Because I read a lot, I decided to join the Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge to test myself.
I set a goal of 12 books to read and I was able to read 15 books! Not bad for a first time challenge. I am wondering though why my Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge is listing 16 books instead of 15. One of the books is listed twice and I do not know how to fix this.
I usually read before going to bed so my choice of genre is mostly nonfiction, the boring stuff. The topics are usually historical, war, crime or espionage. I do sneak in some fiction once in a while. Before setting my goals on the Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge, I already have read the books of Dan Brown, George R. R. Martin, J. R. R. Tolkien and many more!
Contents
Why did I do the Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge?
One thing that comes to mind when joining a challenge such as the Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge is that it makes reading into a competitive thing instead of just enjoying reading. Do you agree? For me, I do not agree. I was not after any competition. I just used the Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge as a means to remind me to read more. There are no material rewards involved.
The only reward you get from a reading challenge is a sense of accomplishment. You will be able to compare your reading statistics with others. You can also compare your own stats from previous years.
Sometimes it is a good thing to take up a reading challenge as it is a means to test yourself. A reading challenge motivates you to read more. Have you taken up a reading challenge?
The Goodreads platform is beneficial in tracking your progress. It reminds you if you are on track and helps push you to reach your goal.
My Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge list (15 out of 12!)
Below are the books that I have read in 2018 in no particular order:
Isandlwana: How the Zulus Humbled the British Empire
From Amazon: The story of the mighty imperial British army’s defeat at Iswandlwana in 1879 has been much written about but never with the detail and insight revealed by Dr Adrian Greaves’ research. In re-constructing the dramatic and fateful events, the Author draws on recently discovered letters, diaries and papers of survivors and other contemporaries such as Henry Harford, Lt Henry Carling of the Royal Artillery, August Hammar and young British nurse Janet Wells. These, coupled with his own detailed knowledge of the ground, enable the Author to paint the most accurate picture yet of this cataclysmic battle that so shamed the British establishment.
We learn for the first time of the complex Zulu decoy, the dishonorable attempt to blame Colonel Durnford for the defeat, evidence of another ‘fugitives’ trail’. The identity of previously unknown escorts for Lts Coghill and Melville, both awarded VCs for trying to save the Colors.
Isandlwana is a brilliant and fresh account of this most famous battle which will fascinate experts and laymen alike.
The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower
From Amazon:
From drones to satellites, missile defense systems to cyber warfare, Israel is leading the world when it comes to new technology being deployed on the modern battlefield. The Weapon Wizards shows how this tiny nation of 8 million learned to adapt to the changes in warfare and in the defense industry and become the new prototype of a 21st century superpower, not in size, but rather in innovation and efficiency―and as a result of its long war experience.
Sitting on the front lines of how wars are fought in the 21st century, Israel has developed in its arms trade new weapons and retrofitted old ones so they remain effective, relevant, and deadly on a constantly-changing battlefield. While other countries begin to prepare for these challenges, they are looking to Israel―and specifically its weapons―for guidance. Israel is, in effect, a laboratory for the rest of the world.
How did Israel do it? And what are the military and geopolitical implications of these developments? These are some of the key questions Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot address. Drawing on a vast amount of research, and unparalleled access to the Israeli defense establishment, this book is a report directly from the front lines.
My Five Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller
From Goodreads: At once historically important and thrilling to read, this is the first account through Soviet eyes of the most famous spy ring the world has ever known: the Cambridge Five. Written by their KGB controller (Yuri Modin)–their protector, confident, and link to Moscow–this book offers unique insight into the true characters and intrigues of the legendary British spies. Illustrated.
Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
From Amazon:
Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating of “The Cambridge Spies”―Maclean, Philby, Blunt―brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.
In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess’s chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.
Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin’s Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colorful, tragi-comic wonder.
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
From Goodreads: Master storyteller Ben Macintyre’s most ambitious work to date brings to life the twentieth century’s greatest spy story.
Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton’s and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
From Amazon: Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting.
Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Michael B. Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.
Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess
From Amazon: Among the more sensational espionage cases of the Cold War were those of Moscow’s three British spies—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess. In this riveting book, S. J. Hamrick draws on documentary evidence concealed for almost half a century in reconstructing the complex series of 1947–1951 events that led British intelligence to identify all three as Soviet agents.
Basing his argument primarily on the Venona archive of broken Soviet codes released in 1995–1996 as well as on complementary Moscow and London sources, Hamrick refutes the myth of MI5’s identification of Maclean as a Soviet agent in the spring of 1951. British intelligence knew far earlier that Maclean was Moscow’s agent and concealed that knowledge in a 1949–1951 counterespionage operation that deceived Philby and Burgess. Hamrick also introduces compelling evidence of a 1949–1950 British disinformation initiative using Philby to mislead Moscow on Anglo-American retaliatory military capability in the event of Soviet aggression in Western Europe.
Engagingly written and impressively documented, Deceiving the Deceivers breaks new ground in reinterpreting the final espionage years of three infamous spies and in clarifying fifty years of conjecture, confusion, and error in Anglo-American intelligence history.
Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone
From Amazon: Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker, with a contacts book that included everyone from statesmen to socialites, high-ranking government officials to the famous actors and literary figures of the day.
He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously, and often simultaneously, for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Despite this, Burgess was never challenged or arrested by Britain’s spy-catchers in a decade and a half of espionage; dirty, scruffy, sexually promiscuous, a ‘slob’, conspicuously drunk and constantly drawing attention to himself, his superiors were convinced he was far too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow.
Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool his many friends and acquaintances for so long, ruthlessly exploiting them to penetrate major British institutions without suspicion, all the while working for the KGB. Purvis and Hulbert also detail his final days in Moscow – so often a postscript in his story – as well as the moment the establishment finally turned on him, outmanoeuvring his attempts to return to England after he began to regret his decision to defect.
Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer
From Goodreads: The British government’s efforts to block publication of Peter Wright‘s Spycatcher: Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Agent climaxed in a sensational trial in Australia in 1986 that cast a shadow of disrepute on the British legal system, the Official Secrets Act and the government itself.
The author of this engrossing, suspenseful account is the Australian attorney who represented Wright and his would-be Australian publisher. Excerpts from the trial testimony reveal that Turnbull uncovered mendacity, hypocrisy and cynicism at the highest levels of the British government, principally during his cross-examination of Sir Robert Armstrong, cabinet secretary and adviser on intelligence matters.
In 1987 the High Court at Canberra dismissed the case and ordered the Thatcher government to reimburse legal costs to Wright and Heinemann Publishers Australia.
Turnbull calls the Britishers’ conduct in the affair “quite disgraceful” and adds that the experience “galvanized my determination to see Australia rid herself of its sic remaining constitutional links with England.”
Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II
From Goodreads: A thrilling account of the extraordinary efforts of Allied intelligence in gaining control of Belgian Congo’s uranium mines and keeping them from Hitler and Stalin.
This book is the true story of American spies in Africa in the Second World War, which until now has never been researched or told. It is set against the background of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the war — America’s struggle to secure enough high quality uranium to build atomic bombs. These efforts were focused on the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, which was described within the Manhattan Project as the ‘most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world’. Uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.
Given the very real possibility that Germany was also working on an atomic bomb, it was an urgent priority for the US to prevent uranium from the Congo being diverted to the enemy. This task was given to the newly-created Office of Strategic Services in Washington, which sent some of their best Secret Intelligence agents under cover to the Belgian Congo to track the ore and to hunt for Nazi collaborators. Their assignment was made even tougher by the complex colonial reality and by tensions with British officials.
Spies in the Congo tells the story of the men — and one woman — who were sent on this dangerous wartime mission
Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee – A Look Inside North Korea
From Goodreads: In this rare insider’s view into contemporary North Korea, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom.
“The General will now enter the room.”
Everyone turns to stone. Not moving my head, I direct my eyes to a point halfway up the archway where Kim Jong-il’s face will soon appear.
As North Korea’s State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.
Never before has a member of the elite described the inner workings of this totalitarian state and its propaganda machine. An astonishing expose told through the heart-stopping story of Jang Jin-sung’s escape to South Korea, Dear Leader is a rare and unprecedented insight into the world’s most secretive and repressive regime.
Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed
From Amazon: On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a seriously ill crewmember, and a dwindling water supply, a safe return seemed unlikely.
Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for the New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.
The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
From Amazon: For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin’s orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI―a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. Then, in 1992, it surfaced briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a deeply censored dossier to the White House.
The Lost Spy at last reveals the truth: Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets.Based on six years of international sleuthing, The Lost Spy traces Oggins’s rise in beguiling detail―a brilliant Columbia University graduate sent to run a safe house in Berlin and spy on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria―and his fall: death by poisoning in a KGB laboratory. As harrowing as Darkness at Noon and as tragic as Dr. Zhivago, The Lost Spy is one of the great nonfiction detective stories of our time.
The Second World War: A Complete History
From Amazon: In the hands of master historian Martin Gilbert, the complex and compelling story of the Second World War comes to life. This narrative captures the perspectives of leading politicians and war commanders, journalists, civilians, and ordinary soldiers, offering gripping eyewitness accounts of heroism, defeat, suffering, and triumph.
This is one of the first historical studies of World War II that describes the Holocaust as an integral part of the war. It also covers maneuvers, strategies, and leaders operating in European, Asian, and Pacific theatres. In addition, this book brings in survivor testimonies of occupation, survival behind enemy lines, and the experience of minority groups such as the Roma in Europe, to offer a comprehensive account of the war’s impact on individuals on both sides. This is a sweeping narrative of one of the most deadly wars in history, which took almost forty million lives, and irrevocably changed countless more.
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
From Amazon: It was the height of the Cold War, and a dangerous time to be stationed in the Soviet Union. One evening, while the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station was filling his gas tank, a stranger approached and dropped a note into the car. The chief, suspicious of a KGB trap, ignored the overture. But the man had made up his mind. His attempts to establish contact with the CIA would be rebuffed four times before he thrust upon them an envelope whose contents would stun U.S. intelligence.
In the years that followed, that man, Adolf Tolkachev, became one of the most valuable spies ever for the U.S. But these activities posed an enormous personal threat to Tolkachev and his American handlers. They had clandestine meetings in parks and on street corners, and used spy cameras, props, and private codes, eluding the ever-present KGB in its own backyard—until a shocking betrayal put them all at risk.
Drawing on previously classified CIA documents and on interviews with firsthand participants, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting and a riveting true story of intrigue in the final years of the Cold War.
That’s my Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge list. What is yours?
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