Before I get to the list section of this listicle, I wanted to give an honorable mention. That goes to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Catch-22 is the funniest book I have ever read, and that is its problem. It is laugh-out-loud funny from page 1, and I don't remember it ever really stopping except when it went to a dark place, and then it was straight back to comedy. But when I set down to read a book, I am not looking to bust a rib, I want a quiet moment to sit and engage with the ideas in the book and I cannot do that when I am constantly laughing. I first read the book in middle school, I had that problem then, and the last time I picked it up I still had the problem, so the humor holds up. The problem is that I am not really interested in comedy in my books beyond a brief chuckle, and Catch-22 is a dangerous book to drink hot chocolate while reading. So it ends up an honorable mention.
1.
Black May by Michael Gannon
Black May probably wins the award for the book I most often reach for absentmindedly when I am looking for a good read. When I find it on my shelves I always reach for it. A history of the Battle of the Atlantic centering around May 1943, Black May combines technical history with an excellent narrative. It covers the developments in technology, air patrols, and even interrogation and propaganda, and balances it with an excellent narrative that covers the battle of convoy ONS-5. Neither part seems like an afterthought, and every time I read it I feel I have a greater appreciation of what was needed to win the war with U-boats. It also makes me want a convoy commander video game. There are too many U-boat simulators.
2.
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
The Face of Battle is a great read and an influential piece of history. John Keegan gives a view from the ground level of three great English battles, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the first day of the Battle of Albert, the first battle of the Somme offensive. There is a narrative section to give you the basic geography of the battle, but the focus is on the "face of battle", and what it was like to fight there. This covers not only the mechanics of battle, like how much smoke muskets made, or how armored knights were killed by groups of bowmen, but also the emotions of battle. How religious the armies were, how were the wounded cared for, and what kept men from running away all come up in this piece, and they all get the attention they deserve. It is not perfect, John Keegan was a professor at the leading British military college and it shows, but it is excellent. Well worth your time.
3.
The Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
The Storm of Steel is a strange one. I have never owned a physical copy, but instead, I have an audiobook. Some might say that audiobooks are not real books, but they can get bent. Get your books in whatever format works for you. I like The Storm of Steel for its content, and not just for the excellent narrator Audible has. It is one of the great memoirs of the First World War, and the German-to-English translation has an excellent usage of language that makes the war very vivid. There is also a sense of authenticity that is nice to find in a memoir. Junger is proud of some of the things he is done, but unlike Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel, another German captain, there is not this sense of self-aggrandizement. Junger does some really stupid things, and even recounts a time when he broke down and cried in front of the unit he was leading. It is part of the complexity of Junger's character revealed by the book. Junger has a romantic side but also has romantic feelings about the least romantic war in human history. It is a strange combination that makes for a great read.
4.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings is a classic that needs little introduction. I still manage to get a little more out of it every time I read it, and that is only helped by the wealth of secondary literature that surrounds a classic work. It is really rewarding to read something that suggests a different way to view a novel, and then to go back to the novel and be able to see that perspective and have it heighten your appreciation of both the novel and the author. The Lord of the Rings is much more rewarding to read this way than any other book I have come across.
5.
World War Z by Max Brooks
World War Z is an exciting experiment in fiction. Max Brooks manages to write a fictional oral history of a zombie apocalypse that delivers on the horror and humanity of that concept. I am not normally one for horror, but this book manages to deliver good horror in a very human way. There is also a great flow to the book. Brooks manages to make the book have very distinctive phases that each have a different feel. The mounting awareness of the pre-apocalypse, the desperate and confusing early days, a period of adaptation and consolidation, the triumph of humanity working together, and then some closing povs to dampen that triumphal spirit with a sense that the world will never be the same again. It has been a while since I read it, but I am sure it holds up. There is also a great fanfiction you should check out called "The way is shut" which explores what happened to North Korea fantastically. The fanfictions writer nailed the authors style perfectly.
6.
Mossflower by Brian Jacques
Mossflower is probably my most-read book. I was obsessed with it around third grade, and I read it on loop for a while. The story is Lord of the Rings lite. A small party quests for a mountain, and then there is a great battle at the end. I have reread it as an adult, and while it still holds up pretty well it is a children's story, simple and straightforward. I got a lot out of it as a kid because I was reading so fast. So fast that I remember on one of my rereads I started reading a fight scene I had no memory of. Therefore Mossflower, more than any other book on this list, is a nostalgia pick. A reminder of simpler days when I had the free time to read a book repeatedly.
7.
Three Armies on the Somme by William J. Philpott
Another book I have only experienced as an audiobook, Three Armies on the Somme is 26-and-a-half hours well spent. What makes it an excellent book is its narrow focus but broad coverage. That may sound like a contradiction, but what I am really trying to say is that it takes a holistic view of a very narrow topic. The book is about the fighting around the Somme River between 1914 and 1918, and its narrative can at points describe the fighting day by day, especially during the period we think of as the Battle of the Somme, but it also takes time to pull back from the fighting front and address how the fighting in this narrow geographic area affected the cultures and strategic situation of the nations involved. There is much more depth here than you would find in other history books, even other detail-obsessed books like The Road to Stalingrad, or Stalingrad (It is interesting that a lot of these kinds of books cover the Great Patriotic War, and date from the brief period that the soviet archives were opened up.). It is not for everyone, but it is a book for me.
8.
Tip and Run by Edward Paice
I stumbled onto Tip and Run while researching the German East Africa campaign for my honors thesis in college. In most of the books I had read about it focused on the German commander, Paul Von Lettow Vorbeck, and his skill in avoiding defeat despite the very long odds against him, holding out with minimal resupply and support for the whole war. What Tip and Run showed me is the consequences of that, and by doing that changed my perspective on war forever. In Tip and Run the war is anything but glorious, especially for the Africans caught between the British and German Colonial powers. This war was not a glorious struggle where a chivalrous and great man held off the British with only his wits, but a war where two uncaring armies created forced labor systems with no regard for the lives of the laborers to keep the fighting going in the worst theater of the war. Men who fought both in East Africa and in the trenches preferred the trenches because at least then they got a break from the marching. It is important that history reminds us that the past was not a better place and that nostalgia is a trap. Many want to go back to a time they feel was better, and it is important to remember that is a lie. Tip and Run destroys any feeling of nostalgia that so many other authors have tried to build up.
So there you have it, my eight favorite books at this moment. I don't know when I would ever go back and revisit this. Hopefully, this is not my final list. I can think of nothing sadder then never finding a new favorite book for the rest of my life.
