Aneira
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Games: Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2
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Post by Aneira on Mar 3, 2017 23:12:50 GMT
I finished "The Serpent's Tale" by Ariana Franklin earlier today and started reading the third book of the series this afternoon:
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Post by fiannawolf on Mar 4, 2017 15:40:35 GMT
For today, if you have a kindle, the start to this epic space opera is only 2.99...I really enjoy the Culture series. Good stuff. 3-4-17 that is.
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mousestalker
Inactive Moderator
ღ The Untitled
Just here for the cosplay
Staff Mini-Profile Theme: Mousestalker
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Post by mousestalker on Mar 5, 2017 2:32:07 GMT
Given the title and the cover, I just had to read it. It's fun so far.
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House Targaryen
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The night is dark and full of terrors, but the fire burns them all away.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: gscott7833
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Post by House Targaryen on Mar 11, 2017 7:16:39 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2017 7:50:19 GMT
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Post by Lavochkin on Mar 12, 2017 7:18:52 GMT
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Post by mattig89ch on Mar 12, 2017 8:32:58 GMT
Third time reading it, I'm between books atm. So I went back to an older novel I like. Mind you, I'm going through this on audible while I drive. The narrator is fairly dry, so its a spy novel with a dry delivery. I will say, I'm actually enjoying the dry delivery. Its not some james bond wannabe book. At least the audible version isn't.
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Iakus
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Post by Iakus on Mar 23, 2017 15:46:37 GMT
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legbamel
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Walkin' shoes walkin' back into BSN.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem
Origin: legbamel
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Post by legbamel on Mar 23, 2017 16:53:43 GMT
I'm reading The. Kingfisher's The Seventh Bride and am enjoying it a great deal. The language in the dialogue is a little anachronistic but it's still a fun story.
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Post by Giant Ambush Beetle on Apr 2, 2017 12:25:02 GMT
The Author (left) and his spotter.
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Beerfish
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Little Pumpkin
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect Andromeda, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Post by Beerfish on Apr 4, 2017 16:28:45 GMT
I have set aside Doestoveksy for a bit and have started reading the 1st Andromeda novel instead.
I also have to vocalize a pet peeve of mine and really have no one else to blame for. Introduction chapters, especially for some of the classic novels. I should have learned by now to NEVER EVER EVER read these things until I have read the novel because they always have spoilers, the Dostoevsky one is the latest.
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Post by fiannawolf on Apr 8, 2017 17:50:23 GMT
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Post by frosted on Apr 9, 2017 5:38:20 GMT
"On Tyranny: 20 Lessons From The Twentieth Century", by Timothy Snyder
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indrexu
N3
Certified Gay Mess™
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by indrexu on Apr 11, 2017 1:22:46 GMT
To Hell and Back - Ian Kershaw
Part of the Penguin History of Europe series. As such, it's oriented toward a more generalist audience and it's really easy to tell. Kershaw is apologetic about the lack of footnotes or even rudimentary bibliographical information, but that's the way it is.
The subject matter goes from 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War to 1949 to cover the aftermath of the Second. Kershaw structures the book, fairly clearly, as a history of Europe's second Thirty Years War (a common historiographical mode of analysis for the series of conflicts in the first half of the century). It is intended to be a history of all Europe, not merely northwestern Europe, and as such the overview is reasonably good. It is definitely a broad history as opposed to a deep one, a necessity due primarily to its scope and the truly vast volume of work done on the period. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that 1914-49 in Europe has generated more historical literature than any other comparable era in human history, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
I trust Kershaw on most subjects in his area of expertise. He generated one of the best historiographical ideas of the last half-century - "working toward the Führer" - and his looks at the Nazi elite and at the collapse of the Third Reich are generally high quality. Importantly, he is a good writer; all of his books flow quite well, and like his other work, To Hell and Back is an easy read. It's clear from the book that he has done a decent job of keeping up with the vast literature to review. Naturally, some subjects, as is inevitable, come up relatively short. Kershaw is not particularly interested in detail, which is fine, because there are usually plenty of other places to get it. Importantly, unlike most historians attempting to do overviews rather than detailed work, he avoids pitfalls like blatant errors, which are embarrassingly common in plenty of the other overviews one often finds in popular bookstores. Put another way: he is familiar enough with the literature to generally do it justice in the space allotted.
The one subject I felt he treated awkwardly was one of the first ones, namely, the issue of war guilt and the outbreak of the First World War. Most of the references to war guilt in the book adroitly avoid the topic of who was actually right about the various issues, referring instead to the way various groups of people felt about the issue. The exception is at the beginning of his bit on the July Crisis, when he asserts that all nations had responsibility for going to war (fine) but that Germany bore the greatest share (umm) because of the infamous "blank check" (what). Leaving aside the specifics of the historiography on the "blank check", surely even the most partisan supporter of the Entente, which Kershaw is not, would acknowledge that Russia offered similar support to Serbia to induce the Serbs to fight, and that France's government did the exact same with Russia's. In fact, Kershaw does acknowledge the first one of those things a few pages later, and includes lines like the Russian mobilization making war inevitable (basically true). It feels as though the July Crisis bit is an effort to acknowledge a wide variety of historiography that is often at odds with each other, and in so doing it comes up a bit short. Finding a compromise position between stridently argued opposing viewpoints may be the sort of thing to which many people are temperamentally suited, but unfortunately the compromise position often ends up being incoherent because of that. I have similar feelings with respect to the efforts by military historians to work out the historiography of German war planning in the aftermath of the work published by Terence Zuber almost twenty years ago. Fortunately, Kershaw did not attempt to cover that thorny subject in To Hell and Back, which was undoubtedly wise.
As one could probably guess from the preceding paragraph, Kershaw's primary focus in To Hell and Back is political history, with enough extra bits of social, economic, gendered, and diplomatic history to make things "work". Military operations in the various wars are only covered insofar as they affect the other narratives, which is probably the right tack to take. The narrative through-line is generally one highlighting the importance of institutions and legitimacy in creating and upholding the kinds of societies that resist the sort of bloody meltdowns that characterized the period's interstate and intrastate affairs. I can agree with that as far as it goes; it's a relatively uncontroversial thing to say, even if the specifics can get a little bit iffy in the case of, say, the July Crisis itself. Kershaw spends a great deal of time on ideological conflict, which makes sense, and does a pretty good job both at discussing it in the context of Europe-wide affairs and in the context of specific societies. The European breadth of the subject makes for excellent fodder for comparative analysis, something that is still generally lacking in the field despite efforts to break free of the national-history paradigm.
In general, I would say that To Hell and Back is a fine introduction to the period. It is a good and easy read, something that is not always the case in this era. Its thematic coverage and attention to comparative subjects and to "the stuff outside northwestern Europe" make it excellent for anyone seeking information on the period. It would make a fine textbook for any undergraduate course on Europe's second Thirty Years' War. Since it lacks a bibliography and is mostly a generalist treatment, graduate students and practicing historians probably won't get much out of it, but everyone else should give it a whirl.
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Post by fiannawolf on Apr 15, 2017 16:08:58 GMT
Over 1300 pages of military sci fi goodness. You darned indies, giving me more crack while I wait for more Harrington. For the awesome sauce.
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Zeeix
N1
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by Zeeix on Apr 15, 2017 22:10:22 GMT
Finished the Sons of Corax (I love that book!)started reading this one. Getting through very sloooowly. Just like with art I'm a spontaneous reader lol.
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spacetime
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gay mess <3
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, Mass Effect Andromeda
PSN: coratiel
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Post by spacetime on Apr 19, 2017 18:04:36 GMT
Rat Queens.
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Post by fiannawolf on Apr 19, 2017 20:17:27 GMT
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Post by cheeseandonion on Apr 20, 2017 17:33:43 GMT
Soldiering through this at the moment. Lost interest after I started playing Andromeda though. I'm actually looking to get into Sci-fi recently, is there anything similar to Mass Effect?
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Post by fiannawolf on Apr 22, 2017 19:32:59 GMT
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DOOMSLAYER
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Rip and tear, until it is done.
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Post by DOOMSLAYER on Apr 22, 2017 20:06:44 GMT
Re-reading Stephen King's IT in anticipation for the movie this year.
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Post by fiannawolf on Apr 25, 2017 19:55:48 GMT
I liked his Eternal Series. Didnt take itself super serious and it was decent popcorn entertainment. Not all books have to be Dune quality to have fun with. Here be the linkAnd this is like a mix of Pratchett meets GOTG movie versions. Tastes like Mel Brooks' Space Balls!And to my utter shock, something that got a Hugo mention a while back that isnt trash ID politics. Decent World building and characters. For those of the Urban Fantasy meets Steam Punk meets Stephen King weirdness. Actually Fun series.
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Post by sjpelke on Apr 25, 2017 20:04:53 GMT
Not reading anything at the moment but want to pick up the Andromeda novels since new episodes will start coming out in a year from now.
The show is the best scifi I have seen in a long while and am very curious how the books are.
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indrexu
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Certified Gay Mess™
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Post by indrexu on Apr 25, 2017 21:51:43 GMT
Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943 - Carlo D'Este D'Este is the author of outstanding biographies of Allied general officers in the Second World War, along with campaign narratives on Normandy and Italy. He enjoys a high reputation among military historians of the conflict despite not actually starting out in the academy; he retired from the Army as a half-bird and only went into military history then. In Bitter Victory he turns his attention to the Sicilian campaign, of which he points out there exists no single unified narrative history since the official histories came out decades ago. As a campaign narrative, it works pretty well. D'Este overviews the desert war and the Tunisian campaign before delving into the fraught history of the planning for the invasion of Sicily, Operation HUSKY. He focuses on an operational-tactical level; in general, he spends his time examining the overall conduct of the campaign, and the outlines of a few key engagements (the Gela landings, the Primosole Bridge battles, the fight for Troina), and the personalities of the general officers involved. Some soldiers' personal accounts are interspersed, especially in the tactical narratives. D'Este also does a reasonably good job integrating German and Italian material despite clearly writing from the perspective of the Allies.
The title gives away the premise of the book, which is that the Allied victory in the Sicilian campaign was an empty one: the Allies fucked up. The Axis forces successfully delayed an overwhelmingly superior force and were able to make good their escape. Despite some individual virtuoso performances, and the generally good quality of their soldiery and equipment, Allied combat power was deployed in a way that virtually predetermined the unhappy outcome of the battle. Therefore, some significant portions of the book are set aside to properly apportioning blame: how the Allies fucked up, and why, and who was responsible.
That sort of process is rather more similar to an after-action report than to most academic history - except in military history, where apart from some of the "new military history" texts the assignation of responsibility (black eyes and feathers in caps, as it were) is still one of the primary tasks of the authors, albeit rather more so for the "pop history" bookstore-quality books than for the academic military history. Some of D'Este's contemporaries, like Rob Citino, emphasize a more systemic (if not exactly longue durée) appraisal. The merits and drawbacks of such approaches are somewhat outside the scope of this review. It's just a very noticeable aspect of the book.
D'Este seems quite clear that the Allied command structure was the primary underlying cause of the "bitter victory". Because the Sicily campaign had its genesis in a British political effort to focus attention on what Churchill and the Imperial General Staff considered to be Britain's primary interests in the Mediterranean - rather than in an area of obvious joint Allied interest, like the invasion of Northwest Europe in 1944 - British political efforts structured HUSKY's command. Eisenhower was the supreme commander, but he had a council of British chiefs to run each dimension of the fight: Harold Alexander in charge of ground forces, Andrew Cunningham for the navy, and Arthur Tedder for the air force. These chiefs were geographically and conceptually dispersed in a way that frustrated even elementary efforts to coordinate their forces. Furthermore, although Cunningham and Tedder were generally competent officers, apart from a few missteps, D'Este characterizes Alexander as having no grip on the campaign whatsoever, an incompetent and overrated officer whose affable nature smoothed over his lack of energy or ability. Thus, Tedder and the air force fought their own war largely out of sync with the rest of the Allied forces, and while the navy did a better job of coordinating that was largely down to the two Army commanders rather than to the efforts of Eisenhower or Alexander.
Dispersion also prevented agreement on the only strategy that could have ensured anything like a decisive Allied victory in Sicily, namely an attack on the Strait of Messina, whether by an amphibious assault on Calabria and Messina or a purely naval attempt to interdict shipping in the Strait and prevent the Axis withdrawal. Neither option was seriously considered by the Allies, to the general shock of the German leadership. D'Este spends considerable time discussing the Axis withdrawal program, which succeeded beyond the Germans' wildest dreams because nobody in the Allied command structure bothered to do anything serious about it. Only the air forces attacked Messina, and they hit the wrong targets and did not try anything close to a maximum-effort strike.
D'Este also discusses the most well-known controversies about the Sicilian campaign - chiefly on the Allied side, since the Germans were generally satisfied with their own performance. The infamous episode in which part of the road net assigned to the American Seventh Army was assigned to British Eighth Army, preventing the large and powerful American force from doing anything other than driving off to a sideshow in the western part of the island, is overviewed in considerable detail. D'Este blames Alexander for failing to do anything other than treat the Americans as an adjunct to the British, due largely to his negative impression of their troop quality formed in Tunisia. He does, however, point out that Patton either misunderstood or did not care about the (bizarre) British practice of treating orders as topics of discussion rather than final statements about what must be done, and thus missed an opportunity to appeal an obviously unfair and brainless military decision. He also covers Patton's slapping incident in what I thought was a slightly strange manner; although at the beginning he mentions that it was a court martial offense, he then discusses Patton's subsequent escape (due to Eisenhower's protection) without censure; describes Drew Pearson, who broke the news in America, as a muckraker; and adds the German confusion over why this could possibly be an issue (due to the Wehrmacht's practice of executing deserters and malingerers, which the two men Patton assaulted were not).
He also treats the Sicilian campaign as an episode in the development of the US Army. In Tunisia, the Americans were just getting their act together after decades of neglect and it showed. The Axis attack at Kasserine Pass embarrassed the Americans from top to bottom and permanently colored their reputation among many British officers and men. In Sicily, the US Army took on an arguably more difficult task and aced the test. Every American unit, from the elite 82nd Airborne and 1st Infantry to the National Guardsmen of the 45th Infantry Division, performed up to par or better. The infantry and airborne units were confronted with counterattacks almost immediately and successfully defeated them. American armor and improvised motorized infantry performed impressive feats of mobility even if they were in the largely pointless cause of seizing control of Palermo. That this evolution went largely ignored by many observers of the American military both then and since speaks volumes about the importance of first impressions.
It is impossible to discuss Sicily - or, really, any other British campaign in the latter half of the war - without mentioning Bernard Law Montgomery, the commander of the Commonwealth's Eighth Army. Monty, fresh off of his desert victories, had already become a British national hero by the time of Sicily. Most American accounts cast him as a villain, seizing control of planning from Alexander, stealing control of American-designated roads, denigrating American combat prowess, and engaging in an attempt to race Patton to Messina (which Patton naturally won). D'Este's coverage of Monty is diametrically opposed to most of these judgments, treating them either as myths or vast embellishments of the truth. Monty had a more favorable opinion of American arms than most in the British Army and at no time did he ever treat the campaign as a contest of egos between himself and Patton; any rivalry was purely one-sided. His effort to direct planning for HUSKY was borne more of the incompetence with which planning was directed before his intervention rather than out of any attempt to denigrate the Americans (although he probably was aiming for a place in the spotlight for himself, as he usually did; Monty's skills at generating favorable publicity were rivaled only by Patton's). Monty, says D'Este, was largely doing what he considered to be most helpful for his own Army, which is a reasonable enough thing for an Army commander to do; it was Alexander's failure to keep a tight leash on him and consider the American perspective and the overall strategy that was the real problem. This isn't to say that Monty didn't commit errors during the campaign, and D'Este highlights a few of them. He spread Eighth Army too thinly during his attempt to break the Etna Line instead of trying to break through in column of divisions or outflank the Axis defenses by secondary amphibious landings (as Patton and Bradley tried on the northern coast). But the more serious charges that the persecuted American officers laid at Monty's feet were, according to D'Este, patently unfair.
At this point, the role of Operation MINCEMEAT is arguably more famous than the Sicilian campaign itself. MINCEMEAT was the deception plan initiated by the Allies in an attempt to draw Axis reserves away from the real target, Sicily. The work done by the SIS in creating a fictitious dead Allied officer and then planting him where Axis intelligence organs would identify him was quite impressive. After the whole thing was 'rediscovered', the esoteric nature of the intelligence work led to coverage from several Internet outlets, such as Cracked, and MINCEMEAT has since entered online lore as one of those cool-shit things that people talk about with respect to modern warfare, like Simo Häyhä or the Harlem Hellfighters. D'Este devotes a chapter to its coverage, and generally hits an appreciative note, crediting MINCEMEAT with the immobilization of Axis reserves in southern France and the Balkans rather than in Sicily where they could have halted the Allied invasion. D'Este is not as hysterical with his praise as some other recent authors, but I would still probably disagree with his analysis here: MINCEMEAT probably did not play a particularly large role in Axis troop deployments compared to other considerations (like the overall strategic situation, which made any deployment of large forces to an island in an enemy-dominated sea a silly proposal) and the presence of extra Axis reserves probably would not have made or broken the Allied invasion considering massive Allied quantitative and qualitative superiority. Still, it was an interesting and bizarre episode in the war and it certainly deserves coverage. As a campaign narrative, Bitter Victory is quite serviceable. It's informative, the analysis is generally good, it has something relatively new and useful to say, and it does an excellent job covering its remit. I would have liked perhaps a bit more on the structures of the Allied and Axis militaries, the equipment used by both sides (usually discussed in excruciating detail in WWII books but strangely absent here), and perhaps a bit more use of the Italian and German sources. But these are largely nitpicks on what was overall a satisfying read. The one thing that I do think is inexcusable was that the Amazon Kindle version of the book, which I read, was riddled with transcription errors that were extremely frustrating to try to parse. I assume they used Captchas from porn file-sharing websites. Ebooks are currently my preferred reading material but I have never before seen transcription this poor. If you read Bitter Victory, go with a hard copy. EDIT: Holy shit, I never actually looked at the preview window for this janx. I apologize to everybody for the insane wall of text. Spoilered for y'all sanity (and scroll bars).
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Liadan
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Post by Liadan on Apr 28, 2017 18:05:09 GMT
I started reading:
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