Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

So I'm in scenic Jacksonville for work. This means I got up yesterday at 4:30 to leave the house by 6 to drive 3 hours or so to get here by 9, then work until 6. Today I'm working 10-6 and heading home afterward. (I saw a Taco Bell on the drive in, so I'll stop there for dinner.)

I ate at IHOP last night. I like IHOP, and I know there's vegetarian food there, unlike the Chinese buffet (which came with a good recommendation, but.) I also saw a delivery menu for a different Chinese place in the hotel lobby, but I wasn't in the mood for delivery Chinese of unknown quality. So IHOP. Conveniently it's about 100 yards from the JAX Barnes & Noble, so I hied thither to peruse the books.

I only left with three books, only one of which I'd intended to buy going in (World War One: A short history.) I spent a lot of time in the bargain books section, and they had The Girls Who Went Away marked down in hardback to 5.98, and since I've read good reviews of it, I bought that. I almost got Barbara Tuchman's medieval history book, which was in bargain for like $10, but I'm not that interested in medieval stuff.

My lucky, awesome find was a book called Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds. I say lucky because their section on Turkish history is sparse as hell (and combined with Greek history, which, um. No?) I was perusing the Middle Eastern section looking for All the Shah's Men, the history of the 1953 CIA-led coup in Iran. I found it, and I was thinking of buying it, but I flipped it over and noticed in the list of books by the author, Stephen Kinzer, a book about modern Turkish history. So I put the shah's men back and went to see if they had it. Luckily they did, but it took a minute to find it; the Greek/Turkish history section was poorly organized.

I also perused the travel section for books on Vienna and Budapest. I think the Lonely Planet city guides will be good; they're also nicely small. Unfortunately you can only get Bratislava in the Czech and Slovak Republics book, which is bigger. I'm going to get the LP Berlin Encounter guide for April, I think. Consider Eastern Europe phrasebook; wish there were one for Slovak, not just Czech. Two similar languages but not identical.

The B&N in JAX has a HUGE military section. Military history, history of warfare, strategy, books of tank and warplane IDs. This should not be surprising, since JAX is home to Camp LeJeune. I actually kind of like it, because there's this giant section of books about World War One. It's smaller than the WW2 section, though. There's also Learn Pashto, all about Arabic and Afghani customs, and support books for military spouses.

I just feel weird, this super civilian girl standing and ogling the military history books. (I almost picked up Carl von Clausewitz On War, but it's in the public domain, and I have it on my computer from the Gutenberg Project. Possibly in both English *and* German.) I'm trying to rectify my public high school lack of education about WW1, the parts the US was not involved in. I mean, shit, until I started researching for the alternate history, I don't think I knew the Ottomans were involved, or parts of North Africa, or Japan. (They were fighting Russia.) Or that the Russian Revolution happened in the middle of WW1. So I'm reading more.

I think WW1 is a lot more interesting than WW2, because it was a giant clusterfuck that could ... well, probably not have been completely averted, with the players who were on stage at the time, but have been different. But from what I've read, the early 1900s were a situation ripe for revolution and change, so it was this kettle boiling over. Human behavior is fascinating.