I did manage to put the time in the air to good use, though--revisions on Chill have reached page 208. I gave up there, because I was not having a lot of brilliant ideas for the new scene I have to write, but it seems to be mostly coming together nicely--and hey, halfway done!
I also accomplished an awful lot of reading, about which more below:
Book 31, Greg Van Eekhout, Norse Code.
The title is trying way too hard. But the book itself, while I did not utterly fall in love with it, is a cheeky, fast-paced, suitably apocalyptic romp through Ragnarok, to which (predictably) I am entirely sympathetic. I did find that it had one quality that I find in most urban fantasy these days--it felt a little superficial: I wanted more crunch. But that is usually just me.
And it did keep making me laugh out loud. Just saying.
Book 32, Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy
Another one that wasn't quite for me through no fault of its own. There's a whole subgenre of beautifully written, steampunky high-gore fantasy about generally reprehensible people that I think just has too many guy cooties for me: they don't fill me with love. Examples include China Mieville's Iron Council, Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, Jay Lake's Trial of Flowers, and so on. Since they are generally well receeived by people who are not me, I am forced to accept that the fault lies not in the books, but in myself.
Book 33, Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe
Meh. Although the copyright is 1997, this book of military history appears to me to have been written in the 60's. It feels tremendously dated. I also find myself questioning some of his postulates--at one point, for example, he says that the Russian Army in 1941 was the best-equipped in the world, which doesn't jibe with my understanding.
Anyway, I did find some tiny lovely little bits I am stealing for The Steles of the Sky, like the horse-hoof scale armor and maybe some bits of the story about what happened when they exhumed the skull of Timur Leng and incurred his curse. (Hint: the Russians did so in 1941....)
Also, I wanted more economics and politics, and fewer descriptions of battles.
And now, I may endeavor to nap, and post this when I have landed.
- Location:~40,000 feet
- Mood:
elevated - Music:The Dandy Warhols - Not If You Were The Last Junki
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matociquala- it's a great life, if you don't weaken
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Comments
Hmm, that doesn't sound right to me either, though it makes me curious how he defines "best".
horse-hoof scale armor
!!
I did not know that could be done!
But yeah, it's really questionable without explanation.
By comparison, the German tanks of 1941 were sardine tins with paper tracks - and the later, more powerful models were so unreliable that they often broke down and had to be abandoned before they came into contact with the enemy.
Katyushas absolutely shattered frontline German infantry and could stall and break the rapid assaults that made Blitzkrieg so effective. Nobody even came close to matching them until quite late in the war.
In general the Soviets were very good at the 'hard' material (armor, artillery, small arms, and etc.) and climate-specific things like winter clothes and transport, and poor on 'soft' materials (which, around late 1942 was a gap filled by Lend-Lease*) like food, medicine, motor transport and communications gear.
Leadership was the same - the individual Russian soldier was the toughest and bravest in the world, but was often poorly led, trained, and cared for.
*it's generally understood that no meaningful amounts of Lend-Lease were received by the time the Red Army checked the German advance, though.
Note that it took relatively little time for the soldiers at Stalingrad to be supplied with more and better equipment. If you want some eyewitness stories from a western journo, try Alexander Werth's _Russia At War: 1941-1945_. He's quite, quite biased in favor of the Russians (no wonder he got the access he did), but it's such rare material so well-written that you should check it out anyway.
You want some serious starvelings-armed-with-garbage stories, though, try _Stilwell and the American Experience in China_.
It's so nice to hear someone else express this feeling. There are several books (some by authors you list) that give me exactly this impression. There are many books that I will even recommend to other people saying something like "I really hated it, but so many people who's opinions I respect liked it that I conclude it's actually a very good book that I just didn't like."
Also, steampunky high-gore fantasy about reprehensible people sounds a lot like _Berserk_, which I love because well, I do have kind of a lot of testosterone. Depending on the location and nature of the guy cooties I might enjoy this thing.
ETA: gore, per se doesn't bother me; a lack of empathy does.
Edited at 2009-06-29 02:54 am (UTC)
I love this description, and the phrase "guy cooties"; though there is something in me for which this sort of thing does things. (Though I think what might be happening is that I'm reading it as if it were humanist and not male-specific, that is some of it tacitly about and including women and our experience of trauma--or at least, suggesting we could empathize with each other across the gender divide; and once you stop doing that, a lot of things look different. Very different. It's like reading Kazantzakis on heroic Greeks being tortured by Turks and then moving on to "Zorba.")
And now something walked into my head--an example of a story that could-have-been-this-but-wasn't, or else of was-this-and-loved-it, but it's walked right out again.