We call this "The Outback" method

I'm currently reading
- Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain
- The Course
- The Staff Engineer's Path
- Release It!

I read Without Remorse by Tom Clancy a few months ago. I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction books about my favorite hobbies, with some fiction thrown in now and again.

Tom Clancy. 100 pages of storyline. 400 pages of weapons manual

I’ve enjoyed a few Clancys and they’ve made some great movies from them, but eventually his rampaging erection for the technical specs of weapons put me off.

I've heard good things about Hardcore History, but I hate podcasts, so...

That blog sounds awesome, and right up my alley. I love daily life and society studies. I read a lot of Social History, though not so much ancient. Most Revolutionary Era through WWII, with a bit of medieval for obvious reasons. I'll definitely check it out, though.

My reading is very eclectic, though I obv read a lot of history for work (I'm a history professor too). For fun, I read history that is not related to classes I teach or books I'm working on, and a lot of science fiction, including a bunch of alternate history. Right now I'm reading "What If," by Randal Munroe of xkcd fame. It's a book of "serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions."

OMG, TJ, this is amazingly good stuff. Rigorous but approachable. I love it!

Thanks for the tip. GG, productivity.

ETA: Also, the more of it I read, the more I'm convinced that he shares my medieval combat hobby, though I think in a different group.

yeah thank tj i never heard of the 2nd one

garick, you may not like his style because he's very much a campfire storyteller focusing on incredibly interesting tidbits and outliers, but dan carlin is awesome

like on his 8 hour pod on the eastern front of wwii he found an exchange in the soviet archives where a unit was ordered to move 1 kilometer to the east, this meant putting them on the other side of a river, too fearful of being insubordinate, the co did not mention they had no pontoons to cross and forced his men into the river at gunpoint and they all drowned, command was annoyed he did not put in a request for pontoons, but couldn't be too upset because he did faithfully execute the orders

so obviously that wasn't a normal day on the eastern front by any means, but still an incredible anecdote, he of course does a 100x better job of retelling it than I do

If you want to read a novel that dramatises a part of war/history you might not be too familiar with, check out

‘the narrow road to the deep north’ by Richard Flanagan

It’s based in a Japanese POW camp in 1943 Burma. It’s a rarity for a Booker winner in that it is unpretentious and very readable as well as being beautifully crafted. And as well as being a rewarding story it tells in graphic detail of the extreme savagery of the Japs

Crikey!

Like I said, I've heard good things, even from fellow academics. I just don't have any interest in the spoken-word style. I don't listen to audio books either. 1) I read way faster than people talk, so I always get impatient. 2) I can't check the footnotes. There aren't any. 3) The format sucks for starting and stopping, and I'm not listening to a 1 hour podcast straight though, much less 8. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Without Remorse is one of the better ones in that regard. But I agree it can get a little over the top.

When I was in college, I read several books by Richard Marcinko, which were a lot worse for that type of stuff. His books are "paperback romance"- level, Tom Clancy knockoffs.

If you enjoy some historical fiction (but generally accurate) type books...

I recommend Allan W. Eckert's series "The Winning of America". If you have any interest in the early days of the frontier/colonial era you will enjoy it.

I also recommend the series on Genghis Khan written by Conn Iggulden. I knew a little about the Mongol Empire going into this series but found out exactly how much I didn't know or had forgotten.

On the Tom Clancy front, I think I enjoyed his run of Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, and The Bear and the Dragon the most. Red Storm Rising was also very good.

It no longer looks like something DMW made, so yes, much better.

Thank you.

The Economist had an article a couple of weeks ago about how long one should wait after the event before writing history about it. Certainly on one end, people are already trying to write "history" about the Ukraine War. There was the point that was made that histories needed to be re-written in the 1970s after the Allies declassified their code breaking effort in WWII. And of course Chou En Lai's comment on the French revolution "too soon to tell" represents the other end.

What is the considered opinion of the historians here?

Then there's a reverse survivorship bias. The many battles where one side fled the field were not studied, and may have been written off as between battle skirmishing.

Never build a memorial until the subject has been dead for a min of 10 years.
Never tear one down if there is no one alive has met him.

And for historical non-fiction, very accurate we can search your late night and a bottle deep ebay buying history. It’s an entertaining read.

I don't care what you guys say, the Planet of the Apes cartoon DVDs and the various swords were quality purchases.

IMHO: If anyone who worked on the problem is still working (as in, not yet retired or dead), it's a lessons-learned study, not history. If everyone who was alive at the time is dead now, it's history. for the things in-between, it depends.

I used to read Victor Davis Hanson's books on Ancient Greece. Now I read all day, read the fora and social media at the end of the day; the last thing I want for fun is more reading.

Glancing over that long-winded medieval blog I did not see anything that indicates my old Dungeons and Dragons players handbook was wrong. Their classes of armor were: leather, ring mail, chain mail, plate mail, suit of armor.

Here. Try this entry that shows you that plate mail is not a thing. Additionally, ring mail has only been seen in art, not in any extant pieces, and is probably an artist's shorthand for regular (or "chain") mail because they were too lazy to draw all the interlocking links.

Wikipedia purports that "mail AND plate" armor was a thing. But I don't see standalone plate mail mentioned.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_plate_armour

Yeah, you can find that stuff in Eastern Europe, likely from influence from the Mongols. In Western Europe, plate was often worn with mail underneath, either in the form of a shirt, or at least in patches to cover up spots like the armpits, but they weren't attached like that. You can find similar stuff in India,with plates permanently attached to mail in the most vulnerable spots. Usually it was attached over the mail, but occasionally it replaced a spot in the mail, which attached to the plates via a bunch of little holes around the edges of each plate.

But mail is mail (the interlocking rings) and all those other words that end in mail are ones made up in the Victorian era, including chain-mail as a name for the interlocking rings, though only the most pedantic correct that one.

Garrick, are you writing/have you published a book or just academic papers? No need to dox yourself just curious.

I am writing a book. It's been through two rounds of peer review, and I've been putting off doing the (hopefully last) set of revisions because I've been really busy and also because I really don't think some of the stuff one of the reviewers asks for actually makes it better. So it's been a tough slog.

Just finished my heavy teaching load for the school year, though. Going camping for a week and then hitting revisions hard.