Just this guy, you know?

Man I love learning about submarines. They’re terrifying bits of kit and I couldn’t and wouldn’t get on one. A friend recommended Blind Man’s Bluff and I devoured it in a few days. It’s full of anonymous tales from the USA’s submarine spying programme during The Cold war. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched documentaries about most of the stuff here but I think there are new-to-me details that are anecdotal which didn’t make it into the docs, but such is a book on secret submarines publish in the 90s. It meshes really nicely with Command and Control from last year but is more chest beating and jingoistic. Tom Clancy fans would love this book entirely unironically.

Here are some books that I started in 2024, put down for months, and have now “boshed out”. Bosh.

Perilous Times

This came recommended from a friend describing it as “Immortal Arthurian knights are also spies” which is a great premise to be fair. It’s generally really good but I found the themes of climate collapse & rampant privatisation just a bit too bleak at some times. That’s why I bounced over to Fellowship of the Ring. Definitely give this a go & try to get a copy with the US cover which is far superior to the UK one.

What can I say? It’s great.

This is my first re-read of LotR in quite a while. I think in at least a decade. I have always been nostalgic for the time I spent with my gran reading LotR and that’s only getting stronger. Reading it is like being in a cozy duvet. The prose is verbose, ‘old fashioned’ and a fatherly. I wouldn’t put up with it in a modern book but I will for something so genre defining, so Dave defining.

The idea of Time Compression in memory really hit this year. It feels like yesterday when I wrote my 2024 post. Work was really busy and full of changes. We lost Iolo. Had some nice breaks. We got Enzo. Lots of stuff but it’s all just flown by in a blur.

So how did I do against last years goals?

1. Painting. Didn’t achieve the specific projects listed but I painted loads of models. ✅
2. Reading. Just shy of the 25 target (as measured by blog posts). I read the odd thing that I didn’t post about which would probably tick me over the target. Very pleased with how I did there. ✅
3. Health? Stuffed it. When things got busy this one went out the window. ❌
4. Music practice. A mixed bunch. I have practised regularly but mostly the same stuff over and over. 🤷

A tad over 50% which isn’t bad. 2025 goals will be similar:

A good follow up to Nuclear War. It’s a bleak read in a subtly different way to Nuclear War. It’s also very long and some might say rambling but I think the tangents about various people’s histories. If you did GCSE history in the 00s it fills in a lot of gaps between and around SALT and START. Unlike Nuclear war I had to put this book down a lot, it really did take a month or so to get through the 600-odd pages.

Here we go again. As usual this the highlights of the music I’ve enjoyed this year, not just music release in 2024.

Iron Maiden’s Brave New World has been on heavy rotation. It came out in 2000 which means, to my shame, I’ve never really listened to it properly when I started listening to Maiden with A Matter of Life and Death. Wall to wall bangers. My top track is Dream of Mirrors with The Thin Line Between Love and Hate at a really close second.

Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll came recommended from at least two podcasters/comedians (Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Elis James) and it’s superb. Not as un-put-downable as Nuclear War was but I still devoured it. I love a book that tells events in detail. Carroll also has a wonderful turn of phrase, for example describing Scotland as a “Celtic Ho Chi Minh trail”.

Carroll follows the threads of many players very closely whilst avoiding Space Opera style “who the hell is this guy and why have we had three chapters on him?”. He also covers all sides with an even hand, even Thatcher herself.

A friend posted on Twitter that they’d started reading Slow Productivity and just the title piqued my interest.

It’s a short book which builds on the idea of Bullshit Jobs, pseudo productivity, and presenteeism by putting forward an idea of a more humane way of working in the current economic system. Newport uses many examples where people (scientists, authors, musicians, etc) were able to spend lots of time on their projects which allowed them to create great works. Newport argues that the pandemic accelerated the way the work day for many is filled with meetings and interruptions which makes it harder to actually deliver value from Deep Work.

I love the meme that men are always thinking about Rome. For a guy who reads non fiction I barely think about Rome. For example it took me far too long to see the obvious inspiration in Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. I’ve tried to fix this obvious character flaw by reading Mary Beard’s tome SPQR. Now, after finishing it, I think about Rome a lot more.

SPQR is incredibly dense, in a good way, and required me to create a timeline of key people and events because the scale and detail is fast. I will go back and re-read it as I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.

You can’t look away from this page turning book which imagines one way a nuclear war could play out.

I devoured it in two sittings. This future is so bleak you just can’t look away. My only complaint is with the writing style. I can live with the short punchy sentences, but I can do without the long lists of details that seem to go on and on without adding value. The descriptions of fires and detonations are also excessive. I get it, nuclear war is bad, now please get back to the discussions of strategy and cold logic.