Here are the books I’ve read last month.

Have His Carcase — Dorothy L. Sayers
The second Harriet Vane novel, which starts when she almost literally stumbles about a body on the beach, its throat cut by a razor. Vane and Wimsey team up to solve the case and see whether it was murder or suicide.

Postsingular — Rudy Rucker
Despite having several of his novels in my bookcases, this is the first of his I’ve read and I got it from the library… As the title gives away, this is a novel trying to deal with the socalled Singularity and succeeding reasonably well. A fair but not brilliant novel, that looks to be written for a young adult audience.

Reporting War — Stuart allan and Barbie Zelizer (editors)
A collection of essays about journalists in wartime, the dangers they face and the possibility of honest reporting as well as the limitations they work under.

Dresden — Frederick Taylor
The frontcover blurb compares this to Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, which for once is
a quite good comparison. Like Beevor’s book, Dresden takes an iconic episode of World War II and put it into context, clearing away some of the myths that have grown up around it.

The Mercenary — Jerry Pournelle
One of the novels that set the tone for the milsf subgenre, warts and all. It’s all here: the glorification of military men, the cod-toughness and distrust of democracy

Sand against the Wind — Barbara Tuchman
The usual competent Tuchman history, this time mixing a biography of “Sour” Joe Sitwell with the story of US intervention in China between the wars and during World War II, while America’s strategy for defeating Japan slowly changed.

What We Say Goes — Noam Chomsky
A collection of interviews with Chomsky, talking about current events and explaining their background. Not much new here if you follow the right blogs (ie. mine) but he does have the knack of explaining complex things clearly.

The White Rose — Glen Cook
The third book of the Black Company series of dark fantasy books. The Black Company has been leading the resistance against the Lady, the Evil Overlord ruling most of the north and now after years of waiting things come to a head. What sets this series apart from other fantasy “trilogies” is Cook’s nicely unsentimental attitude towards his characters.

Silencing the Past — Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Trouillot is an Haitian historian, so it’s unsurprising that he would want to investigate the ways in which certain parts of history are routinely silenced, as so much of his country’s history has been, despite its importance not just to Haiti but the wider world.

Shadow Games — Glen Cook
The fourth book of the Black Company, starting a new storyline in which the Company goes in search of its past and

The High Crusade — Poul Anderson
An alien ship lands in Medieval England. The local nobles, too brave or too unimaginative to know fear of the aliens and their weapons storm it, then intend to use it to invade France. Instead they end up at the other end of the galaxy and set about conquering the alien empire that send
the ship…

Tunnel in the Sky — Robert A. Heinlein
A group of students are sent by teleportationt unnel to a distant planet for their solo survival tests. It shouldn’t have take more than two weeks, but something goes wrong and the tunnel doesn’t reappear. Now they have to work together to survive. The hero is as per usual in a Heinlein juvenile brave, goodnatured and a little dim so that his more clever friends and kindly elderly authority figures can explain the ways of the world to him.

Farmer in the Sky — Robert A. Heinlein
A teeneage boy migrates to Gandymedes with his father and his new family and grows up to be a man. They get a bit of a raw deal on the new colony but as usual with Heinlein the solution lies in hard working and no complaining rather than any collective action.

Under an English Heaven — Donald E. Westlake
A lighthearted history of how Anguila was the only British colony ever to rebel against its rulers with the intention to remain a British colony, rather than become independent, and how this led to an invasion compared to which the American invasion of Grenada two decades later looked dangerous.