What are you reading

[Profpointy]

Just finished this

It's an account of the disastrous Dieppe Raid which achieved nothing with heavy casualties. The story in earlier books was that it was a vital practice run for D-day and there was never any intent than it being any more than an experiment. This book, digs into the story a bit more and concludes that it was from the off a "pinch operation" to try and get hold of code books and other Enigma related material and the larger raid was more or or less a cover. He makes a good case, and everything is referenced to a particular source. The mention of Ian Fleming on the cover is quite central as rather than a mere observer, it seems he had the key role of getting the materials "pinched" quickly and safely back to Bletchley. I found the whole story reasonably convincing as the Dieppe raid otherwise made little sense, and of course, the whole Enigma story was only declassifiedc in the 80s so any previously published accounts of Dieppe could not even allude to the big secret at the heart of it

The above is not a spoiler as it is on the back cover and the whole point of the book

 

[oldwheels]

Just been rereading Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett.
Pure hokum of course but entertaining .
One reference a modern generation my not believe is about tomato growing and I remember my father telling me about it.
He was a time served gardener and served as apprentice and journeyman in the gardens of “ big houses”. Plumbing was in many of them a bit rudimentary and chamber pots and dry privies were all emptied into a large tank in the garden and then diluted and used for watering tomatoes.
Produced great tomatoes apparently but nowadays such methods probably no longer exist in the UK anyway.

 

[Conrad_K]

This book, digs into the story a bit more and concludes that it was from the off a "pinch operation" to try and get hold of code books and other Enigma related material and the larger raid was more or or less a cover. He makes a good case,

The "just a disastrous experiment" story never made sense - there were lots of places the men and resources squandered at Dieppe could have been more useful, even had it been successful - but the "to steal Enigma stuff" doesn't make much sense either. Bletchley Park already had several types of Enigma machines to play with; they were sold commercially in the 1930s. And ordinary espionage had obtained several code books. The problem was, even with the code books, without that particular day's key there wasn't much that could be done. And every branch of the German military and diplomatic corps had *different* Enigma machines, sometimes more than one.

I guess I'll have to get a copy of the book and see follow the author's reasoning.

 

[Conrad_K]

Just been rereading Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett.
Pure hokum of course but entertaining .

I'm a huge Pratchett fan, and I'm sure the book was full of in-jokes and allusions all the railheads squeed at, but not knowing or caring anything about trains, I'd rate that one as "barely worth reading."

pterry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's eight years before "Raising Steam" hit the bookshelves, so I'm not going to be too critical about the book.

 

[C R]

I'm a huge Pratchett fan, and I'm sure the book was full of in-jokes and allusions all the railheads squeed at, but not knowing or caring anything about trains, I'd rate that one as "barely worth reading."

pterry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's eight years before "Raising Steam" hit the bookshelves, so I'm not going to be too critical about the book.

I found it disappointing too, as many others did as well. At the time it was said that the effect of the disease was starting to show.

 

[oldwheels]

I'm a huge Pratchett fan, and I'm sure the book was full of in-jokes and allusions all the railheads squeed at, but not knowing or caring anything about trains, I'd rate that one as "barely worth reading."

pterry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's eight years before "Raising Steam" hit the bookshelves, so I'm not going to be too critical about the book.

The book has allusions to all sorts of things a modern generation will never have heard of. I remember putting half pennies on the rail line to our local coal mine for example. Some adventurous ones stole detonators from the pit which made a bang when the train went over. We did it at a bridge near the pit as it signalled an emergency stop but the train was going to stop anyway and just ignored the bang.
That is only one example of many in the book.

I'm a huge Pratchett fan, and I'm sure the book was full of in-jokes and allusions all the railheads squeed at, but not knowing or caring anything about trains, I'd rate that one as "barely worth reading."

pterry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's eight years before "Raising Steam" hit the bookshelves, so I'm not going to be too critical about the book.

The railhead references are pretty minimal but there are lots of other things.

 

[bitsandbobs]

View attachment 743874
Set in the near future, in a newly unified Ireland. It's that rarest of books, a literary thriller and the writing is poetic Irish at its best.

Is that right? The book speaks of people leaving for the "North" which I took to be reference to people crossing a border into Northern Ireland.


Of course, it's not entirely relevant as the book to a largely avoids political specifics.

View attachment 743874
Set in the near future, in a newly unified Ireland. It's that rarest of books, a literary thriller and the writing is poetic Irish at its best.

Is that right? The book speaks of people leaving for "the north" - the implication is that they're crossing a border, presumably into northern ireland.


I'm not quite sure how successful the central conceit of grounding a forced migration experience in the bourgeoisie of a wealthy european country is. For one thing, Ireland spends virtually nothing on "defence", so it's difficult to understand where all the military hardware appears from. I guess the author would say that's not really the point and I suppose that's fair. On the other hand, I think the best dystopian writing has at least some plausibility about it.

I've recently read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. I found those more persuasive (and better written).

 

[Profpointy]

The "just a disastrous experiment" story never made sense - there were lots of places the men and resources squandered at Dieppe could have been more useful, even had it been successful - but the "to steal Enigma stuff" doesn't make much sense either. Bletchley Park already had several types of Enigma machines to play with; they were sold commercially in the 1930s. And ordinary espionage had obtained several code books. The problem was, even with the code books, without that particular day's key there wasn't much that could be done. And every branch of the German military and diplomatic corps had *different* Enigma machines, sometimes more than one.

I guess I'll have to get a copy of the book and see follow the author's reasoning.

Just to be clear they weren't simplistically just trying to pinch an Enigma machine, but at that point the Germans were in the process of issuing a machine with an extra wheel, with disastrous consequences for coadbreaking for the U boat war, so to crack the improved cyphers they needed extra help from "pinched" materials. It was far from the simple task portrayed in the films and was a continuing battle to catch up with changes and new settings else the decrypts would be impossible until enough "pinched" material got them going again

 

[Gillstay]

The films always miss out the assistance from the Polish as well.

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

Currently reading this

Interesting dip into the minds of the mile eater racers

 

[stephec]

The films always miss out the assistance from the Polish as well.

Everyone knows that it was Tom Cruise that did it, after he'd won the Battle of Britain that is.

 

[C R]

Everyone knows that it was Tom Cruise that did it, after he'd won the Battle of Britain that is.

No, it was Jon Bon Jovi that captured the Enigma.

 

[Conrad_K]

The films always miss out the assistance from the Polish as well.

Poland is where the original data package for "Tube Alloys" came from, being passed from hand to hand to Britain, "addressee unknown." It made it to one of Churchill's "boffins." Churchill was enthusiastic, but Cherwell ran the numbers, and Britain simply couldn't afford it.

The only Commonwealth country that could was Canada, but apparently McKenzie-King's trusted scientific advisor (his dog Pat) thought it was un-British. So Churchill tried to give Tube Alloys to the Americans, but Roosevelt kept brushing him off until finally accepting it just to shut him up for a while. (Churchill would send him a dozen telegrams a day, and was offended that Roosevelt had his staff deal with them; presumably his staff was getting tired of his incessant nagging as well)

Roosevelt called on General Groves to run the project. Groves was an architect, not a scientist, and turned it down. Roosevelt called him back and asked what it would take. Groves' response was, basically, to be made dictator of the American economy, with absolute priority over everything, including other war projects. Roosevelt signed off on it, and a few years later the light of ten thousand suns lit up a remote desert in New Mexico.

What was mostly forgotten after WWII was that pre-war Poland wasn't the gutted husk it was during its Warsaw Pact days. Researchers in Warsaw were on the bleeding edge in many fields, and their contributions were critical, not just for WWII, but for much of the Cold War as well.

 

[raleighnut]

Re-reading The Scattered Scruffs by Hazel Jacques, a quite harrowing tale of growing up in Leicester with both parents succumbing to TB in Groby Rd hospital during WW2 and the cruel treatment of orphans at the time.

 

[DCBassman]

I now have four Iain M. Banks books to re-read: Against A Dark Background (1993), Feesum Endjinn (1994), Inversions (1998), and The Algebraist (2004).

Have menaged two of those, some light Kindle crap, and currently enjoying Maggs's Railway Curiosities. After that, All Out War by Tim Shipman. Then back to Banks.