeno rebels. When World War I started, many of the US Army personnel promoted into positions of great responsibility were veterans of the US experience in the Philippenes, most notably John Pershing himself. They took a lot of the techniques about intelligence and counter-intelligence they learned in Manila and began development of a formal US military intelligence doctrine. This resulted in the creation of the Military Police branch, and the dramatic expansion of legal surveillance across the United States under the Espionage Act of 1917. He also argues that the illegalization of narcotics in the Philippenes helped legitimize the expansion of police power politically, and that percolated back to the United States as veterans of the US military returned stateside.

As far as destabilizing the political system goes, basically the dramatic increase in police power gave the executive branch a wide reach into society, one that was never truly balanced by legislative bodies in the government. That's about as far as I've gotten - I just started it, so this outline is a little rough.

I'm over halfway through Iain (M.) Banks' The Crow Road and as with Matter, The Crow Road's story picks up very quickly past the mid point with the stakes being raised (it's all fallen apart for Prentice McHoan). I'll finish off Deer Hunting With Jesus this week.

Finished Flood (Stephen Baxter) and Why Architecture Matters (Paul Goldberger). Right now I'm working on Rothstein (David Pietrusza), a biography of the man who practically invented modern organized crime in America.

I'm reading Rethinking Military History by Jeremy Black. It's a very intriguing book.

Anyone read Caesar: Life of a Colossus; did you like it?