What are people reading?

Have just started reading Paul Preston's magnificent biography, Franco. In his early career he seems to have been entirely devious and never to be trusted.

Spelling in the Title.!!   

Nothing right now ('cept this post obviously). I need to get reading glasses in the next week. Then I might actually read Richard Flanagan's book from last year The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Finished Preston's bio of Franco. What a small, mean-minded criminal mediocrity he was. Well worth a look at.
Now reading Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally. China's World War II, 1937-1945. Excellent, once you get used to the pinyin romanisation.

Had the good fortune to be in Spain not long after Franco's demise and saw four decades of pent-up exuberance let loose.   It was great.  

The sad thing is that the Spanish people, having endured the Civil War and then Franco's mis-government, suffered so unfairly and continue to suffer because of the crooks who got rich through the so-called Global Financial Crisis.

b.t.w., it wasn't China's World War II that started with the Lu Kou Ch'iao (Lugouqiao) Incident on 7-7-1937, that was the start of World War II itself.   Though the shooting on the Polish-German border didn't happen until Act II, Scene 2.

Now reading Hugh Thomas's The Golden Age. The Spanish Empire of Charles V. Its the second volume of his planned trilogy. First volume was Rivers of Gold. He's over 80 so I don't know if he'll live to finish it. Crammed with fascinating detail, but it takes a lot of concentration reading it and the print is small. 695 pp.

Wonders will never cease. After years and years I finally got round to ordering a novel on line and I should have it in a few weeks.
It is Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Not published in Russia til the late 1980s, Grossman is supposed, with this book to have written the 20th century War and Peace. We'll see. I'm certainly hanging out for it to arrive.

I've given up on the Hugh Thomas Book. The print is too small, the work's organisation too dense or digressive or something. Very hard to keep track of. A bit of a disappointment, really, as I really enjoyed his Rivers of Gold, enough even to recommend it to people. Have other books to read rather than struggling through this latest one..
While I sort of believe you should read a book through to the end once you start it, if you're not enjoying you should move on to something else. I've never got beyond the pins or the nails or whatever they were in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for example.
So now I'm reading Hannah Greig's The Beau Monde. Easily readable print, clarity of style, well organised and easy to follow. Its about the life of the privileged in 18c London. Seems well worth a look if you're into that sort of thing.

Paul Burns: Still wondering why my comment failed to appear.  I said that you did well not to waste your life away trying to plough through convoluted or badly disorganized books.  

The opportunity cost of persisting with one badly written tome is the time that could have been spent reading, perhaps, half a dozen well written books.

GB,
A sentiment I share exactly.
Though I have to be careful don't have too many books on the go at once.

Well, I'm part-way through Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore, in which a teenage runaway who takes up residence in the corner of a library, a WW2 mystery, an old man who has conversations with cats, a sleazy pimp who in reality is Colonel Sanders (of Kentucky Fried Chicken), a cat-murderer who is actually a sentient Johnnie Walker Whisky logo, and a brutal murder are all inter-related.

Complex, but rather a good read (even in translation)

Wow! Sounds unputdownable!

Currently reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. This is the first time I've read a novel for years, and wow, what a novel. Not able to be published in Russia til about 1988, it is now recognised as the 20th C's equivalent of War and Peace. I'm not kidding. And what a magnificent equivalent it is. Ranging in location from Stalingrad durin WW2, to the Urals, and various other places in the USSR, including a labour camp and the Lubyanka prison in Moscow to a Nazi death and concentration camps, it follows the fortunes of the Shaposhnikov family and their friends as acquaintances, much as War and Peace followed the Rostov's.
Nowhere near finished it yet but it is unputdownable. A Russian masterpiece one should not miss.

Good News.

Brian Bahnisch will soon have his new blog on climate and related issues up and running.

Yes, looking forward to that.
Update on what I've been reading: The new translation of Dr. Zhivago - moved me to tears.
Vassily Aksynov's Generations of Winter and The Winter's Hero A stunning series of novels about life under Stalinism.
Have ordered Craig Nelson's The Age of Radiance. The latest history of the Atomic Age. Its had good reviews.

Have just started reading "Anzac's Long Shadow" - about the manufacture and marketing and the effects of the Gallipoli legend - written by a veteran of our longest war: Afghanistan.

I read that last month (May). I found it extraordinarily interesting, and the last part had me rather worried about what may very well happen in the next couple of decades.