prysmicdork

Since I seem to be babbling all over the internets tonight, I may as well go ahead and do my book update post.

Books :

Ghost Wars : The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Ladin, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll

Super fascinating read, very well written and a great account of how we ended up so tangled up in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). Warning that it will make you repeatedly want to yell "OMG what the hell are you doing!" at all manner of CIA agents and government officials depicted here in.

I meant for February and March to be Afghanistan reading months, but that's been somewhat waylaid...
HBO is airing a second WWII mini series starting in mid-March, called The Pacific and so in preparation for that I ordered Band of Brothers from the library...and it came a bit early? So now February and March are apparently WWII months and also apparently Damian Lewis months as I've also started watching Life (BoB and Life have together mostly cleared out my Soames Forsythe impression of him, which was creepy and freaky, but compelling).

Band of Brothers : E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest by Stephen E. Ambrose

Well written, and a good combination of telling the soldiers' stories, as well as the accounts of the actions they were involved in. There are occasional weirdnesses to the text that would occasionally throw me out, and I don't know if they are the result of Stephen Ambrose coming from an earlier generation of military writers than those that I am used to reading (he was born in '35, I think), or if they are a stylistic choice to better convey the attitudes and thought processes of the soldiers' themselves, but I did find them occasionally jarring (for example, the German's are occasionally referred to as 'Jerries' outside of a direct quote, and Cpt. Sobel is described with the epithet 'hook nosed' which felt rather like a racial slur given that Sobel was Jewish).
I am planning to read Mjr. Winter's book next, but not sure if I will read any of the other guys books (maybe Malarkey as he is a fellow Oregonian?).

Yes, more books, but at this point I just have to stop apologizing or I will be doing it forever. Um, sorry!

Books :

Fareed Zakaria The Post-American World
Michael Isikoff and David Corn Hubris : The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War

I really hope the snow goes away soon, because Dad and I are supposed to see Sherlock Holmes for New Years!

Another not-entry book update!

Books :

Thomas Ricks Making the Corps
(I particularly recommend the '07 edition because it includes a new afterward with updates on the Marines profiled as well as some reflection on the book itself.)

Also! Powell's is having Free Shipping with no minimum order amount until midnight (Pacific time, so that would be for another four and a half hours) today only! (Yay used books!)

http://www.goodreads.com/prysmicdork

I've made a Good Reads page to go along with my booklist (but I'm not going to bother to go in and add everything on my shelves, because I am lazy and also does the world really need to know that I own five billion Terry Pratchett books?) because it kind of looks like a fun site and also I really love reading other people's reading lists.

My current book is lagging slightly due to the trauma of reading it. Um. Surprise, it is harder to read about war when you are reading about real people being shot and their families waiting at home, than when you are reading about criticisms of official policy or psychological theory! (Sometimes I am a little dense about these things. Also reading about guys in a very similar situation getting so badly hit, makes the fact that so few of the GK guys were injured even more amazing and insane.)

ETA. I do think by the time I get sick of reading about this, switch topics, or whatever happens, I will have a very strange shelf in my library and people will be like, what is that about? And all I will be able to say is, that was the end of 2009. (Or maybe it will never end and I will become some kind of foreign policy geek.)

Having finished watching it last night, I can now say that the new BBC Emma is awesomesause, officially my favorite version (I think it has something to do with it being a 4 hour series, so it can really take its time with things) and Romola Garai is so lovely and she just hit all the right notes (and for those of us who are also superficial creatures, she reminds me much of Katee Sackhoff). OMG why didn't more people watch it (fail Britain, fail).

Books:

Robert D. Kaplan Warrior Politics

This is such an interesting book, even though (maybe because) it at times made me deeply uncomfortable. It's basically a long essay on why governments should have a different morality than individuals (and how we can look to the past for examples of this). Recommended for both historians and people interested in modern politics. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions (and occasionally an argument seems to spin out into nowhere or be unsupported), but it is an exceptionally compelling read.

(Now I get to read Nate Fick's book - is embarrassingly excited!)

I know! I never post. And at the moment the thing that I probably should post about (for certain values of should) I don't want to and won't (to be extra vague about it) and really the reason I'm posting at the moment is that I'm feeling chatty and also avoiding my book because I think it's about to get into Abu Ghraib. So! A list of non importance.

1. My recent spate (is that the word I want?) of friendings has been all Generation Kill related and so if you are one of those people and happen to come across this, um, hi!

2. For longer term residents of the list, yeah uh, my media consumption (it kind of feels weird to call it entertainment given the topic) life has taken a weird turn thanks to an HBO mini series about the Iraq invasion in '03. Which I'm on my um, third viewing of, after having read the book it was based on and am now currently reading Thomas Ricks' book on the invasion and subsequent mess, with a pile of other related books to follow.

3. Mostly I'd like to be better about posting on the books I've read, at least as a record for myself, but also because I find more good books from reading other people posting that kind of thing and also I love pushing books on people.

4. I'm considering doing NaNo this year in a limited fashion, but that depends on mushing together some kind of potential plot this week first, so it's kind of maybe listed depending on that. (Plus I feel a weird conflict with my reading, like, if I'm doing all this, well, what is essentially a kind of research, shouldn't my output be related to that? But then I've really just started reading, much less gotten to the point of having/wanting to say anything about it through fiction. I would do something GK related if I thought I could pull it off, but I've never really written fanfic in any meaningful way, and the characters - and I would call them characters from their presentation in the miniseries - have such specific voices and I've never really tried writing in another writer's style. So probably my best bet is try and incorporate some kind of related atmosphere or something, but yes, confusing).

Books :

Evan Wright Generation Kill
Thomas Ricks Fiasco : The American Military Adventure in Iraq

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTiRnqnvDs

This is so cool!

I am not a Green Lantern fan, my only real exposure to that courner of DC world is through Justice League and pretty much only the animated one there. So it's not the source that is doing it for me here, it's that the thing is entirely fan made from other sources, tons of sources. How cool is that!

(And someday I will do a life up-datey post and actually be a good person and reply to comments and so on, but today is not that day).

I am slowly flocking and private-ing bits of my journal, I think the public face is going to be fannish, with random bits of other public worthy squee, friends only for some real life stuff (I've made a filter for people who know me in rl) and private for others (this was prompted by rereading entries which now seem so blatantly young/depressed/etc that I'm not sure I'm super comfortable with having them public - not deleting them, but just shoving them into the closet for the moment, it does seem somehow journaling dishonest, but lj always walks a weird public/private line and having them out there tips me more toward discomfort at the moment).

I'll do one of those "this journal is somewhat friends-only" posts when I get caught up and post to that filter, on the off chance I missed adding someone (or there are multiple journals and I've added the wrong one).

Not that this will effect how this journal seems on the whole, as I am an entirely dismal failure at the whole enterprise anyway! (If they would only just make some kind of neural interface, the web would never be safe from my vast internal ramblings, esp. now with the swimming which allows for a vast distractionless opportunity to navel gaze, ha ha).

Recent Entertainments:

Runaways (the comic): Love it up through the end of Joss's run (v2 issue 30), but have reservations about the new team starting in Sept (even if Vaughn is up to his usual HORRIBLE tricks - how I have not forgiven him for certain things in Y, which I have still not managed to read the last issue of) so I won't be regularly buying that until I see how the new guys handle things (but all of the stuff previously published is gold, even the crossovers).

Wonder Woman (the comic): Started with volume three (whatever that means, it was the most recent of reboots), which started out horrid, nearly unreadable through several guest writers who had been brought in from the "outside" (tv writer, novelist etc), who didn't seem to quite get how to do modern comics except in a stupidly cheesy way (particularly the first guy, there were endless lines of dialogue of things like "but of course I am WONDER WOMAN" and endless iterations of the characters basic facts - I know the serial books struggle mightily with this because you never know which issue will be someone's first issue and you don't want to alienate them with a lack of information, but part of writing these books is maintaining that balance and most of the so called volume 3 issues I've read failed mightily with this.
Then came Gail Simone, like a breath of fresh, well written air and lo I read a decently written Wonder Woman comic that didn't make me hate every facet of her mythology and characterization and I almost cried! So um yeah, WW is probably joining She-Hulk and a very few other titles as comics that I actually shell out for.

Which are She-Hulk, Powers (I don't know if I even like it anymore, but I kind of need to see what happens to Deena, so), Kabuki (which is being published at a rate of about one issue for year, so I frequently forget about its existence, Astonishing X-Men (for Joss's run, but Warren Ellis is apparently taking over now, and given my fondness for his run on the Authority, I'm giving him a chance), Serenity (there is a new mini series out, but I haven't read it, but it's out and the covers made me cry :( ) and Supreme Power (if he ever puts out another issue). So yeah, not much.

I was reading Fables, because I really like the concept, and some of the execution, but great swaths of it piss me off, so I can't actually pay for it, despite my love for Snow, Bigby, Cindy and various others. It's the kind of thing I'd love to read in a class, to talk about the possibility of the stories it tells, as well as the sad, sad failures (oh Snow, how Willingham has marginalized you). If you like fairy tale retelling, check it out from the library or something, because intriguing yes, infuriating, yes (the basic premise is that characters from fairy tales have escaped into our world after their own worlds were invaded by a conquering army). The first part is a bit clunky, but the writing does eventually loosen up.

"Even after Yvaine mellows and warms to Tristan, who discovers her in a crater and becomes her protector, Ms. Danes has a distracting habit of scrunching her features into a scowl unbefitting a supernatural heroine who aspires to live happily ever after."

From the NYT review of Stardust, for some reason this line makes me just furious. Not having seen the movie yet, I don't know who to blame exactly, the movie or the reviewer, but it's such a horrid misinterpretation of both the character and of what women in fairy tales and fantasy are or should be that it just makes me steaming mad! So I am posting here to steam (STEAM).

(On the whole I am inclined to blame the reviewer, because for me the NYT has had kind of a crap track record in writing about/reviewing fantasy and Neil Gaiman has on the whole seemed both involved with and pleased by the movie and I am inclined to trust him.)

Eeep. ( No real spoilers, but just in case )