My personal reading list is ~500+ books in size. At this point I add things faster then I can read them. I treat it as more of a "here's something I can read" list rather then as a project to be completed.
What are you reading at the moment?
- Thread starter ngatimozart
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- #82
Sounds like my list. Mine is comprised of papers / articles as well.
My copy of Geoffrey Tills "How to Grow a Navy" arrived last week. Ten days from ordering to delivery - US to NZ is quite impressive.
buffy9
Well-Known Member
I'm currently reading through the RAN's Sounding Papers series. I had earlier been reading through some of the Australian Army History Series ("The Hard Slog" and "The Search for Tactical Success in Vietnam"), though am trying to broaden my inputs.
I'm aware of the bias and aim to move on from it at some point, but I find the information informative anyhow.
I'm aware of the bias and aim to move on from it at some point, but I find the information informative anyhow.
Next on the list is a privately-produced book on the experiences of my Grandfather during WW1 and the period leading up to it.
He entered the RAA as a junior officer before the war started, and was stationed at Ft Queenscliff when the Port Phillip defences fired the first hostile shots by a British or Commonwealth nation, for that conflict.
He deployed with the Australian Siege Brigade, the first AIF combat unit to reach the Western Front, and finished the war as a Battery Commander with a DSO and three MID.
I’ve read some of his war diary.... often very dry. “Carried on the war as usual” . “A big shoot” can be correlated by date and position with some of the larger actions of the war, but he doesn’t make much of that. Arriving to find that “the enemy got our range, during the night” meant listing the day’s tasks. Dealing with casualties, locating spare parts, requesting reinforcements and getting guns back into action.
I knew him as an old man, who had been through both world wars. Very human, very sympathetic ... but knew when to pyt that aside to get the job done.
He entered the RAA as a junior officer before the war started, and was stationed at Ft Queenscliff when the Port Phillip defences fired the first hostile shots by a British or Commonwealth nation, for that conflict.
He deployed with the Australian Siege Brigade, the first AIF combat unit to reach the Western Front, and finished the war as a Battery Commander with a DSO and three MID.
I’ve read some of his war diary.... often very dry. “Carried on the war as usual” . “A big shoot” can be correlated by date and position with some of the larger actions of the war, but he doesn’t make much of that. Arriving to find that “the enemy got our range, during the night” meant listing the day’s tasks. Dealing with casualties, locating spare parts, requesting reinforcements and getting guns back into action.
I knew him as an old man, who had been through both world wars. Very human, very sympathetic ... but knew when to pyt that aside to get the job done.
I'm reading, The Semonovskaya Story by Lapin. It's a detailed take on the mutiny of the Semenovskiy Rgt in 1820, a precursor to the Decembrist revolt. It also does a good job of breaking down the details of military service for enlisted personnel in the Russian Empire.
After a quick look, that Vietnam War book looks quite interesting. I'm adding it to my list.
Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery. It's a book covering the involvement of the US with various radical groups across the greater Middle East, starting with the Mujahadeen in the Soviet Afghan war, and ending with the relatively recent situations in Syria and Libya.
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- #90
Ah the ancient Greeks. I have a copy of "Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian Wars", Herodotus, and I like Plato when he's writing about Socrates. Did have a copy of Arian's "History of Alexander the Great" but not sure where it is. Maybe my son has it. Might see if I can find a copy of Demosthenes.
For Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon (both Hellenika and Anabasis), Arian, and even Julius Caesar, I can't recommend the Landmark editions enough. If you have the money and want a collector's edition, Easton Press did Herodotus, Thucydides, and Caesar. But the contents are the same and even the regular Landmarks are great. Demosthenes is hard to find.
Moscow and Muscovites by Gilyarovskiy. It's a fantastic collection of vignettes and stories of pre-revolutionary Moscow. It preserves for us a world that is now two countries away from modern day Moscow, and Gilyarovskiy does a great job of taking us from the slums to the aristocratic hangouts.
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- #93
"Unrestricted Warfare" by PLA Snr Colonels Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui. It's an English translation of their 1999 work. This work gives a good insight into PLA and CCP military thinking.
"The Last Empire - The Final Days of the Soviet Union" by Serhi Plokhy. A work that I have just started and is quite interesting. It's a non western account of the fall of the USSR.
"How to Grow a Navy" by Geoffrey Till. It discusses the development of maritime power.
"The Last Empire - The Final Days of the Soviet Union" by Serhi Plokhy. A work that I have just started and is quite interesting. It's a non western account of the fall of the USSR.
"How to Grow a Navy" by Geoffrey Till. It discusses the development of maritime power.
Just got through "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright. I've long since enjoyed the miniseries (I've seen it at least twice) and was looking forward to the read. I was not disappointed, it was interesting and quite good but very different from the miniseries. The journalistic perspective is far more visible here and there is a definite anti-war slant, though more so a general anti-war rather then against that particular war. Overall would recommend.
I've started working my way through Theodore Mommsen's History of Rome. It's been on my list for a while, and is a fairly massive undertaking. It's also hard to come by, but I managed to snag a copy in Russian (a 5 volume copy) before sanctions landed on account of the current war. I'm about half-way through the first volume, and it's quite good. It's an interesting comparison with actual Roman historians, and with Gibbons.
buffy9
Well-Known Member
I'm currently reading through East Timor Intervention: A Restrospective on INTERFET. I plan on following it up with Born of Fire and Ash: Australian operations in response to the East Timor crisis, 1999-2000.
Doing a deep dive on the topic, as it has always interested me but I have never looked too deeply into it. Based on my current impression, I will probably look at reading other MUP books in their Defence Series.
Doing a deep dive on the topic, as it has always interested me but I have never looked too deeply into it. Based on my current impression, I will probably look at reading other MUP books in their Defence Series.
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- #97
I have finally finished "The Last Empire - The Final Days of the Soviet Union" by Serhi Plokhy. A work that I have just started and is quite interesting. It's a non western account of the fall of the USSR. It is quite an informative text, a good read, and I thoroughly recommend it. I found it interesting that Gorbachev forecast the Russo - Ukrainian War if Ukraine gained independence from Russia. This was in 1991 when he was at loggerheads with Yeltsin and trying to retain power. He wanted a Federation formed with the Centre in Moscow being the overall controlling body. However Yeltsin and others didn't want a supra national body in charge because they regarded it as just sapping one master for another. Ukraine definitely wanted its complete independence and Kravachuk, the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament wasn't agreeing to anything less. He was a CPSU apparatchik who came to the idea of a fully independent Ukraine late.
George WH Bush was the POTUS at the time, who quite liked and got on well with Gorbachev, not wanting to see a collapse of the USSR because of his concern about the USSR nuclear weapons. It was only in December 1991, that Bush and his Administration fully accepted the reality that Gorbachev wasn't going to last as leader of any supra-national body in the former USSR. On Christmas Day (25/12/1991) Gorbachev signed his letter of resignation, the associated decree, and made his televised announcement about it. Yeltsin and the other independent nation leaders had promised Bush that Gorbachev would be respected and given an honourable retirement with his salary. However Yeltsin hated Gorbachev, because of a personal slight, and took his revenge by having Gorbachev politically neutered and gutted. The formation of the CIS was the death knell of the USSR.
The other really interesting point was that Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Kravachuk had quite a lot of contact with Bush during the latter half of 1991. Bush tried and mostly succeeded at remaining neutral in his many conversations with all three leaders, plus the leaders of the Central Asian Republics. When Bush gave his State of the Nation address to Congress in 1992, he proclaimed that the US had won the Cold War, but Plokhy states that isn't true because Reagan's actions and Bush's involvement was not the reason for the collapse of the USSR. He argues that it was the determination of the various republics to have more independence from the Centre in Moscow, and Gorbachev's own handling his position as general Secretary of the CPSU, President of the USSR, and the inefficiency of overall production that was the predominant cause. In fact he said that the some of the cause can be traced back to Brezhnev's time as General Secretary of the CPSU.
George WH Bush was the POTUS at the time, who quite liked and got on well with Gorbachev, not wanting to see a collapse of the USSR because of his concern about the USSR nuclear weapons. It was only in December 1991, that Bush and his Administration fully accepted the reality that Gorbachev wasn't going to last as leader of any supra-national body in the former USSR. On Christmas Day (25/12/1991) Gorbachev signed his letter of resignation, the associated decree, and made his televised announcement about it. Yeltsin and the other independent nation leaders had promised Bush that Gorbachev would be respected and given an honourable retirement with his salary. However Yeltsin hated Gorbachev, because of a personal slight, and took his revenge by having Gorbachev politically neutered and gutted. The formation of the CIS was the death knell of the USSR.
The other really interesting point was that Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Kravachuk had quite a lot of contact with Bush during the latter half of 1991. Bush tried and mostly succeeded at remaining neutral in his many conversations with all three leaders, plus the leaders of the Central Asian Republics. When Bush gave his State of the Nation address to Congress in 1992, he proclaimed that the US had won the Cold War, but Plokhy states that isn't true because Reagan's actions and Bush's involvement was not the reason for the collapse of the USSR. He argues that it was the determination of the various republics to have more independence from the Centre in Moscow, and Gorbachev's own handling his position as general Secretary of the CPSU, President of the USSR, and the inefficiency of overall production that was the predominant cause. In fact he said that the some of the cause can be traced back to Brezhnev's time as General Secretary of the CPSU.
I think this is fundamentally correct. The Soviet system of government was inherently unstable with in practice there being only two branches of government, one confusingly enough called the Soviet Government, and the other called the Communist Party. Add to that an essentially ethno-federalist approach which at the best of times could ease tensions and give various minorities good representation, but at worst could incentivize these semi-autonomous and nationally organized entities to act against the interests of the center, and you had a problem. It wasn't unsolvable but it went unsolved and in my opinion was the real reason of the Soviet Union's collapse. Other factors of course played and role and contributed too. It's also why in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union we didn't really see western-style democracy but instead either straight up dictatorships, or oligrachical republics slowly becoming more and more authoritarian. The people didn't pull apart the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government did, in resistance to the Communist Party, and in the interests of relatively small groups of people.
I took a break from Mommsen ( at the end of book 5) to read Geoffrey Roberts' Stalin's Library - A Dictator and his Books. So far quite an interesting look into where Stalin's library, and reading habits fall in with his political and public life. Apparently he had a massive library estimated at 25 000 books, hundreds of them marked up in great detail with his personal notes and comments. Roberts' is not strictly speaking original, since the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev already wrote What Stalin Read on much the same subject, but likely with less access and at a time when it was more politically relevant, something that can't but inform and skew perspectives and opinions. It's a good read so far.
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- #100
That wouldn't surprise me about Stalin being a great reader. Afterall he was educated in a seminary and that would've been one of the skills that would've been instilled in him. As an aside, I have never written comments in a book probably because the nuns that taught me as a kid instilled much fear in doing that
