Elder millennial in the American Pacific Northwest. Cutting aerospace parts for monies, reading and exploring for funs.
Currently playing: Dark Souls (PS3)
Currently reading: The Gunslinger, Stephen King; A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman
Recently finished: Truman, David McCullough; Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell; Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, Max Hastings; Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945, Max Hastings; Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Vol. 2, James McPherson; The History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Vol. 1, James McPherson; Grant, Ron Chernow; The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari; Alexander, Theodore Ayrault Dodge; The Vietnam War: An Intimate History, Ken Burns; Leningrad, Anna Reid; The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman; Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum
Many city libraries loan audiobooks! I am unreasonably happy about this.
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“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night