A Feast For Crows - George R R Martin

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood

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A Dance with Dragons - George R R Martin

I can't say much about this book without breaking into a spoiler ridden rant that will go on for five pages, so I will just say it was awesome, it was worth the wait and bring on the Winds of Winter.

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West - Gregory Maguire

A very clever novel. Prose and plot that would probably stand on its own.

as if her form were knit with iron and whiskey instead of bones and blood.

Strangely, built on top of 'The Wizard of Oz' turns this book into something special.

The alien girl- she called herself Dorothy- was by virtue of her survival, elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying

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Strong Men Armed - The United States Marines Against Japan - Robert Leckie

A detailed account of the extraordinary conflict that made its way across the vast ocean from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. This is not a personal history (despite it's author being a marine veteran), instead it reveals the scale and significance of the sacrifices made during that long Pacific war.

Probably the most striking insight of the book is the deliberate description of every instance of soldiers who had thrown themselves on live grenades to save their comrades. Their frequency is difficult to comprehend:

Among the Americans serving on Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Admiral Chester Nimitz

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No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 - Richard Slotkin

My understanding of the Battle of the Crater prior to reading this book was a vague impression of misguided troops stumbling into a breach made by a mine explosion, trapped by the sheer sided walls and shot to a man by a ragged line of Confederates perched along its rim.

The battle was dramatized in Cold Mountain and my view of events certainly came from that film. The reality was incomprehensible gallantry in the face of infuriating incompetence, horror, slaughter and racist violence played out over twelve hours under a relentless Virginian sun.

This book reaches to the core of the brutal, racist world view that permeated society at that time and drove a nation to war with itself.

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