BillP's Book\Miniature\Wargame Blog

The beginning of this year has been much more productive than last year. One month in and I’ve finished eight books on a wide variety of topics.

The Black Box by Michael Connelly was a carry over from 2022. I had started it before the year ended so I finished it. This is a pretty standard Bosch book, with a bit of a twist in as much as Bosch is solving a 20-year-old case based on a new ballistics match.

Colony One: A Space Colonization Adventure by Tarah Benner was the initial novel in a series about the first commercial, residential, space station. The book follows the paths of two characters who are recruited for the station; Jonah, a soldier suffering from PTSD resulting from his service recruited for the station’s security force and Maggie, a young internet journalist covering into typical social media stories (The 50 best Fro-Yo places in Manhattan!) to entice others to take up residence on the station. The book involves a convoluted conspiracy, a revolt (or sabotage) of murderous ‘Bots, and much skullduggery. Unfortunately, this book ends just as all hell is breaking loose requiring the purchase of the next volume to get the “rest of the story”. At the end of the day I didn’t care enough about the story to buy the next volume, and it was only $3.99. You have been warned.

Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Craig L. Symonds was an outstanding study of Nimitz’s command style and decision making. Its not an actual biography. The book is very narrowly focused on the period when Nimitz was CincPac, starting with him flying into Pearl Harbor on 16 Dec 1941 and ends promptly on V-J Day. Symonds has combed through all the primary and secondary sources and builds a pretty much day to day picture of Nimitz’s tenure of command. I was fascinated by the story of how Nimitz balanced the pressures of running the Pacific War while dealing with the politics of the USN officer corps even as he’s getting messages from Ernie King on an almost daily basis seeking to apply pressure to Nimitz or interfere in his operations. I recommend this book very highly to anyone interested in WWII in the Pacific.

Wish You Were Here: A Novel by Jodi Picoult was a fun little book about the COVID pandemic’s impact on one woman’s world. Diana O’Toole is an accessions specialist for a Manhattan art gallery scheduled to take some well-deserved time off with Dr. Finn Colson, her surgical resident boyfriend, for a two week vacation in the Galapagos islands. The day before they’re scheduled to depart, COVID becomes serious enough that Finn’s vacation is cancelled to deal with the increasing stream of patients in his NYC hospital. Diana and Finn decide she should go by herself rather than lose their entire investment, additionally being in the Galapagos will probably be safer than being in NYC. Just as Diana arrives on her island, everything shuts down including both her pre-paid resort and the ferry service back to the mainland. Diana settles into life in lockdown, much transpires, and there are several enormous plot twists that frankly I never saw coming. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone looking for a little diversion. It would be a really good airplane book or beach read.

Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960 by James D. Hornfischer is, just as it says on the tin, the story of the USN between V-J Day and 1960. This was Hornfischer’s last book, written as he was battling the glioblastoma that would ultimately take his life. I suspect that circumstance was responsible for the end date of the book, since it seems rather arbitrary. At any rate the book was excellent and really filled a gap in my knowledge. I was only vaguely aware of a whole slew of things covered in the immediate post-War era: the issues involved in merging the Army & Navy departments into the DoD, the “Revolt of the Admirals”, how NATO naval forces were stood up, how Hyman Rickover almost single-handedly drove development of nuclear submarines, and the details of the USN/USMC involvement in the Korean War. This book was a fitting end to an illustrious career. I recommend it very highly. I’m sad that the author didn’t live long enough to complete it and won’t be writing any more.

Feral: Losing Myself and Finding My Way in America’s National Parks by Emily Pennington was a pedestrian memoir of one woman “finding herself” while visiting each of the 63 US National Parks. Ms Pennington had planned her trip to visit each of the parks and just as she started out on it, COVID struck causing her to massively modify her plans. I thought the book was going to be focused on the experience of visiting the parks, and while there is some of that, it’s mostly about the author’s inner life and conflicts, losing her boyfriend, and her state of mind during the journey. It was interesting enough to finish, but if I knew before starting it, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.    

The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty by G. J. Meyer was a fascinating revisionist history of this period of English history. Conventional wisdom is that the Tudors more or less transformed England from a medieval society into something that resembled a modern one while increasing standards of living and being beloved by their people. Turns out, none of that actually bears much examination. Meyer demonstrates that the Tudors were pretty much a disaster for the common people, imposing religious tyranny, dropping standards of living, and recklessly causing the long running semi-war with Spain that resulted in the Armada which was only narrowly defeated and then mostly by weather rather than the skill of Hawkins, Drake, and the rest of Elizabeth’s “sea-dogs”. The book was certainly an eye-opener for me. Meyer’s thesis about the shortcomings of the Tudors seems well grounded in fact and well supported by primary evidence. His opinionated and sometimes deliciously sarcastic tone was a definite plus. I recommend it for anyone who thinks they have the whole story of “ …Harrys (twain),VII VIII, Ned six (the lad), Mary, Bessie…” . Hat tip to long time friend Tricia Jones for turning me on to it.

Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zack Hample is a fun, engaging, primer on what to watch for when viewing a baseball game. Pretty much everything a viewer might see is covered in a way that not only explains what to watch for, but how and why players and managers act as they do. Topics covered included infield shifts, hit & run plays, steals, substitutions, the infield fly rule, and the vagaries of the rosters and minor league systems. Interspersed throughout the explanations are humorous anecdotes from baseball’s past, record setting baseball achievements, and stories of past and present players. As a long-time baseball fan and viewer I’m not sure I learned very much, but I certainly enjoyed the trip.  

8 for the year.

I’ve been off work since 21 December and with such crappy weather I’ve had a bunch of leisure to finish out the year’s reading.

First up was a slew of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books; The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, The Last Coyote, Trunk Music, Angel’s Flight, A Darkness More Than Night, City of Bones, Lost Light, The Narrows, The Closers, Echo Park, The Overlook, and The Drop. I started re-reading these because I read the most recent volume when it was published. The last time I was through them was about two years ago in the Spring of 2021 and all I can say is “what a difference two years makes”. I really enjoyed the books the first time I read them, and I still enjoyed them as recently as two years ago. This time through, while I still enjoyed them, I found myself ever more exasperated by Bosch’s utter inability of get outside himself and see anyone else’s point of view in any appreciable way. With this guy it really his “his way or the highway”. The books are still really well written and compellingly plotted, but the sturm and drang of Bosch’s self-righteousness is becoming tiresome. I’m definitely taking a break from them and don’t know if I’ll finish.

Bits of Anarchy by E.M. Forner was the latest in the series of books set in the “Union Station” milieu dominated by the nearly omniscient A.I. “Stryx”. This time there are a group of human “hackers” who left Earth and rented a planet from an alien race so they could preserve “hacker culture”. Now it’s decades later and the hackers’ income stream from games and in-game mods is drying up at the same time as their planet’s lease is up for renewal.  For whatever reason this one really didn’t do it for me. If you’re interested in the milieu start with Destiny: Union Station or Independent Living both of which are excellent.

Georgia POW Camps in World War II by Dr. Kathryn Roe Coker and Jason Wetzel was a bit of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, when I was 10 or 11 years old my Dad was stationed at Ft Stewart, GA. That Christmas we went out somewhere on post to cut down our Christmas tree. Visible from the tree cutting area was an abandoned compound with a high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire and guard towers on the corners. My dad told me it was a POW camp that had held German POWs during WWII. I’ve always remembered that encounter but didn’t really know very much about the subject, so when I saw this book, I jumped on it. Sadly, I still don’t know too much about the subject. This is one of those books that is really just a “data dump” of photos, facts and anecdotes gleaned from newspapers, books, and official documents without much in the way of a narrative or thesis. It’s just a litany of unconnected facts and stories almost totally devoid of context.

Road of Bones by James R. Benn is the 16^th (of 18) installment of the “Billy Boyle” series recounting the adventures of the one-time Boston PD detective (and Ike’s nephew) who is serving as “Uncle Ike’s” chief investigator and trouble-shooter. This one highlights the “shuttle-bombing” missions during which US B-17s took off from bases in Italy or the UK, bombed targets in Germany, and continued to land in the Soviet Union where they could refuel, rearm, and take off to bomb targets on their way back to their home bases. When two intelligence agents, one American and one Soviet, are found murdered on one of the joint US-Soviet air-bases, Ike sends Billy to investigate. I’m not sure how I missed this one back in 2021 when it came out, but I did. I’m glad I came across it in the library, like the rest of the series, this book is excellent. I highly recommend the series, but this isn’t the place to start.

So that’s it, I close out 2022 with 104 books for the year which I’m pretty happy with after such a slow start that I read only 16 books through the end of April. Thanks for hanging in there with me and I hope you hang around to see what I’ll be reading in 2023.

104 for the year.