Another year of reading done … and I have to admit that between blogging, gaming, and other non-reading uses for free time, I don’t read anywhere near as much as I used to. Not counting re-reads of old favourites (Conan Doyle, Heinlein, Bujold, Tolkien, and Pratchett among others), this is all I managed to read during the course of the year:
For some reason, the HTML for the table isn’t playing well in my WordPress theme, so you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the reading list and comments. Sorry about that!
| Surname | First name | Title | Date | ISBN | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stephenson | Neal | Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing | 10/01/2014 | 978-0-06-202443-5 | The essays were a bit dated in some respects, but still informative and entertaining. |
| Barnett | Correlli | Marlborough | 30/01/2014 | 0-413-29540-0 | Not a bad overview of Marlborough’s career, very good maps and illustrations. |
| Ferguson | Niall | Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire | 02/02/2014 | 978-0-14-303479-7 | If you like doom’n’gloom about American prospects in the 21st century, Ferguson has you covered. Doom! Gloom! Double-doom in Chinese ideograms! |
| Turner | Alexander | Vimy Ridge 1917: Byng’s Canadians Triumph at Arras | 08/02/2014 | 1-84176-871-5 | One of the Osprey campaign histories. |
| Shlaes | Amity | Coolidge | 19/02/2014 | 978-0-06-196755-9 | An excellent biography of Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the least-appreciated US president of all time. |
| Kynaston | David | Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59 | 08/03/2014 | 978-0-7475-8893-1 | Part of a series of British social history works. Fills in a lot of the blanks left in ordinary political histories. Knowing the context of the times helps to illustrate the social impact of global, national and even local events. |
| Foundation for Civic Literacy | The Dorchester Review | 17/03/2014 | 1925-7600 | An interesting semi-annual publication on Canadian and Imperial history. | |
| Lomas | David | Mons 1914: The BEF’s tactical triumph | 22/03/2014 | 978-1-85532-551-7 | An Osprey Campaign history. |
| McArdle | Megan | The Up Side of Down: Why failing well is the key to success | 27/04/2014 | 978-0-670-02614-2 | McArdle is just as good writing at the book level as she is in her regular column at Bloomberg View. Recommended. |
| Whedon | Joss | Firefly: A Celebration | 06/05/2014 | 978-1-781161-685 | If you loved Firefly, this is the single-volume “official” show history and you’ve probably already read it. |
| MacMillan | Margaret | The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 | 14/05/2014 | 978-0-670-06404-5 | An excellent study of the origins of the First World War. I depended on this heavily when I put together my blog series on the subject. Recommended. |
| Arthur | Max | The True Glory: The Royal Navy 1914-1939 | 02/06/2014 | 0-340-62301-2 | The British navy from the start of WW1 to the start of WW2. |
| Patterson, Jr. | William H. | Robert A. Heinlein Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better | 16/06/2014 | 978-0-7653-1961-6 | An excellent follow-on to the first volume, but undoubtedly a bit too close to hagiography than true biography. While not quite as good as the first, it was still a great read. |
| Neillands | Robin | D-Day 1944: Voices From Normandy | 21/06/2014 | 0-304-35981-5 | W/Roderick de Normann. There’s not much new to be said about the 6th of June, 1944, but this is an interesting cross-section of the land, sea, and air battles, drawn from individual accounts of participants. |
| Griess | Thomas E. | The Great War | 26/06/2014 | 0-89529-273-4 | Part of the West Point Military History series. |
| Beevor | Antony | D-Day: The Battle for Normandy | 28/06/2014 | 978-0-670-02119-2 | Another of the many books published or re-published around the anniversary date of the invasion. I’ve read enough of them that there wasn’t much new here, but it would be a good introduction if you weren’t familiar with the details. |
| Geraghty | Jim | The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits | 02/07/2014 | 978-0-7704-3652-0 | While this wasn’t quite as funny as Yes, Minister, it was well worth reading. |
| Clark | Christopher | The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914 | 17/07/2014 | 978-0-06-114666-4 | I read this in parallel with Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace, and leaned on it a fair bit in my origins of WW1 series of posts. Recommended. |
| Fine Woodworking | On the Small Workshop | 19/07/2014 | 0-918804-27-2 | A collection of short articles from the early days of the magazine. | |
| Pratchett | Terry | Raising Steam | 27/07/2014 | 978-0-8575-2227-6 | One of Pratchett’s best … and that’s saying a lot. |
| Schwarz | Christopher | Campaign Furniture | 27/07/2014 | 978-0-9850777-9-2 | One of the few books I know of that deals with one of the iconic furniture styles of the 18th and 19th century — both in origins and in design trends. While I haven’t yet built any of the designs, I found it quite fascinating. |
| Stephenson | Neal | Reamde | 06/08/2014 | 978-0-06-197796-1 | I find Stephenson’s novels to be binary: I love ’em or I hate ’em. This one was definitely a positive. While the ending stretched my willingness to suspend my sense of disbelief, I preferred it to the George R.R. Martin style of ending (that is, there were some deaths, but despite the elaborate set-up they were not gratuitous). |
| Stirling | S.M. | Lord of Mountains | 24/08/2014 | 978-0-451-41476-2 | Another in the continuing series of the “Dies the Fire” stories. This one had the feel of a “contractual obligation” work, I’m afraid. |
| Foundation for Civic Literacy | The Dorchester Review | 03/09/2014 | 1925-7600 | An interesting semi-annual publication on Canadian and Imperial history. | |
| Fine Woodworking | Selecting and Using Hand Tools | 05/09/2014 | 1-56158-783-4 | A collection of hand-tool stories from more recent issues of Fine Woodworking. | |
| Stross | Charles | The Rhesus Chart | 08/09/2014 | 978-0-425-25686-2 | The most recent installment of the “Laundry” novels. It does a good job of blending espionage stories, Lovecraftian horror, and the mundane terrors of a modern bureaucracy at work. |
| USDA Forest Service | Low-Cost Wood Homes Construction Manual | 09/09/2014 | 1-897030-12-6 | If you want to build a cabin in the woods or a similar type of inexpensive structure, this is one of the books you should read first. While parts are out-of-date (it was originally published in 1969), it’s still quite informative. | |
| Stirling | S.M. | The Given Sacrifice | 16/09/2014 | 978-0-451-41731-2 | The end of a story arc in the Dies the Fire series, introducing new characters and killing off some long-serving ones. |
| Freeman | Richard | "Unsinkable": Churchill and the First World War | 17/09/2014 | 978-0-75249889-8 | The rather unlikely political and military career of Winston Churchill in the run-up to WW1 and through the course of the war. Freeman gives Churchill a bit less blame and a lot more credit than most historians have done. |
| Hopkirk | Peter | Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia | 25/09/2014 | 0-7195-6448-4 | A fascinating book on the adventures and mis-adventures of European archaeologists and explorers (and spies) along the ancient trade route called the Silk Road. |
| Fields | Nic | Troy c. 1700-1250 BC | 07/10/2014 | 1-84176-703-4 | An Osprey book on the archaeological remains of Troy, with emphasis (of course) on the fortifications. |
| Walker | Jesse | The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory | 23/10/2014 | 978-0-06-213556-8 | It’s not just your imagination: Americans are conspiracy theorists, but they come by it honestly … conspiracy theories go back well before the American Revolution. |
| Steyn | Mark | The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned | 29/10/2014 | 978-1-62157-318-0 | A collection of Steyn’s writing on various topics. If you like his newspaper articles, you’ll also enjoy this collection. |
| Hickey | Michael | The First World War (4): The Mediterranean Front 1914-1923 | 30/10/2014 | 1-84176-373-X | An Osprey Campaign study on a relatively neglected theatre of the First World War. It also covers the post-armistice conflicts up to the establishment of the modern Turkish state. |
| Blake | Richard | Conspiracies of Rome | 31/10/2014 | 978-0-340-95113-2 | The first of a series of historical novels set in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire just around the time that Islam was becoming a major political and military power. |
| Hopkirk | Peter | On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire | 05/11/2014 | 978-0-7195-6451-2 | A good follow-on to Hopkirk’s work on the Silk Road. This involves several of the same players, but in a new conflict on the frontiers of the Russian, Ottoman, and British empires as German agents attempt to undermine British and Russian control of the Middle East and central Asia. |
| MacMillan | Margaret | Paris, 1919: Six months that changed the world | 12/11/2014 | 978-0-375-76052-5 | The treaties that ended the First World War were negotiated (or imposed) in the course of a six-month peace conference in Paris in early 1919. This is the most in-depth study of the process I’ve found and it’s quite good. |
| Sandbrook | Dominic | Never Had It So Good: A history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles | 17/11/2014 | 0-349-11530-3 | Another social history of Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. While this covers some of the same ground as David Kynaston’s series, it manages to deal with enough other areas that the two authors’ works are complementary in helping understand this part of recent British history. |
| Cook | Tim | Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King and Canada’s World Wars | 21/11/2014 | 978-0-670-06521-9 | Cook helped me to find more of interest in Borden’s career, but did little to raise my level of respect for Mackenzie King. It did help to explain some of the otherwise inexplicable events around the use and mis-use of Canadian troops in Europe during WW2. |
| Blake | Richard | The Terror of Constantinople | 26/11/2014 | 978-0-340-95115-6 | The second novel in the series, as “Alaric” (actually Aelric) goes to Constantinople and gets dangerously involved in imperial politics. |
| Badsey | Stephen | Arnhem 1944: Operation "Market Garden" | 10/12/2014 | 1-85532-302-8 | An Osprey Campaign study of the parachute and glider assault on the bridges leading to the town of Arnhem in late 1944. |
| Taylor | A.J.P. | A History of England 1914-1945 | 10/12/2014 | A very good read, although somewhat more scholarly than modern works on the period. Asquith and Lloyd George get a bit of a kicking (deservedly), while Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin come out looking rather good in Taylor’s view. Assessments of Chamberlain, Churchill, and Attlee are mostly in-line with modern opinion. | |
| Fuller | J.F.C. | The Conduct of War 1789-1961 | 11/12/2014 | 0-306-80467-0 | Fuller’s reputation suffers for his slightly-too-comfortable feelings about the far right, but he was one of the pioneers of modern armoured warfare, so it is worth reading his work (while being aware of and discounting his biases). |
| Blake | Richard | The Blood of Alexandria | 19/12/2014 | 978-0-340-95117-0 | The third book in the series has Aelric on a mission to Alexandria, where local unrest, land reform laws, and Persian intrigue have the Imperial hold on the province at severe risk. |
| Knight | Ian | Zulu War, 1879: Twilight of a Warrior Nation | 26/12/2014 | 1-85532-165-3 | An Osprey Campaign study. |
| O’Rourke | P.J. | The Baby Boom: How it got that way, and it wasn’t my fault, and I’ll Never Do It Again | 30/12/2014 | 978-0-8021-2290-2 | An insider’s view of the Baby Boom generation. In common with its subject, it starts off great, rather sags in the middle, then gets a bit dotty towards the end. |
