Reading through the War in the Pacific

So I got this notion to read up on the War in the Pacific, and as a starter I chose Stanley Weintraub's Long Day's Journey into War, a 600 page account of the 48 hours surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Weintraub has collated the personal testimonies of thousands of people from every part of the globe and interwoven them in an hour-by-hour account. The cumulative effect is somewhat dizzying at times, as Weintruab skips across the globe among hundreds of characters, but the reader comes away with a sense of the sheer weight and fearfulness of that moment in our history. Be prepared for a long grueling read (one reviewer called it ("Long, long, long day's journey...") but this was a good book with which to begin my Pacific War Reading Series.

Candidates for the next book in the series: Scott Walker's The Edge of Terror: The Heroic Story of American Families Trapped in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. James Hornfischer's Ship of Ghosts, or Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers.

On Reading Projects

Reading projects. I'm a great fan of them. For some time now I've been on a personal quest to read through human history from the time of Julius Caesar to the present. Just now I'm reading Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. It was Godlsworthy's book on Julius Caesar that got this reading project started.

Anyway, this is a long term project that may never actually come to and end. After Goldsworthy I will have to read something that takes place in the post-Fall-of-Rome world (sixth century), whether biography, straight history, or even historical fiction. Suggestions appreciated.

Speaking of reading projects, here's another. Not too long ago I read a book about the last large-scale naval battle in history, called The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. What an amazing story. There was at least one awestruck "wow" on my lips for each page, often several.

Anyway, I decided I would go back to the beginning of the "war in the Pacific" by reading a book about Pearl Harbor, and then reading through the war, island battle by island battle. This might be over-doing it a bit, but that's the plan for now. So the book of the moment is the meticulously researched Long Day's Journey into War, by Stanley Weintraub.

Now, I should mention that the true guru of reading projects is Sherry at Semicolon. She's reading biographies of all the U.S. presidents, for example. Great idea, and a great way to learn American political history. Her blog is an amazing compendium of things bookish.

I have one more reading project in mind of 2010, this one a little different than the others. In this project, rather than reading a series of books, I'm going to read the same thing over and over. I've chosen Paul's letter to the Romans. I'm thinking I'll read it once a week for the entire year. I'm going to center my devotional journaling around the letter. I'm also going to read Ray Ortlund's devotional book, A Passion for God: Prayers and Meditations on the Book of Romans. Expect much Romans-informed blogging around these parts.