books and books review – Page 2

Boekenbeurs 1982 — 2023

Published on January 7, 2023Leave a comment

So many of the books on my bookshelves came from this place:

Front view of a bookstore with books stalled out in front of the shop window sheltered by a canopy above them

I used to have a set routine growing up in Middelburg in the eighties. Every other Saturday morning or so I would go to the local library, sometimes together with my mother, then on the way back home stop at this place, De Boekenbeurs, which was located just across the bridge from the library. There I would spent an hour or so carefully looking over its selections of secondhand science fiction and comics, deciding on what to buy now and what might still be available next time before parting with my hard earned pocket money. It was about the only bookstore in town that did carry science fiction and certainly the only one that a broke teenager like me could afford. After I moved to Amsterdam I’d still continue to visit every time I was back in my hometown because nine times out of ten I would find something interesting there. I did just that when I was visiting my parents for Christmas last December, but I won’t be able to anymore next time I visit, as today is its last opening.

It’s a familiar story for any independent bookstore I’d guess. De Boekenbeurs opened in 1982, founded by an ex-civil servant who wanted to strike out for himself. As many local bookstores, it always specialised in local history and such, most of which was of little interest to me, but it also kept more generic stock to fill its shelves. There was always a good chance of finding some unexpected gem among the airport thrillers and local celeb biographies. And then of course the internet happened, people found it easier to get their books online and the sort of serendipitous browsing that a local shop like that is ideal for fell out of fashion. The store reduced its opening hours, started selling online as well, but it was clear that, especially in the last few years, it had become a struggle for the owner, no longer that much fun. Which is why he decided to shut up shop, not having been able to find a buyer for it.

Nevertheless it managed to stay in business for forty years and a bit and I have been coming there almost as long. It was a life line for a nerd like me at a time when opportunities to read science fiction were limted to either buying secondhand or getting whatever the library deemed worthy enough to get. You need bookstores like this, somewhere where you can go in casually and be surprised at what you find on its shelves. Yes, it is easy enough to get what you want from the internet, but it’s the books you didn’t realise you wanted but were glad to find that you can only encounter in a store like this.

R.I.P. De Boekenbeurs. Thanks for your service and I’ll miss you.

A Night in the Lonesome October — Roger Zelazny

Published on November 2, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of A Night in the Lonesome October

A Night in the Lonesome October
Roger Zelazny
Gahan Wilson (illustrator)
280 pages
published in 1993

A Night in the Lonesome October is a special book: except for the various collaborations he did with Robert Sheckley and others, it was the last novel written by Roger Zelazny before his death two years later. It was also a return to form. Zelazny had been one of the more interesting writers to emerge from American New Wave science fiction back in the sixties and had been a steady Hugo and Nebula nominee and winner in the sixties and seventies. the latter half of the eighties he had been mostly concerned with writing the second, lesser Amber cycle while in the nineties he mostly collaborated with other writers. A Night in the Lonesome October was the first new, solo non-Amber Zelazny novel since 1987 and more than that, it was good. As such it became a bit of a fan favourite among the people on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written, which resulted in a tradition of reading the novel day by day during October each year. This is possible because each chapter is a diary entry devoted to one day in October. I never took part in this, but this year I decided to try it when I wanted to reread it.

Set in Late Victorian London, A Night in the Lonesome October is the diary of a dog named Snuff, companion to a man called Jack who has a special knife. Yes, that Jack. He and Snuff are participants in the Game, held every few decades when there’s a full Moon on Halloween, October 31. There are some other, very recognisable characters taking part in this game: a certain Count, the Great Detective (of course), the Good Doctor and his self made man, etc. There are also some less recognisable people taking part in the game, like Crazy Jill and her cat, Graymalk, the latter as close to a friend that Snuff has in the Game. What the Game is about is only gradually made clear, but it is one played between two sides, Openers and Closers. Each player may not know which side the others are on; each player is basically playing on his own until the climax. Therefore there’s room for schemes to be drawn up, alliances to be made and betrayals to happen.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd — Peter Verlinden

Published on July 17, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd
Peter Verlinden
177 pages
published in 1995

Published in 1995 after the Rwandan genocide had just ended, Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd tries to explain the context and history in which it took place. The writer, Peter Verlinden is a Belgian journalist who had been covering events in both Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi for several years before. This is not a book about the genocide itself, which is only briefly touched upon in the last few chapters, but an explainer of what made it possible. With only 177 pages to cover the whole history of Rwanda it’s of necessity more of a sketch than a complete picture. As the title Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd (Hutu and Tutsi: Centuries of Conflict) indicates Verlinden argues that the genocide was only the latest in a long line of conflicts between the two ethnic groups and should be seen as such, not as some inexplicable outburst of violence. The genocide, together with what was happening at the same time in former Yugoslavia was what broke the short lived optimism brought on by the end of the Cold War. The idea that now the civilised world (sic) would be able to intervene in conflicts and resolve them was proven wrong by the inability or unwillingness of the UN to stop the genocide as it was happening.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

Published on May 4, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of American Tanks & AFVs of World War II

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

The Key to the Bulge — Stephen M. Ruseicki

Published on April 24, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

The Key to the Bulge: The Battle for Losheimergraben
Stephen M. Ruseicki
195 pages including notes
published in 1996

A visit to the Bastogne War Museum when I was on a holiday in the Ardennes last October got me interested in the Battle of the Bulge again, as did the series WW2TV did on the campaign in December. Their interview with Peter Caddick-Adams on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know led me to read his excellent book on the campaign as a whole. Which in turn whet my appetite for more on the individual battles within the Ardennes Campaign. Military history like all history is fractal after all. You can get a broad overview but if you zoom in you get a lot more detail, new insights. Which is where this book comes in. With Snow and Steel I got the broad strokes of the Ardennes Campaign, with this I got an overview of one of the most important of the early battles in it, one that could be argued determined the outcome of the entire Ardennes Offensive…

That battle was the battle for Losheimergraben, then, as now, a small border crossing between Belgium and Germany, too small even to call a village. In December 1944 this was the front line, the furthest point reached by the great Allied breakout from Normandy earlier that year. Since then the front line in the Ardennes had been largely static; the real fighting continued further up north, in the Netherlands and around Aachen. The Ardennes itself was quiet, an ideal sector to introduces green troops to life at the front and blood them before they got thrown into real battle. Losheimergraben and neighbouring places like Lanzerath were held by such troops, the 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th infantry Division. It was these troops that would hold out for thirty-six hours against the Sixth Panzer Army starting on the 16th of December, denying it the quick victory it needed to comply to its already impossible schedule.