Future Reading: Leisure

As much time as I try to spend my time on professional or academic reading of one sort or another, I occasionally introduce something recreational into the mix - The Martian, to name but one. Here are some of the medium-term leisure reading options I've identified thus far.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Armor by John Steakley

Commando Country by Stuart Allan

Commando: Winning World War II Behind Enemy Lines by James Owen

For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming

Gurkhas at War: Eyewitness Accounts from World War II to Iraq by J.P. Cross and Buddhiman Gurung

Micro by Michael Crichton

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Next by Michael Crichton

On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Prey by Michael Crichton

Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories by Ian Fleming

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

The Man With the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Thunderball by Ian Fleming

Timeline by Michael Crichton

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

More to come.

Future Reading: Faith and Philosophy

It's time for another installment of my long-term reading list. While I was living in Hampton Roads, Virginia a few years ago, I went through a phase when I was doing pretty well at reading a chapter from the Bible, a few prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, and another book on faith or philosophy. Those included Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Confessions by St. Augustine, and - unfortunately - Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill. At some point in the foreseeable future, I hope to get back into that habit.

Over the Summer, Lady Jaye (who is Catholic) and I (who, like C.S. Lewis, am Anglican) visited the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and I walked away with a copy of C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce. I've started reading it, so this will probably the first one I'll read. Aside from that, I was assigned a number of books in a couple of my undergraduate history courses that focused on the relationship between science and religion. Those courses were pretty seminal for me, but I didn't have a chance to read most of the assigned textbooks, so I'd like to read the following texts at some point in the next couple of years: Christian Apologetics by Norman L. Geisler; The Galileo Connection by Charles E. Hummel; Reason in the Balance by Phillip E. Johnson; Science & its Limits by Del Ratzsch; and Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, edited by Gary B. Ferngren. I'd also like to throw in some history, such as The Dead Sea Scrolls by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward Cook; History of the Church by Eusebius; or Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish Wars by Flavius Josephus. I may also include a bit more Lewis (maybe a reread of Mere Christianity, or a reading of The Great Divorce?), but that's yet to be determined.

More to come.

Great War Podcasts, Part 6: KCL WSD

It's been a long time since I posted some podcasts about the First World War. In the last few months, the Department of War Studies at King's College London has had a couple of good ones. The first is an interview with William Philpott about his book War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War. The second is more recent, and it features several speakers discussing the sideshows of the Great War - a topic which was also covered in an excellent podcast that I've linked to previously. Go check 'em out!

Future Reading: Strategic Studies

In early July, I posted about my potential 2016 reading goals. I've spent some time identifying categories of books that I want to read over the next few years, so I'll handle these various categories in a series of upcoming posts, starting with strategy.

As I've discussed in great detail, I spent some of 2012 and all of 2013 in Scotland and received my Master of Science (with Distinction) in Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen. I've always been interested in military topics, and that course of study helped me to simultaneously expand and focus that interest. While I ready very voraciously before, during, and after my courses of instruction, there were a handful of books I never got around to reading. There are a few more that I'd like to reread. Other books have come up either before or since that course of study. They're listed (and annotated) below.

Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution by Tim Kane: This is actually on my 2015 reading list, so I'll let that entry stand.

Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West's Afghanistan Campaign by Sherard Cowper Coles: The author was the British envoy to Afghanistan. This book was added to the 2012-'13 list after I'd already started reading, so I got a copy, but never had a chance to read it. My buddy, CN Constable, says that it's pretty dry material.

Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Robert M. Farley: This is also on my 2015 reading list. Parts of the author's case were flawless, and other parts were pretty pedantic and convoluted. If you're going to read this book, do yourself a favor and read it alongside Elinor Sloan's book, listed below.

History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides: I actually found my old Penguin Classic paperback of this book during a recent visit to my storage unit back home. This has been on my list for years due to my study of ancient history, and since it's considered the founding work of both history and strategy, it's time to read it. Once I finish my effort to read Clausewitz's entire volume, I'll transition to Thucydides.

The Influence of Sea Power on History by A.T. Mahan: This is considered the seminal work of naval strategy, and was recommended to me during my days as a Naval ROTC midshipman (and possibly in by my AP US History teacher in high school?).

International Law and the Use of Force by Christine Gray: This was one of the books that was assigned to familiarize students with the Strategic Studies and International Law option. I may or may not make it a priority to read this one.

MCDP 1-1 Strategy: The Marine Corps' MCDP 1: Warfighting is mostly a blatant (albeit liberally footnoted) condensation of Clausewitz. I suspect that this will be similar, but it's worth my time to read. The Marine Corps tends to do better than the Army, who don't even seem to have borrowed writing a doctrinal publication about strategy in the first place.

Modern Military Strategy: An Introduction by Elinor C. Sloan: I want to reread a couple of chapters of this book, particularly the chapter about the "Revolution in Military Affairs". Sloan has another book about precisely that topic that may be added to this list.

Modern Strategy by Colin S. Gray: I read Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century prior to my departure for Aberdeen, and I've quoted this particular book liberally in several items I've written, but it's worth my time to slog through the whole thing.

On War by Carl von Clausewitz: As I've noted elsewhere, I'm currently in the process of reading this epic work, which is the basis for modern strategic thought. Some of it has been difficult to digest, but much of it has been entirely relevant to the conduct of contemporary warfare.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli: I read this in college, and since it's short, I want to reread it. Machiavelli is described as a notorious cynic, but his writings remain relevant to this day.

Strategic Studies: A Reader by Thomas Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo: This was the first book that I started reading back in early 2012 (late 2011?), but I only made it past the first few chapters. I think they have a new edition out, but I'm not sure how much was actually updated. It's a collection of essays, some of them pretty dated, but all of them relevant to the academic discipline of strategic studies.

Strategy in the Contemporary World by James J. Wirtz, Colin S. Gray, and John Baylis: This was meant to be our primary textbook in Aberdeen, but I never read more than a few pages of it. I'd like to remedy that.

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman: I read this in 2012, and it was one of the more difficult books because Freedman divides it up by concept, rather than working chronologically. Now that I've completed my Strategic Nuclear Doctrine course, and given that I'm hoping to write about some nuclear issues in the Middle East, I think it would be good to review this one.

The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan: I have an audiobook of this one, and I'd like to give that audiobook a few evenings to refresh my memory. It's dated, but a lot of it is still relevant.

Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems and Prospects by Michael Quinlan: This book was much shorter and easier to wrap my head around than Freedman's book. Again, my interest in strategic nuclear doctrine recommends a refresher read of this one.

More to come.

OGHAP: The Epic Great War Timeline

While studying for my MSc in Strategic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, I wrote my in-class essay for my course in Strategic Theory on the following prompt: "Explain why and how the conduct of war was transformed between 1815 and 1914." My preparations included developing a timeline of armament, geopolitical, military, sociocultural, technical, and diplomatic (treaty) developments from Waterloo to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When I came to the realization that I'd be writing a book about the First World War, I dug that note sheet out and used it to begin developing a timeline of dates relevant to the Great War.

Initially, I was only tracking the dates, events, and which of the aforementioned categories they fell into. As I began researching the early battles on the Western Front, I tried to categorize engagements that were subsets of the Battle of the Frontiers, the Great Retreat, the Race to the Sea. As the list began to balloon in scope, the data quickly became prohibitively unruly, so I decided to organize it - and if I was going to reorganize it, I might as well expand it, right? I re-coded the dates into a "YYYY//MM//DD" format for easier chronological sorting. I also added some additional categories: theater; campaign; whether the military events are ground, naval, or amphibious in nature; and whether the British Expeditionary Force, British Imperial Forces, or neither took place in the engagement. Where relevant, I also track the Wikipedia entry for a given event or topic - I know, boo, hiss, Wikipedia, but it can be useful if you know what you're doing.

Having initially kept the timeline in my .txt manuscript, the expansion made it too unruly for that format. Porting it over into Excel has made the it much easier to manage the data, and Excel allows me to manipulate that data so that I can clump it together for easier use. It ended up being a massive undertaking, and it's still not complete, but I consider it an investment of time that will ultimately make my effort to document the war more efficient in the long run. I can also take pride in the fact that I've amalgamated a variety of sources to create a fairly authoritative timeline of the conflict. Maybe it will have some use beyond OGHAP? Only time will tell.

OGHAP: Primary Sources

When I was studying history as an undergrad, one of my professors was a borderline deranged lunatic on the topic of primary sources. For the uninitiated, primary sources are pieces of historical evidence that constitute eyewitness or participant accounts. If you submitted a paper to him (I think I submitted a total of four) that didn't rest largely on the testimony of primary sources, you were going to have a bad time. As I've researched the service of the Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, I've found myself making use of multiple primary sources.

Medal index cards are often the only remaining official record of a particular soldier's service. (Most First World War personnel service records were destroyed in the Blitz.) My contact in Orkney has diligently assisted me in identifying and procuring the medal cards for the soldiers in question. A few months ago, the BBC published this guide, which includes a guide to reading a medal card. These documents have been extremely valuable in establishing or confirming some basic facts about the various Orcadian Gordon Highlanders.

Earlier this year, I discussed my efforts to procure soldiers' wills for seven Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from the National Archives of Scotland. Since I wrote that post, my contact back in Orkney discovered several additional Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, and one has a will. My good buddy, CN Constable, has agreed to get it for me since the last effort took about a month and cost far more than it needed to.

The United Kingdom's National Archives (known colloquially as "Kew") are releasing and/or digitizing many documents for the Great War's centenary. One such effort is Operation War Diary, about which I learned a couple of months ago from one of War on the Rocks' (W)archives posts. (Here's more information about Operation War Diary.) Since information about many of the Orcadian Gordons is so sparse, I thought that this might be a good way to find information about the various battalions of the Gordon Highlanders, and possibly even about individual Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from my own roster. I put off participating in OWD until I had some time, at which point I discovered that none of the diaries available for tagging pertain to the Gordon Highlanders. However, Kew has a total of thirty-eight individual war diaries, ranging in length from about twelve pages to nearly six hundred. I expect to procure these records in the near future. The National Archives has a good webinar (also available, albeit less illustrative, as a podcast) about how to search for and correlate the various documents available in the archives for the purposes of historical research. I'm not sure I'll have need for more than medal cards and war diaries, but it might be interesting to see what additional resources might be available to allow me to continue researching this and related topics in the future.

I've worked with primary sources before, but this has been my first opportunity to do much archival history. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, and once I get the book published I may see if my undergraduate alma mater might be interested in having me out to lecture about my experiences doing historical research outside of academia.

Reading in 2015: Mid-Year Update

I recently posted about my progress on my 2015 reading goals. Since I'm doing so well in this endeavour, to the tune of probably exceeding my goals, I'm taking the next logical step by formulating insanely ambitious reading goals for subsequent years that I have no chance whatsoever of actually completing.

One author whose work I enjoyed in high school and college was the late Michael Crichton. Like many young people, I started with Jurassic Park, and continued with (in no particular order): Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, and Airframe. There are a number of Crichton's novels that I have yet to read, and I'd like to remedy that. I expect to forego the thrillers that the young Crichton wrote under the pseudonym "John Lange". That leaves some of his older works, and some of his later works: The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and Micro.

That's nine books, and while it might be fun to follow the nine books I'm likely to read this year with nine books by a single author, I suspect that it would get monotonous, and I have other priorities to satisfy as well. So, what other categories am I considering?

Still in the leisure category, I also read a number of Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novels during and after my undergraduate years. I still have yet to read For Your Eyes Only, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice. One of these, For Your Eyes Only, is a collection of short stories that was combined with Octopussy and The Living Daylights into Quantum of Solace in 2008, to coincide with the release of what may have been the worst Bond film ever made. I already read the latter collection around 2006, and I have the Quantum of Solace volume, so I'll just read those stories from that particular volume. Otherwise, I'll try to salt these into the mix along with the Crichton novels.

Aside from these two authors, I hope to read a few other books. One of these is Armor by John Steakley, which has been highly recommended to me for years, and which I attempted to read in 2014. Another is Animal Farm by George Orwell, which I also started reading years ago and only ever got a few pages into - maybe on a plane? I don't remember.

While I was in Scotland, I may have gotten about a quarter of the way into The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and I'd love to finish it at some point. I've also spent years trying to get through the audiobook of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and attempted to listen to Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island while on a road trip to the East Coast in 2014. Those may be good bedtime reading/listening projects for the winter months of 2015/'16.

As I continue to identify categories and books within those categories, I'll continue posting about it.