books

One of the things that I want to do when I get back to NJ is to ask my grandpa the name of the ship that he was on during WWII. Kicked off by finally reading a few more of my books on Bletchley Park (I've been mildly obsessed with it since college), I've been tearing through a bunch of WWII history books. In the last few days I've finished An Army at Dawn, The Liberation of Paris, Enigma: Battle for the Code, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Codebreaker's Victory and Finest Hour. The Liberation of Paris I turned up in a used bookstore up on Capitol Hill, and read a few pages of it standing in the stacks. It's a very quick read- I think it took me all of 4 hours, with breaks, to go through it.

I also have Combined Fleet Decoded here, it's next on my list (and From Fish to Colussus on my amazon wishlist, which I might end up buying myself). Out of all of these, An Army at Dawn and The Liberation of Paris have been my favorites. An Army at Dawn has its own website and is supposed to be the first of three books on WWII campaigns. Hopefully the next two will be as engaging. The website just says they "will be published in the coming years".

Next Stop Grand Central

I've been working on building Kate's book collection for almost two years now. Next Stop Grand Central is going to be the next addition to her bookshelf, hopefully she'll enjoy the bright pictures until she's old enough to read it. There's not too much of a story to it, but got so much style that I had to buy it. The pictures inside, especially the hippie in bellbottoms, had me convinced that it was written in the 1970s, but it's not very old. The story, such as it is, meanders around the page with text looped around each small picture, so you can just pick and choose to read the bits that interest you, which I think is a neat way to write a book for children.