On Books & Reading: My Much Delayed Update of My TBR Pile

Late Morning, Tuesday, September 19, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, all.

It’s another warm early fall day here in the Tampa Bay area. As I begin this, my 366^th post for 2023 and 1,265^th overall since I started A Certain Point of View, Too in March 2020, the temperature outside is 80°F/27°C under mostly cloudy conditions. With humidity at 66% and the wind blowing from the east-northeast at 8 MPH/16 KMH, the heat index is 83°F/29°C. Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 87°F/30°C.

If I’d bothered to check my Weather app when I first woke up, I might have stirred myself to go for at least a short walk, maybe to the corner and back. Alas, I did not. Now it’s warming up and it’s sticky outside with all that humidity in the atmosphere. Oh, well – at least the forecasts here are beginning to predict less torrid highs during the day.

My To Be Read Pile – A Belated Update

Oh, geez. It’s been a while since I last posted any updates about my To Be Read (TBR) pile, hasn’t it? (A quick look at My Site on WordPress tells me I last did that in…April!) Well, let’s fix that with a quick post today.

According to On Books & Reading: My TBR List for April 2023, or: You Can’t Be a Good Writer if You’re Not a Good Reader, these are the books I was reading a bit over five months ago:

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
• The Kick-Ass Writer: 1,001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, & Earn Your Audience, Chuck Wendig
• Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947, D.M. Giangreco
• Star Wars: Brotherhood, Mike Chen
• Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960
• Fire & Steel: The End of World War Two in the West, Peter Caddick-Adams

Of the six books on the list, two are books that I don’t read from cover to cover, although I should do that – at some point, anyway – with King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. (Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer is more of a “list of things a writer should do to get published the traditional way” tome, and it does not lend itself to a sit-down-and-read-it-for-hours-on-end approach.)

I started reading those writing-related titles back in April after I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a truly serious effort to write my first novel, Reunion: Coda. They’re both good sources of both information and inspiration, though I must say I turn more for advice from Stephen King’s On Writing.

Of the four remaining titles (two are novels, the other are history books), I have finished two: D.M. Giangreco’s Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 and Mike Chen’s Star Wars: Brotherhood. Giangreco’s Hell to Pay is a detailed look at both the American planned invasion of Japan (Downfall) and the Japanese Ketsu-Go plans to counter such an enterprise had the U.S. not had nuclear weapons ready before Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu – the southernmost of Japan’s Home Islands – which was scheduled for November 1, 1945 as a preliminary step to Operation Coronet: the landing of a mostly American invasion force near Tokyo, which was to take place in March of 1946 and intended to be the knockout blow against Imperial Japan.

If I wasn’t up to my neck with the manuscript to Reunion: Coda and worried about my near- and long-term future, I would review Hell to Pay PDQ, but I don’t have the time or inclination to do that any time soon. Suffice it to say, though, that the book is a good counterbalance to the argument used by critics of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the Bomb was not necessary to end the war in the Pacific because Japan was beaten and would have eventually surrendered to the Allies sometime in 1945.

In contrast, Mike Chen’s Star Wars: Brotherhood is the kind of book that I would have read at a fast clip if my reading habits had not been altered by either my mother’s long illness or my move to the Tampa Bay area several months after she died. It’s a novel set in the Prequel Era – immediately after the events of Star Wars – Episode II: Attack of the Clones – and tells the story of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in their first mission after Skywalker becomes a Jedi Knight in his own right.

Again, if I wasn’t busy being a first-time novelist, I would have reviewed Brotherhood well before now. I finished Chen’s book sometime in mid-August, a few weeks before I finished the thicker and more serious Hell to Pay.

I must confess that I have not read from the late James D. Hornfischer’s last book, Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960,in a while. The book, which covers the U.S. Navy’s activities in the first 15 years of the Cold War, is a fascinating read and a credit to Hornfischer’s determination to complete it even as he dealt with a terminal case of brain cancer. I had just gotten to the chapters that delve into the Korean War – including an abbreviated account of how naval aviator Thomas Hudner earned a Medal of Honor for his efforts to rescue his wingman and friend, Ensign Jesse Brown (the Navy’s first black naval aviator) during the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November 1950 – when I put Who Can Hold the Sea down and never picked it up again.   

As for Fire & Steel: The End of World War Two in the West, I do read from that book – irregularly and for brief periods of time – at least twice a month. I estimate I am one-third of the way through Fire & Steel, which delves into the Western Allies’ final drives into the heart of Nazi Germany in the first five months of 1945.

And…there you have it, folks: my long-delayed update to my TBR stack.

It’s almost time for my mandatory rest break, so I’ll close this here. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.