Working on the Compendium

I’m currently up with Anne in Lerwick for Up Helly Aa, visiting friends: you won’t see much blogging, but I’m attempting to wrap the Compendium this week and next (both of which I have off work). First on the list are working my way through Guy Halsall’s “Worlds of Arthur” and adding a campaign section o the Compendium based on some discussion on Facebook and some ideas I already had kicking around.

More reading/listening

Not much chance for practical hobby stuff yesterday, as I was off to Hull for my annual eye checkup. Having time to listen to stuff on the train, I was continuing my way through D-Day Through German Eyes Book 2 (link to Kindle version) - interesting stuff. Basically, it's pretty literal transcripts of interviews with German survivors of D-Day, that were conducted in the 50s by the author's grandfather while writing for 'Die Wermacht' magazine. A wide range of accounts, many with vastly differing views on the war, the French, the British, the Americans...

Browning FP-45 - CC BY 4.0,
from https://digitaltmuseum.se/011024251246/pistol-fp-45

The interesting one yesterday was an interview with German military policeman Niklaus Lange, and his account of a resistance assassination of a Panzer officer using a Browning FP-45 Liberator, essentially a one-shot pistol dropped for the French Resistance's use. Lange (judging from the transcript) clearly was still suffering from PTSD, but it remains a fascinating account.

Background reading... well, listening...

Had a pleasant morning in bed yesterday (a lie in, yay) re-listening to "D-Day: Through German Eyes" on Audible. (And was gigging last night so didn't have time to post this).

Interesting book (and I must get on with part 2, too), based on 5 accounts recorded in the 50s. Fascinating to see how the perspective (obviously) differs from the much-more-often read Allied accounts. Well worth a look or listen.

The good and the bad of audio books

For the first time ever last week I asked for a refund on an Audible book (yes you can do that, surprisingly!)

The book in question was "Hawk Of May", the first in Gillian Bradshaw's excellent trilogy of Arthurian/Dark Ages novels about Gwalchmai ap Lot (Gawain). I own it in print and I adore the series, but given I had credits to burn, I figured having it to listen to on my commute would be good inspiration for Dux Britannoiarum.

Oh. Dear.

Let me quote my review:

Quite honestly, this is unlistenable. The (American) narrator affects a range of supposedly Scots accents for the characters (including the first person narrator), and they are, I'm sorry to say, unlistenably, almost embarrassingly bad. Gwalchmai (the narrator) as a teenager sounds at BEST like Wee Jimme Krankie, and is at worst borderline incomprehensible.

The reading has pretty much ruined the story for me, so much that I've actually stopped listening,. 

The video link to the right is the first 15 mins, which was about all I could stand. Some of the American reviewers actually liked it!

So, to easy my disappointment, I'm now two chapters in to Bernard Cornwell's "The Winter King", read by someone with a much better grasp of accents.... which is prompting interesting thoughts on the nature of magic in its world.

Holiday reading... ok, listening

Given my current gaming addiction (Sails of Glory, in case you've been on holiday longer than I have) it may come as no surprise to learn what my holiday listening was.

My right eye is still not 100%, so instead of print (which also takes up valuable luggage space) or e-books, I've been using up Audble.com credits on the Alexander Kent "Richard Bolitho" series of Napoleonic-era naval books - the series is being read by British actor Michael Jayston, who brings just the right aura, and a wide range of accents, to the novels. I was kind of hoping to grab some good SoG scenario material out of them, but Bolitho is, of course, the hero of a book. and thus most of his victories come against odds ranging from the unfavourable to the impossible, so some tweaking will, I suspect, be required.

Good to dip in to them again - Jayston reads them very well, and they're a bunch of rattling good yarns.

Audio book review - "Night Raid"

To give it its full title, "Night Raid: The True Story of the First Victorious British Para Raid of WWII", by Taylor Downing. It's the story of Operation Biting, the paratroop raid on the German Würzburg radar facility at Bruneval in northern France.

Actually, it's quite a bit more than that - it starts off with the para drop, and then flips back to cover the history of radar before and during the war, the set up of combined arms operations under Louis Mountbatten, and ranges widely about just about anything that's even remotely connected to the raid. To be fair, the raid itself would probably only merit a short book, maybe three or four chapters, but the surrounding context makes for fascinating reading (or in this case listening).

If I have a gripe, it's that the author seems to forget what he's written, and if, for example, he needs to mention an event in two different chapters in two different contexts, it's covered the second time as if he'd never mentioned it before. If I did that in an essay I'd have been accused of padding. :D

That aside? Cracking story, and one I quite fancy trying to war-game. The audio book is read by Gordon Griffin, which is pretty much all you need to know: clear, well-phrased, subtle \character' voices, well up to his usual standard.

Well worth a read or a listen. 

Book Review - "The Last British Dambuster"

I'm actually listening to this (as a break for my still-iffy eyes) rather than reading it, but I'd strongly recommend it either way - the audio book is superbly read.

This is the autobiography of George "Johnny" Johnson, DFM, bomb aimer with Joe McCarthy's crew on the Dams raid and veteran of two tours of duty with Bomber Command. As well as being the story of his life both in and out of the RAF, it's one of the few books that seems to convey what it was actually like to be part of the crew of a Lanc.

Look, just read it, ok? :D 

Audio book review - John Julius Norwich, "Shakespeare's Kings"

Or, to give it its full title, Shakespeare's Kings: the Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485.

I'm loving this - it is, pretty much, what the title says: a review of history from Edward III through to Richard III, and a comparison between history and Shakespeare's retelling of it. "Edward III?" you say. Yes, I was surprised too, but it appears that recent textual analysis suggests that it was at least partly written by Shakespeare (the wide range of opinions on the whole authorship question of his plays aside!).

As usual, I'm listening to it slightly fragmentarily on my commute, which has been aided by a few weekend round trips to Ely for rehearsals. The approach Norwich takes is to cover the historical period of one of the plays, look at the actual history, with reference to contemporary sources, predominantly Hollinshed, and then step back and compare what we know against what Shakespeare wrote. It's a fun and interesting approach, and in addition to being a good history lesson, leaves me wanting to grab a copy of the Complete BBC Shakespeare, the Branagh Henry V and the BBC's new "Hollow Crown" series.

My one gripe: the reader has a slightly forced delivery, and a tendency to pause before... complicated words, or words in... Français. As it were. Other than that? really enjoying it.

Audiobook review - "Anarchy" - Stewart Binns

I was mildly amused to discover, partway through listening to the Audible audiobook of this, that I had an earlier book in the series on my unread pile. Only mildly amused, because, to be honest, by about halfway through, I was pretty much convinced I didn't want to read another!

What can I say? I love good historical fiction, the kind where the author does good research into the period, and then fleshes out history with plausible, well-written speculative insights into the characters and events that history presents. I was really hoping this would be on a par with Sharon Penman's superb 'When Christ and His Saints Slept' as an inspiration and insight into what's potentially a fascinating period to wargame in - a good historical novel is just as speculative as a good wargame.

Sadly, it wasn't. The hero is the fictitious 'Hal of Hereford', a descendant of Hereward the Wake and a bearer of the mystical 'Talisman of Truth', an implausible sounding pendant that links Hereward, the hero, Richard the Lionheart and lord alone knows who else. He feels like an implausibly heroic and self-indulgent "Marty Stu" - by less than halfway through the book he's become a knight of Venice and co-founder of the Knights Templar (which he then deserts), before we're 2/3 through he's met John Komnenos, survived the wrath of Henry I, and is busy stealing Empress Matilda's affections from Geoffrey of Anjou, and fathering a line of English kings...

As a pseudo-historical roll in the hay, it's sort of OK. Except that for a book titled "Anarchy", I find it a bit of a con, given that Henry I doesn't die until chapter 25 of 37, and the account of the ensuing decade and a half (i.e. the Anarchy of the title) skips from Wikipedia high spot to Wikipedia high spot (the Battle of Lincoln, Matilda's entry into London, and her escape from Oxford being pretty much it), and wraps up before Stephen dies, leaving the accession of Henry II to a postscript and entirely glossing over most of the last seven or eight years of Stephen's reign (in which our hero is living in blissful sin with Matilda in Aquitaine... and MAN does he overuse the word 'blissful'). Somewhere along the way (and I'm actually facepalming and shouting at the car stereo at this point) the hero also adopts the pseudonym 'Robin of Hode' (oh puhlease), gets made Earl of Huntington by Henry I (for massively implausible reasons to do with keeping the whiny Matilda happy after Henry finds out the hero's sleeping with his daughter), and awarded lands in Barnsedale and (oh, look) Sherwood Forest. Oh, and his loyal sidekick Eadmer (masquerading as, wait for it, William of Scarlett) makes up songs about Robin which become popular ballads...

Stephen of Blois, unlike Penman's take on him, is just obnoxiously arrogant and unlikeable. And then there's the whiny, lovesick, earthy, sexy, gorgeous Matilda, who has to go to 'Hal' to make any key decision in her life, and has some of the most awfully stilted dialogue - in fact, dialogue is not his strong point. This was not helped by an unfortunate quirk of the guy reading the audiobook, who actually did a decent job on switching voices up until the point that I realised one of his female voices sounded like K9 from Dr. Who, after which it was kind of hard to take them seriously.

I guess it must have something going for it, since I did manage to finish it (although some of that was just a degree of morbid curiosity). If you want a pseudo-historical romp, it's, like I said, not bad. But it doesn't hold a candle to Penman.

Audiobook review - Alison Weir "Lancaster and York"

A COMPLETE contrast to the previous audiobook... Superbly written, and superbly read.

For all I did the Wars Of The Roses in school, there's so much I didn't know about the causes and the personalities. At least I can now tell Richard III of York from Richard the 3rd Duke of York ;)

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/History/Lancaster-and-York-Audiobook/B0084E1U76?bp_ua=y

(Audio)Book review - "Decision in Normandy" - Carlo D'Este, read by Tom Weiner

I could wait till I've finished this before I review it, but quite honestly, most of what I want to say isn't going to change if I wait, so...

The book is subtitled "The Real Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign", which sums it up pretty well. It's a breakdown of the higher level politics and command decisions involved in the planning and execution of the British/Commonwealth side of the D-Day invasion. As such? It'd probably make a fun read.

However, it's badly let down by the performance on the recording. By contrast with Gordon Griffin's excellent Peter Fleming "Operation Sea Lion" book, there's very little light and shade in Weiner's voice: it's a dull, flat reading, in which it feels more like he's just reading the words than actually following the narrative. He doesn't pause for section breaks, he doesn't audibly change his 'voice' for quotes (and believe me, there are enough quotes in this book that that's a biggie)...

In short? I may go find a print copy to find out what I missed.

(Audio) Book Review - "The Liberator" by Alex Kershaw

[Flying back to Seattle today. Should have more time in the evenings for the rest of this week - being mostly over the jet lag helps!

Must not succumb to 15mm 'Nam...]

Picked this up on my Audible subscription a month or so ago: it's the biography of Felix Sparks, an officer in the US 157th Infantry Regiment from the Sicily invasion through to the liberation of Germany during WW2.

Impressions?

From a wargamer/military history point of view, it did open my eyes rather to the 'other' European campaigns (Sicily, Italy and the South of France), which is good, as I think we do tend to all get a bit hung up on the glories of D-Day and the Normandy campaign. Certainly gave me some ideas.

The writing is definitely more of a biography than a military history - it does also jump viewpoint characters a bit, for all it's about Sparks. My major gripes? The excusable one is the classic 'every gun's an 88' - not quite true in this case, but there are things referred to as '88s that I'd be very surprised if they were. The author also suffers a bit from the 'make and model'-itis disease a lot of military writers do - everything on the US side has to have its model name... My major gripe, though is that Kershaw does get a bit 'gosh wow' about stats - every artillery barrage is categorised in terms of rounds/minute, and every one tries to be the worst yet, for example.

That aside? An interesting and thought-provoking listen. The author does a particularly good job of covering the controversy surrounding the shooting of a number of SS soldiers by some of Sparks' men during the liberation of Dachau. I need to do some more research from other viewpoints about the whole story of those events, but Kershaw certainly makes me want to do so.

The book's full title is The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey From the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau, and if you'd rather read it than listen to it, that's an Amazon link.

Peter Fleming - "Operation Sea Lion"

Since a couple of folks have asked, I thought I'd share what I plumped for as weekend listening while I was supposed to be taking it easy. As it turned out, I didn't actually get much listening done - they were pretty keen to get me out of the room on the day, and I spent half of the Sunday asleep...

But, I did cash in a free Audible.co.uk subscription for a copy of Peter Fleming's 1957 book "Operation Sea Lion". Fleming was Bond author Ian's brother, and the book dates back to a time sufficiently soon after the war that he could draw on a lot more eye-witness accounts than more recent books.

The audio book is 12 hours long, so it's currently keeping me company in 15 minute chunks on my commute... [counts on fingers: so that'll last me about 3 more weeks]. It's read by the amazingly prolific Gordon Griffin, who's done well over 600 audio books, and who has, to be fair, the perfect delivery to do Fleming's delightfully British prose justice, as well as slipping into a quite subtle German accent where necessary. I have to admit, I'm really enjoying it - Fleming isn't a journalist per se, so you won't find this having the tone of something by, say, Max Hastings. He's very much a crafter of words, with some delightful turns of phrase and astute observations.

To be honest? It's a better book to listen to than it would be to read, I think. I'll review it properly when I'm done.