posts interesting only to me

That’s the first month of the year done and dusted. Six books read, four history, two science fiction:

The Wages of Destruction — Adam Tooze
Brilliantly written book putting the evolution of nazi politics on war and genocide in the economic context in which they took place. Tooze makes it clear the nazis and Hitler read the economic situation in which Germany found itself in the 1920ties and wanted escape from what they saw as a trap by creating lebensraum for the German people, only to keep finding themselves still trapped with each new solution, ultimately ending in genocide.

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 — Guy Halsall
I saw this in the library and read it largely because Peter Heather had slagged Halsall off in his Empires and Barbarians for wrongthink on the Fall of Rome. Judging by this book the differences between Halsall and Heather are about ten percent real and ninety percent hype. They largely agree on the facts, are fairly close in how to interpret them. Halsall is leaning slightly more towards the idea that it was the internal fights for supremacy in the western empire opened opportunities for the barbarians, rather than the barbarian invasions creating the political unrest as Heather has it.

The Making of Late Antiquity — Peter Brown
Peter Brown is the historian who first made the idea of Late Antiquity fashionable. This is not the book which with he did it, but the closest I could get to it and it’s very strange. No politics, barbarians invasions and Roman collapse here, but a description of the evolution of the “pagan” mindset of yer average Roman during the second century Common Era, into the Christians of the fourth century. Interesting, but not quite for me.

The Goths — Peter Heather
Heather so far is the historian I trust the most on the Late Roman Empire and his speciality is the Goths. Here he tries to write their history, from very meager sources attempting to reconstruct their prehistory up until the time they first enter centre stage in 376 CE, then following them up until the dissolution of the two kingdoms they founded in Italy and Spain, as well as their heritage. Good one volume history, best read in context with e.g. Heather’s other books, or something like the Halsall book above.

The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. LeGuin
Classic science fiction novel and winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, not a feminist novel, but profitable to read it within this context.

Absorption — John Meaney
Part space opera in the tradition of Banks, Baxter, MacLeod, Reynolds et all set in the same universe as Meaney’s earlier novels, part epic fantasy following people at various points in time, from 777 AD until well after the main sequence’s 2603 AD. Not surpringly, part one of a trilogy. Decent book, need to wait for the next volumes to see if it was worth it.

When in doubt, steal from the best and Andrew Wheeler’s top 12 favourite books for 2010, one book for each month of the year, seemed like a neat device to copy, so here goes:

January saw me mostly recovering from surgery plus the added bonus of an opportunistic infection, so I read mainly not too challenging books. One book thta did challenge me, was Gwendolyn Leick’s Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City.

February wasn’t much better, with the standout book being Richard Morgan’s first published novel, Altered Carbon.

In March I read both Owen Heatherly’s Militant Modernism and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, both in their own way attacking the unexamined assumptions at the heart of contemporary society. But it was Fields of Conflict, an anthology of papers on battlefield archaeology that made me think the most.

April: World War Z gave me nightmares, but it was The Night Sessions and The Raw Shark Texts that impressed the most, with the latter recieving a slight nudge.

In May I read a lot of science fiction, including China Miéville’s latest, Kraken, but it was Richard Fortey’s Life, the story of well, life on Earth, that impressed me the most.

June was a slow month again, no doubt because of the Worldcup, but I did read The Reconstruction of Nations by Timothy Snyder, which attempted to show how nationalism and ethnical identity grew in Poland, Belarussia, Lithuania and the Ukraine, countries once united in the early modern state of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where ethnicity and nationality was much less important than class.

July was mostly about bubblegum reading, things like three Ian Fleming novels that you can read in a n hour and still have fifteen minutes left to kill. One positive exception was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Back in Edwardian times, mashups between ghost and detective stories were quite popular and Carnacki was one of the better ghost detectives. Not at all scary, but despite their great age still quite enjoyable.

August saw more science fiction and more books on warfare. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire an indepth look at the economics of Nazi Germany and Europe, was the book of the month. The Battle of Kursk was good too.

In September, it was Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is KILL that made me sit up: a great short, mil-sf novel that was a cross between Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers (the novel, not the movie). Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny and Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains were excellent too.

Moving on to October, the best book that month was a reread: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr, where it turned out I had missed about eighty percent of the real action in the novel on my first read…

Then came November and I read some twenty books, largely due to a massive reread of all Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga novels. Diplomatic Immunity was a disappointment, Iain M. Banks’ latest Culture novel, Surface Detail was not.

And finally, December, in which N. K. Jeminisin’s first two books in her fantasy trilogy were the best books I read that month. These deserve proper, well thought through reviews, but suffice to say they’re essential reading for everybody interested in fantasy.