Book Fest
It’s been a while since I’ve book-blogged. I’ve devoured several books recently.
 |
Canadians: A Battalion At War: Canadians in the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, 1940 to 1945 A collection of short articles and memoirs as told by survivors in the Queen’s Own Rifles Battalion during WWII. My grandfather was in the QOR for WWII so this was of particular personal interest. These memoirs really drill home what an absolute nightmare it was. It’s traumatic just reading it. I can’t imagine living it. |
 |
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut An irreverent classic that I finally got around to reading. Impossible to describe. |
 |
Godplayers by Damien Broderick A surreal sci-fi melding a pile of old sci-fi themes with lots of new transhuman themes and speculative physics. More of a narrative than a proper novel. I found the plot and characters very unbelievable. I suspect it was intentional, but I didn’t like it anyways. Skippable. |
 |
The Longevity Diet by Brian M. Delaney & Lisa Walford A light and gentle introduction to the Caloric Restriction (CR) Diet. This book is aimed more at the general diet-book audience and is much lighter on the heavy science in other books on the topic. It is a great book to pick up if you are curious about the CR diet, but if you decide to try CR, I highly recommend doing more in-depth research and going through some of the more dense reading materials. |
 |
The Guns of Victory by George C. Blackburn The followup to Blackburn’s first book The Guns of Normandy which is by far the best book I’ve ever read on WWII. In The Guns of Normandy we follow Blackburn’s artillery regiment through the Normandy campaign. The Guns of Victory picks up where the first book left off, following the the Canadians into Belgium, the Netherlands, and into Germany. We see the horrors of battling through the Scheldt Estuary, fighting through flooded farmlands polder to polder with no cover and muck up to the ears. Canadians suffered over 6000 casualties during the bitter fighting for the port of Antwerp and Walcheren Island. Later, we follow the battle of the Rhineland and the push into Germany where even the civilians could turn deadly. Again, this book is of great personal interest to me as it traces much of the path my grandfather took through Europe. It’s an incredible series for anyone who wants to know the unromantic, unsanitized, hollywood-free, god-awful truth of WWII infantry life. |
That’s some diverse reading there. A few of those look interesting.