The Seperation

The Separation (Christopher Priest)


Another swing-and-a-miss historical fiction novel from a genre I'm having no luck with recently. I made it to page 100 hoping that this book's setting would be enough to carry it (World War II ended in 1941, when Rudolph Hess' crazed peace mission was successful). Unfortunately, the book itself is just deadly dull. Weather it's the author's dry writing style or the too-long coverage he gives of two brothers going to Germany to row in the Olympics, I don't know, but this book is a heck of a slog. Even reading about what should be an exciting bomber run one of the brothers makes had me skipping pages after a while. Skip this one.


Grade: D

Kalki

Kalki (Gore Vidal)


A book that is, unfortunately for me, simply far too of-its-time - this book is so 70's it hurts, and having missed that decade, I could almost feel my hair getting rustled as most of the book flew straight over my head. I've really enjoyed some of Vidal's historical novels before, and I think perhaps I'm going to stick to those in the future.


Grade: N/A

Resurrection Day

Resurrection Day (Brendan DuBois)


Ooooh, I did not like this book. The setting is interesting - it's the 1970s, and America is still reeling after a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this world, the US got hit by enough nukes to destroy Washington DC, NYC, Florida, and, um, Omaha, Nebraska, losing 10 -12 million people, while the USSR was completely destroyed in return.
The problem is the execution. There's a passage I just couldn't get past where our hero is explaining to a Brit that America feels guilty, comparing the nuclear exchange to when a neighborhood bully throws trash into your yard and in return you shoot him, murder his family and burn his house down. My problem here is that the person saying this had his entire family killed in the incident he describes as "throwing trash in your yard". On top of that, a big part of his character is that he was in the Army doing radiation cleanup and saw horrible things that haunt him to this day. So would he be comparing all of his family dying and the haunting, terrible aftermath that makes up his largest character trait as throwing trash in someone's yard? What?
One more complaint and I'm done. The author hints that England is getting ready to invade the US, taking advantage of the US' weakness even 10 years on after the bombs and missiles fell. However, the author also states that the US is now the only nuclear power left in the world, with all the other countries having voluntarily given up their nukes. I couldn't get past this either: England is going to militarily challenge and attempt to invade the world's only nuclear power? What?
(To be fair, maybe the Brits have some counter measure, like they secretly have their own nukes - but the author attempts to build tension by hinting at this invasion, and since he does not address the nuke issue, this comes off as a damp squib and frankly a waste of pages.)
Take a pass on this one.


Grade: D-

Hitler at Home

Hitler at Home (Despina Stratigakos)


I got this book as a gift, and I'm glad I did as it's the kind of thing I would never pick for myself, but ended up enjoying quite a bit. The author explores Hitler's, uh, homes, using this as a base to explore the difference between the way Hitler really lived and the image that was projected in propaganda. This is really interesting stuff, and the only complaint I have is that reading about chumps like Hitler decorating their palaces with stolen art can really get your blood boiling. (Of course, on the other hand, reading about all of his chalets and hideouts getting bombed into the ground, looted, and paved over is good for a giggle.) I'd recommend this to anyone, even people with WW2 fatigue - the subject matter is so off the beaten path I couldn't help but be interested.
My one caveat is that if you, like me, take your books out to read while you're eating, you might want to take the dust jacket off this one; fellow guests at TGI Fridays aimed a couple hard stares at me while reading this.


Grade: A-

"The Girls of Atomic City"

The Girls of Atomic City (Denise Kiernan)



I had high hopes for this book, but I didn't make it past page 40; despite the fascinating story it's attempting to tell, the book is undone by two flaws. The smaller is that the author jumps around too much, attempting to juggle 8 women's lives; limiting the book to 2 or 3 would have been a big help.
But in the end I'm not sure this would have made any difference as what what really dooms the book is the author's inexcusable over-writing. In Kiernan's world, coal can't just be burned; instead the energy inside "could be released in dreamy blue flame and bestow its power on its liberators". The entire book is written like this, and it becomes incredibly annoying extremely quickly. The passage that finally drove me to give up is the author describing someone's hair:

She wore her dark brown hair parted on the left, undulating tousles washing past her prominent cheeks, ebbing again at her gymnast's shoulders, before landing with a final bounce at the top of a spine that exhibited the kind of impeccable posture grown out of a lifetime of grooming and horseback riding.

If you made it through that whole disaster of a sentence without gagging a little bit you're a stronger reader than me. Or as the author might write: The reader's eyes washed past the horribly overdone prose, his interest ebbing at the tiring text, before his desire to continue to read the book landed with a final thud as he tossed the book in the donation pile.
Take a pass on this one.



Grade: F

"No Picnic"

No Picnic (Julian Thompson)

A personal history of the Falkland Islands conflict from the commander of the English forces there. I enjoyed this book well enough, but the author assumes familiarity with the conflict; I strongly recommend reading something like The Battle for the Falklands first or you'll be totally lost. This book is much shorter than that one, and I might recommend reading this one right after it as a nice little chaser.

Grade: C+

Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War (Dexter Hoyos)

On reflection, my assessment of Carthage Must Be Destroyed has cooled; Luckily, my second attempt at the material was this book, which I quite enjoyed. This one covers covers the dispute between Rome and Carthage starting with the Mamertines in Sicily asking both cities for help down through Carthage being razed to the ground (spoiler alert). Parts of the military history can be slightly dry, but that's really my only complaint; in general this is an excellent history of the entire conflict.

Grade: A-

The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil (Stephen Collins)

Okay, I'm going to admit it: I read this book because of the title. You can probably guess what it's about from the cover; our hero Dave's boring life is disrupted when he grows a gigantic beard that is evil. Actually, I'm not sure the beard really is evil; it seems more like an agent of chaos disrupting the boring, dysfunctional society that Dave lives in. Either way, I enjoyed reading this; it's a quick little read, but the art is great. I might recommend getting it out of the library since you can finish it in under an hour, but otherwise I don't have a bad word to say.

Grade: B+

"Fall of Giants"

Fall of Giants (Ken Follett)

I made it 300 pages into this before giving up. This is a historical novel about a bunch of different families starting just before World War I, and it turned into a real slog rather quickly. I couldn't put down a different Follett book, The Pillars of the Earth, and I really feel the difference is a simple one: Pillars of the Earth has one, single overarching narrative thread that may touch many people and subplots, but keeps everything tied together; Fall of Giants is missing this, and is instead very, very loosely woven from five or six threads that barely rub up against each other. Almost every character's thread is interesting, but jumping away from them to dive into another, almost totally unrelated one kills all the momentum, and eventually makes the book a chore to read. I'd recommend taking a pass on this one.

Grade: C-

"Commie Girl in the O.C."

Commie Girl in the O.C. (Rebecca Schoenkopf)

Commie Girl in the O.C. begs many questions: Why am I reading Commie Girl in the O.C.? Why do I own Commie Girl in the O.C.? I wish I could answer these questions, but I can't. The mystery surrounding Commie Girl in the O.C. is, I'm afraid, more interesting than the book itself, which mostly reads like a series of newspaper columns or short blog posts from somewhere in the 2000s, and which I quickly found myself putting down to read The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America (review possibly forthcoming). I don't recommend Commie Girl in the O.C.; even at under $7 from Amazon, it's just not worth the extensional crisis.

Grade: D

"The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish"

The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish: My Life in Churchill's School of Spies (Noreen Riols)

I'm really torn about this book; the author's story working in SOE during World War II is very interesting, but the book really seems to need a good editor. The raw material of the author's story is fascinating and she has a great voice, but it reads like a tape recorder was put in front of her and she told a bunch of interesting stories; I think the book could be vastly improved if it was set in chronological order, or at least had a stronger main narrative. As it is it's like spending an afternoon hearing the author reminisce, and while that's no bad thing, in its current form I ended up reading it in an afternoon and then forgetting most of it.

Grade: B

"The Devils' Alliance"

The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939 - 1941 (Roger Moorhouse)

Kind of the European version of Japan 1941. As you can guess from the title, this book covers the strange period of time where Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR were allies, starting just before the pact was signed and ending with the German sneak attack in June 1941. This is obviously a pretty depressing book, but as a look at a often-ignored period of time, it's fascinating; I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at how cynical Hitler and Stalin both were given that they both agreed to the titular devil's alliance, but here we are. My only caveat is that this is something of a niche title. I found the book very interesting, but a 432-page history of two years about World War II where World War II isn't happening between the subjects is kind of a hard sell. That said, this is probably an excellent appetizer to read before a solid history of the European front in WW2.

Grade: B+

"A History of Britian in 36 Postage Stamps"

A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps (Chris West)

This was an interesting book to read; I know basically nothing about postage stamps, and not a great deal about the period of British history covered (1840 - the modern day). I enjoyed reading it, but the history is very basic, and it mostly just left me wanting more. I can easily recommend this for school kids, history novices, and people with an interest in postage stamps; otherwise I'd probably give it a miss.

Grade: B-

"Kushiel's Dart"

Kushiel's Dart (Jacqueline Carey)

A big fantasy novel about a courtesan who's tossed into a high-stakes world of political intrigue in late medieval fantasy Europe. For the first 300 pages or so this was really hard to put down; Carey's great at world-building and weaving exposition, and the world she's made is pretty interesting. Unfortunately the book eventually slows down and starts dragging, hamstrung by two issues, one big and one small. The big one is that it's simply too, well, big - the paperback comes in at a hair over 900 pages, and it's not hard to suggest some useless parts that could be cut (my recommendation would be the entire Master of the Straits storyline, which not only adds almost nothing to the story, but feels very out of place having a super-powerful wizard in a very low-magic setting). The second issue is that the characters are not always fleshed out as much as one would hope; our heroine and the main cast mostly come off pretty well, but the head antagonist is barely more than a sketch.
All in all, I guess this is a good beach book, but it's hard to really recommend seeking it out unless you pass it on the shelf at the library.

Grade: B

"Vengeful Spirit"

Vengeful Spirit (Graham McNeill)

I'm scared to start a Graham NcNeill book now; when he's good he's great, and when he's bad, he's infuriating. I'll cut to the chase here: Good McNeill showed up for this book, and the biggest flaw has nothing to do with his writing; it's the fact that we're deep in the Hersey now, but the story's possibilities are still limited by knowing the ending. The reader knows there's no way that Horus is going to die during the course of this book, neither is the titular Vengeful Spirit going to be destroyed.

That being said, McNeill mostly works around this by drawing on the now well established setting of the Horus Hersey (over 30 novels!) - to the point where even giving a basic sketch of the book's story risks running into spoiler territory, as a pivotal character thought dead returns in first few pages. The tradeoff here is that McNeill is able to sidestep the majority of the predetermined ending problem, but in turn the book is almost totally inaccessible if you haven't been reading the Heresy up to this point.
In short, if you've read enough of the series that you'll catch the book's references, it's an easy recommend; otherwise, take a pass.

Grade: B

"Elizabeth"

Elizabeth: England's Slandered Queen (Arlene Okerlund)

I didn't really enjoy this book; mostly it made me want to re-read Allison Weir's the Wars of the Roses, a historical event that takes up about half of this book, and quite honestly the more interesting half. The parts that are actually about Elizabeth are ultimately doomed by the author stopping quite frequently to defend Elizabeth's reputation; While these parts do sound convincing to me, I had barely heard of Elizabeth before reading this book, and the author introducing arguments against Elizabeth to then refute them started turning into a real drag. I appriciate the author's attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of "England's Slandered Queen", but I'm afraid it doesn't make for terribly interesting reading, and I'd probably recommend steering clear of this one.

Grade: C

"City of Ambition"

City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (Mason B. Williams)

I feel bad giving this book a negative review, but I found that my attention kept drifting while reading it. It's a little difficulty for me to put why that was into words, but it seems to boil down to the book's main theme getting quite muddled. The opening material, sketches of FDR and La Guardia, is pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the book during this part, but when the author starts running through a detailed history of the politics of New York state in the interwar years, it's just not very gripping. I would suggest the author either needs to take a higher level overview of this material or dive in even deeper and really fill out the history; as it is, the level of detail has the reader see a lot of characters come and go without making much of an impact, and it turns into kind of a muddle. It also stirs the dreaded "Why am I reading this" feeling - I can't help but feel that a lot of the pages in the book could be condensed down to "La Guardia was in the political wilderness for a few years" without following the fruitless narrative thread about what the ultimately meaningless mayors and governors of New York were doing at the time.
For all that, though, I don't think this is really a bad book - it's just one I didn't personally enjoy. It's a bit tough to recommend; if your local library has it, I'd try the first hundred pages (I made it to 125).

Grade: :/

"Glass House 51"

Glass House 51 (John Hampel)

I don't really know what to make of this book; it kind of reads like a boring fever dream, if such a thing is even possible. I'll freely admit I didn't make it very far, giving up after the author introduced 15 characters in 10 pages over the span of a confusing, painful exposition dump about a company called AlphaBanc that's getting ready to become the world's most powerful E-bank, but this serial killer nerd called the Gnome and I'm sorry, I seem to have slam-dunked this book into the donation pile and picked up something else to read. Might be worth seeking out if you want to read something bonkers, but not for me, I'm afraid.

Grade: D-

"Japan 1941"

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (Eri Hotta)

I got this book for Christmas, and it was a nice surprise; in my continued quest to read all about the less reported on facts of history, this book fills in a sizable gap. My schooling covered the leadup to WW2 in the Pacific in a super quick sketch (Oil embargo > Pearl Harbor > Midway > A-bomb > Pokemon), and this book is a interesting if depressing look at the Japanese decision making that lead to Pearl Harbor.
I learned a lot from this book - surprisingly, Tojo comes out looking okay, possibly better than Prince Konoe, the previous prime minister, who is painted as weak willed and paralyzed by tough choices. (The villain of the piece is foreign minister Matsuoka, architect of the Tripartite Pact that made Japan one of the Axis powers.)  Just about the only two figures who escape unscathed are Yamamoto (the unwilling planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) and the Emperor Hirohoto himself, who was anti-war but so powerless that about the most he could do is ask skeptical questions and recite a anti-war poem.
All in all, this isn't the kind of blockbuster you need to run out and pick up immediately, but I'd recommend it (doubly so if someone else buys it for you, I suppose).

Grade: B

"Marie Antoinette"

Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Antonia Fraser)

Until recently I haven't been a big biography fan; I guess I read some bad ones and was scared off by the boring parts of life even the most interesting among us have. Lately, though, I've come to enjoy them quite a bit, and this one among a few in particular. Fraser's biography (like any good one I suppose) is more than just a history of its subject; it's also a history of the times they lived through, and Fraser brings them to life in sometimes stomach-churning intimacy. (Want to read all about Marie Antoinette and her sister's periods? Here you go!!!!)
Perhaps surprisingly, Marie Antoinette herself comes off as probably the most likable person in the book; I'll admit that by page 100, I was actively rooting for most of the French court to get guillotined. (The nadir for this probably comes on page 102 where ambassadors are giving diamond necklaces to the palace's pets.) That being said, the second half of the book is just as grim as you're probably expecting, and I identified with MA enough that I was uncomfortable reading about life kicking her around. I'd recommend this book heartily, just be prepared for a good cry near the end.

(Bonus out of context quote: "The spanking pace caused much merriment among the waiting crowds of his erstwhile subjects.")

Grade: A-