Books, or what I'm reading now

This is called the reading room, so what I'm reading will always be a topic. Grant's memoirs are kind of long, so it may take me awhile-and I don't feel like starting something else in the meantime (which I have been wont to do in the past). But I wanted to share this great part of the Memoirs-Grant has taken Fort Donelson from the Confederates-a heartening win in a cold February of 1861. Brigadier General Buckner (who was not in charge of the fort when Grant took it) sent him a letter asking to meet to discuss the terms of capitulation. To which Grant responded via his own letter "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works". And that was what happened, Buckner capitulated to Grant's "ungenerous and unchivalrous terms" but the backstory is that Grant and Buckner had spent three years together at West Point and fought together in the Mexican War. When they did meet after the exchange of letters, Buckner told Grant that he wouldn't have taken the fort if he (Buckner) had been in charge to which Grant said that if Buckner had been in charge, he would not have tried taking the fort the he did, with the implication being that he would still have taken it. It was great.
Also, until I moved to Washington, I thought the Civil War was over and the good guys had won, as I said in another post. But when I discussed this with a friend of mine and we talked about why there was a need to keep re-fighting the war, he pointed out all Southern authors who felt the need to revise why they thought the South fought the war-and he thought it was up to each generation to keep up the battle and promote the truth, using hard facts to do it. So, these posts on the Civil War are just my small part of that.

The book I read before Memoirs was Three Days to Never by Tim Powers. If you like a writer who can take two completely diverse topics and weave them together in a spellbinding story and tremendous writing, he's your man. Be warned that his books have science fiction elements-if you can't deal with time-travel (Three Days to Never), genies and the Cold War (Declare) or pirates and voodoo (which he did long before Pirates of the Caribbean in On Stranger Tides), then he's not your man. But if you like good writing and great stories, give him a try.