This year’s vacation reading material was quite different from last year, which was largely audiobooks. This year, with one exception (which itself is notable), I read honest-to-goodness dead-tree books.
The Stats:
Over the twenty days I was camping, I read 4,150 pages, with a low of 45 pages, a high of 654 pages, averaging 207 pages per day.
Red Storm Rising (1986) by Tom Clancy
One of my favourite stand-alone war stories. My paperback, which I think I picked up in the late 1980s has finally died, splitting into two or three chunks by the time I sailed through it.
This is, in my opinion, Clancy’s best individual work, and is probably the most human and approachable telling of what a war stemming from the Cold War days would be like, as opposed to the highly technical The Third World War: The Untold Story by Sir John Hackett.
I would absolutely love to see this turned into a mini-series, covering.. oh, twenty or thirty hours.
The Dying God and other stories by S.M. Carrière
This book I picked up at the 2013 Ottawa ComicCon directly from the author who had a booth right beside the Ottawa BrownCoats booth. The book sat patiently waiting for me to go on vacation to read it.
I don’t have the book in front of me now to go through the table of contents but, overall, it was quite enjoyable.The final (and title) story of the book stuck with me, as did River Woman. I’d love to see her revisit these down the road. I’ll certainly pick up another one of her books. Now I have to convince her to do audiobooks.
Sum of all Fears (1991) & Debt of Honor (1994) by Tom Clancy
Two books in the Jack Ryan arc, which I quite enjoyed re-reading.
Penguin History of Canada (1988 or so) by Kenneth McNaught
I picked this book up to feed my fascination with Canadian history, and was by far the slowest read of the trip. The writing is so… dry as to make history uninteresting. I start/stopped the book quite a few times, putting it down to read *anything* else.
Area 51 (2011) by Annie Jacobsen
I love me a good conspiracy theory or two, and this book is wrapped in a doozy, but most of the meat of the book is actually about aviation history (the development and deployment of the U-2 and A-12, particularly). I don’t think the author is an aviation enthusiast, so there are some errors and inaccuracies, but there are dozens of pages of notes, and when I have some time to revisit this, I’ll follow up on a few that caught my eye.
Flight of the Old Dog (1987) by Dale Brown
All my friends know I love the B-52 bomber. Give me a book about a tricked-out, modernized B-52 and I’m there. Not a particularly plausible scenario, even back when it was written, but fun none the less.
2600 (issues 30.1 & 30.2, Spring and Summer 2013)
This is the only magazine subscription I currently have, and the two issues I “saved up” for the trip have been a tradition for me for oh, … forever now.
True Canadian UFO Stories (2004) by John Robert Colombo
I think the work true should be quotes. Mixed feelings about the book.
The “audiobook”: Firefly, the series.
Yes, I took the DVD boxed set and converted it into an audiobook. I loved listening to the show this way, usually listening to one episode per night. Consuming the show this way certainly reminded me the importance of good audio designers. Yes, I have a blog post started on the how – it’s not too complicated, so stay tuned. I wrote a blog post detailing how to create an audiobook from the DVDs.