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Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Despite completely ignoring the obvious manner in which time actually progresses, this book is about as interesting as a glacier. Just because it takes 200 pages and three weeks of class lectures to explain it to me doesn't make it good. It makes it a mess. Still, the cute cartoon skull and crossbones on the cover is an excellent design, and if it had one less dash on the mouth I'd get it on a T-shirt (one less dash would have made the mouth a tally mark).

Playing catch up here;

The Goliath Bone by Mickey Spillane, a pulp novel I bought for five bucks, that reads like a pulp novel you'd buy for five bucks. Although with an interesting post 9/11 filter to it.

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. Many would know this as the novella that inspired John Carpenter's The Thing. To my surprise this only translates to about ten minutes worth of film, including blood testing sequence.

Herbert West - Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft. As a fan of the film leave it to Lovecraft to blow me away with an even better story. Scary as hell.

That's funny, I just finished I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane.

I like it. Like a modern day Raymond Chandler.

Last night I finished Sleeper: Season 1 by Ed Brubaker. It reads like the people behind The Wire wrote X-Men.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

A good book if you like it when a British person rambles about the beauty of American nature while ranting about the repulsiveness of American society, despite retreating too it once nature becomes too overwhelming for him.

Seriously, the author is such a hypocrite.

3/10- some of the American bashing was pretty funny, I admit.

This is the last book I have to read for school, though, so that made it exciting.

Finished the following:

Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs by Adrienne Mayor
The Elephant To Hollywood by Michael Caine (yes, THAT Michael Caine)
The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander
Batman: Year One by Frank Miller (yeah, it's a comic book)
The Bible And Recent Archaeology by Kathleen Kenyon

And just started The Human Web by J.R. & William McNeill

Just got done reading The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot for the third time. Yeah, it's probably my favorite book of all time and highly recommend it to everyone with an interest in military history, geopolitics, or real-life action/adventure stories. The book smashes the myth that things like nation-building, lengthy occupations of foreign countries, undeclared wars, counterinsurgency campaigns, regime changes, and serving under foreign officers are new to the American military. The United States was not an isolationist country prior to the World Wars as some believe, but always militarily intervening in other nation's affairs. Hell, the first attempted regime change by American was back in 1805 (an American-led expedition advanced into Tripoli [now Libya] to overthrow the country's monarch and replace him with his brother, but the war [First Barbary War] ended before they made much progress). Did you know the United States fought a brief, little war with Korea on Korean soil in 1871? This great book talks about various forgotten wars and conflicts in American's past.

Damn, this book is so exciting at times, filled with great battle stories about America's forgotten wars (in places like Latin America, the Philippines, China, the Pacific, Russia, and North Africa) that simply need to be made into movies. Hell, somebody should buy the rights to the book or whatever and make an epic T.V. mini-series. Marine officer Smedley Butler, who served in the Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, and China should have a biopic made about him (according to legend, while helping put down a rebellion in 1912 Nicaragua, he had to take a train through enemy territory, so he stood on top of the train swinging two sacks of sand and screaming "Dynamite!" to prevent the rebels from attacking). I could go on forever about the badass stories in this book (how about the American naval officer who tried to colonize a cannibal-filled Pacific island in 1813 without authorization from the government?), but you should probably just read the book. As a bonus, the book talks about how "small war" tactics could've won the Vietnam War. Not convinced? The book makes a Helluva case, in my opinion.

A warning though, the author, Max Boot, can come across as a bit militaristic at times (it almost seems like he's complaining that American servicemen in 1994 Haiti don't have the same "swashbuckling" qualities that American marines decades before had) and frequently speaks of the glory people in the military can achieve. He constantly fellates the U.S. Marine Corps and seems to downplay the economic exploitation of Third World countries by Western big business. In one part, he kinda says that servicemen dying overseas can be good because it can increase morale and the will to fight. That being said, most of his political commentary doesn't come out until the last few chapters, so most of the book is full of thrilling, fact-based retellings of the United States' forgotten imperialist past.

Besides the author's politics (he does make a lot of good points, though, so I'm not bashing everything he stands for), the only gripe I have with the book is that it doesn't really talk about the post-World War II "small wars." Vietnam and the major 1990s interventions (Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans) are talked about, but mainly to contrast them to previous military adventures, rather than to educate the reader on them.

Besides that book, I've read Charlton Heston's autobiography and several Osprey military history books lately.

Crime and Punishment.

The story behind this book is that an anti semite got really pissed off that he was arrested, so he wrote a novel about how he's better than everyone else and so it's okay for him to break the law.

Ignoring the bull crap moral and racism, this book is full of continuity errors like, "A shawl was draped around her bare shoulders," and redundant sentences, "He hated him with an intense, burning hatred."/"All of them without exception."/etc.

I didn't like it. Reading it in Boyka's voice was the only thing that made it bearable.


Roskolnikov is the most complete fighter in the world.

2/10

The Godfather, Battle Royale, and The Fear. The Fear for the first time, The Godfather and Battle Royale for about the 5th time.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

The first half is the most heavy handed Biblical symbolism I've ever read, but the second half is a deep, interesting character study with a twist on Biblical symbolism I didn't expect, but welcome entirely.

5/10. First half sucks. Second half rocks.