War…. What is it Good For?

As there’s no great burning issues I want to vent about and whilst there’s nothing much going on in my life (just hanging in there for my long Christmas break) I thought I’d let you in on some more of my long term reading plans.

So…. War, just what IS it good for? Well, novels apparently! As a long-time fan of war fiction in all its guises I thought I’d get together and put some war novels together in my usual ten book lumps. I’m just coming to the end of my 20th Century Classics set and then I’ll be moving onto 10 Historical Crime novels. After that I’m finally back to the Future with 10 novels of Man Vs Machine which should be much fun. After that we actually get to the topic at hand with 10 novels of World War One. Which, naturally, got me started on other war themed reads. Here’s my thoughts so far:

World War Two
Modern War (1945-Present)
Vietnam War
Future War
Alternative War
Fantasy War
Ancient War
Dark Age War
Medieval War
Early Modern War
Gunpowder War
American Civil War
War at Sea
War in the Air
War in Space

Now, if I didn’t read anything else those 150 books would take me around 2 years to work through. As I would, naturally, be reading other things that’ll extend to around 10 years and maybe more (I’m wondering if I could go for one ‘topic’ per year…). It’s certainly something to think about long term – maybe post-retirement. I already have the WW2 set ready to go and the Modern War set is wide enough to be easy to acquire. Likewise Vietnam should be a problem and Combat SF should be a walk in the park. In fact most of the topics shouldn’t be too much of a problem and I probably already have 3-5 books in each category. This is actually starting to look achievable…… [muses].