34. Read a new book every month, including one that Esther recommends.

Wow. I am really far behind in posting.

For Novemeber, I read James Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Gudalcanal.

I first became acquainted with Hornfischer when I heard him speak via podcast at the Prtizker Military Library in Chicago. At that time, he was speaking about an earlier, excellent book, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. This I polished off a few summers ago, and immediately decided I needed to read everything this fellow ever wrote.

What sets Hornfischer apart from other World War II writers is his unique ability to combine in-depth scholarly research with first-hand accounts of battles by the combatants into a blow-by-blow account that almost reads like an historical thriller. Reading Hornfischer is more than just reliving the battles he describes; it's going inside individual shell hits, exploring the devastating effects of a torpedo on a forward magazine in slow motion, and falling to the teak deck of a destroyer with the survivors of a demolished turret. In short, his style is perhaps the most engrossing and simultaneously the most detailed I've come across in my amateur pursuit of military historical scholarship.

At times, however, this strength of Hornfischer's is also his weakness. At times he takes you so far into the battle he's describing, that it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. The events and decisions leading up to a given action are sometimes described so much in passing that the shells are flying without the reader grasping why.

Still, a terrific read about an incredibly important campaign.