G's Good Reads of 2015

And now for the blog post you've all been waiting for...the post with which 2015 would not be complete..my good reads for the year. In no particular order, here are the standouts that I read in 2015:

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough.

I know B covered this on the blog earlier this year when she read it, but it bears mentioning again. What a fantastic book! As with most things in this life, you think you have a good idea of something until you take a really close look at it, and then you're blown away by all the stuff you didn't even know that you didn't know about the topic. This book is a perfect example. The Wright brothers invented the airplane and powered flight, right? They went to Kitty Hawk and tested their design there on the sand dunes, right? Well, yes. BUT...there was so much more that went into it than that. Highly, highly recommended book (and not just because I'm an aviation geek). And of course, being a McCullough book, the writing is top-notch and very engaging.

On Basilisk Station, by David Weber.

This is the first book in Weber's Honor Harrington series, which chronicles the career of Honor Harrington, a space naval officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy (and a character that Weber modeled after Horatio Hornblower, the main protagonist in CS Forester's books, who was a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars). I actually read this some years ago, but wanted to re-read it as I'm going to jump in to the series in 2016. In this first book, Harrington is sent to a backwater posting, Basilisk Station, after humiliating some of her superiors in a fleet exercise. Turns out that the "backwater posting" is anything but, and she uncovers a devious plan by Manticore's enemies to invade Manticorian space. This is a great science fiction read that isn't all lasers and aliens...there are political, cultural, and social undertones here as well. Really looking forward to the next book in this series!

Asia's Cauldron, by Robert D. Kaplan.

Kaplan is a heck of a writer, and I have always found his topics and how he covers them to be quite engaging. In Asia's Cauldron, Kaplan looks at the brewing situation in the South China Sea between China and her neighbors who border that body of water (Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and others). At odds are several island groups to which some or all of the nations bordering the South China Sea lay claim. This, of course, has repercussions on fishing rights, exploration for petrochemicals, military force projection, and a host of other issues. This book is a great primer for the occasional piece of news we see about events in that part of the world. If you like geopolitics, this is not one to miss.

The Martian, by Andy Weir.

Again, I think B has covered this book on the blog already. Wow, what a read. I finished this book in three days flat, and two of those were workdays. Not sure how the movie compares to the book--I haven't seen it yet--but this is a real thriller.

The Marne, 1914, by Holger Herwig.

One of the (unfortunately) few WW1 books I read in 2015 was this title from Holger Herwig. While I would not recommend this to casual readers of WW1 history, as it goes into a great amount of detail that may lose some readers, it presents a concise look at how the armies of France, Britain, and Germany actually maneuvered in the first 6-7 weeks of hostilities prior to the stalemate of the trench systems on the Western Front. Nothing was a foregone conclusion, and in some places the bravado or indecision of specific commanders--whether at the corps or even the regimental level--had repercussions up and down the line of conflict.  Again, not recommended for a casual reader, but if you're interested in what happened before the Western Front degenerated into a series of trench systems from about mid-September 1914 through November 1918, this is a good book to pick up.

So there you have them...my good reads of 2015. Let us know if you read any of these, and your thoughts on them!