Book Chain, Week 15
Apr. 13th, 2026 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther#13: A book with a page count within 100 pages of the previous book
Second attempt: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. An account of the future history of mankind over the coming millennia, written in the 1930s and famous for its ambition and imaginative scope -- although not, of course, for the predictive accuracy of the opening chapters, which fail to foresee the Third Reich, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the splitting of the atom, among other things.
The foreword in the edition I read straight-up recommends the casual reader to skip the first 75 pages entirely and start reading at the point where civilisation collapses and the national and cultural distinctions of the twentieth century become irrelevant. Being of a completist bent, I did not take this advice, and, despite the promise of better times ahead, didn't make it past page 50. It wasn't actually the failed political forecasts that did me in; I found the wide misses amusing, and some of the hits are worryingly acute. (The foreword, written during the Reagan administration, ranks the depiction of the USA's future development with the depiction of peace-loving Germany as one of the least successful predictions, but from our current standpoint forty years later I'm thinking it's actually one of the more accurate aspects.) Occasionally, the narrative descends from the broad sweep of history to give a detailed account of a specific event, and it was during one of these -- in which a highly artificial situation was discussed in highly artificial dialogue that went on for several pages -- that I decided I had better things to do with my time. At this point, my trust in Stapledon's grasp of human nature is not high enough to sustain a curiosity about his thoughts on humanity's future.
Third attempt: Wolf's Lair by James McGee. An ex-soldier turned smuggler is hired to join an expedition seeking the final resting place of a German U-boat that disappeared at the end of the War carrying a cargo of gold bullion and a dangerous macguffin.
An adventure story that I picked up from a second-hand book stall out of idle curiosity, a procedure which has frequently led to disappointment and did so again in this case. By this point I should know better than to bother with thrillers based on Secret Histories of the Last Days of WW2. It's the kind of story populated by manly men who do manly things like blowing lovingly-described holes in each other with lovingly-described machine guns, and there's not a lot to pick between the good guys and the bad guys if it weren't for the bad guys being literal Nazis. The only female character showed up halfway through, just after I'd concluded there were going to be no female characters, and contributed nothing except to be a decorative object for some of the manly men to fight over. There's a lot of running around and convenient coincidences and a bit where the action stops for a dozen pages while the villain delivers a lecture on the author's carefully-worked-out backstory for the macguffin, which is presumably as gratifying as the action scenes for the kind of reader who enjoys Secret Histories of the Last Days of WW2.
The ending was less unsatisfactory than the last one of these I read, on the understanding that the last one of these I read set the bar so low that it would require digging equipment (or perhaps an U-boat) to avoid clearing it. But at least I got to the ending, and can now move on.
#14: A book with a higher average rating than the previous book
I didn't have anything particular in mind, so I decided to hit the local library and see what I came away with. What I came away with was Dead Wake, Erik Larson's account of the final voyage of the RMS Lusitania. I had only the vaguest memory of what the Lusitania died of; it turns out that this is, in part, another German U-boat story.
Second attempt: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. An account of the future history of mankind over the coming millennia, written in the 1930s and famous for its ambition and imaginative scope -- although not, of course, for the predictive accuracy of the opening chapters, which fail to foresee the Third Reich, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the splitting of the atom, among other things.
The foreword in the edition I read straight-up recommends the casual reader to skip the first 75 pages entirely and start reading at the point where civilisation collapses and the national and cultural distinctions of the twentieth century become irrelevant. Being of a completist bent, I did not take this advice, and, despite the promise of better times ahead, didn't make it past page 50. It wasn't actually the failed political forecasts that did me in; I found the wide misses amusing, and some of the hits are worryingly acute. (The foreword, written during the Reagan administration, ranks the depiction of the USA's future development with the depiction of peace-loving Germany as one of the least successful predictions, but from our current standpoint forty years later I'm thinking it's actually one of the more accurate aspects.) Occasionally, the narrative descends from the broad sweep of history to give a detailed account of a specific event, and it was during one of these -- in which a highly artificial situation was discussed in highly artificial dialogue that went on for several pages -- that I decided I had better things to do with my time. At this point, my trust in Stapledon's grasp of human nature is not high enough to sustain a curiosity about his thoughts on humanity's future.
Third attempt: Wolf's Lair by James McGee. An ex-soldier turned smuggler is hired to join an expedition seeking the final resting place of a German U-boat that disappeared at the end of the War carrying a cargo of gold bullion and a dangerous macguffin.
An adventure story that I picked up from a second-hand book stall out of idle curiosity, a procedure which has frequently led to disappointment and did so again in this case. By this point I should know better than to bother with thrillers based on Secret Histories of the Last Days of WW2. It's the kind of story populated by manly men who do manly things like blowing lovingly-described holes in each other with lovingly-described machine guns, and there's not a lot to pick between the good guys and the bad guys if it weren't for the bad guys being literal Nazis. The only female character showed up halfway through, just after I'd concluded there were going to be no female characters, and contributed nothing except to be a decorative object for some of the manly men to fight over. There's a lot of running around and convenient coincidences and a bit where the action stops for a dozen pages while the villain delivers a lecture on the author's carefully-worked-out backstory for the macguffin, which is presumably as gratifying as the action scenes for the kind of reader who enjoys Secret Histories of the Last Days of WW2.
The ending was less unsatisfactory than the last one of these I read, on the understanding that the last one of these I read set the bar so low that it would require digging equipment (or perhaps an U-boat) to avoid clearing it. But at least I got to the ending, and can now move on.
#14: A book with a higher average rating than the previous book
I didn't have anything particular in mind, so I decided to hit the local library and see what I came away with. What I came away with was Dead Wake, Erik Larson's account of the final voyage of the RMS Lusitania. I had only the vaguest memory of what the Lusitania died of; it turns out that this is, in part, another German U-boat story.
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Date: 2026-04-13 10:13 pm (UTC)This book sounds remarkably similar to the 1970s thriller I just read, with the exception that in that case the *protagonists* (I hesitate to say 'good guys') were literal Nazis...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2851489-hellfire