Bernd 05/23/2019 (Thu) 23:13:30 No.26446 del
Finished Foundation's Edge some time ago. Asimov outdid himself on the ending. The General has an anti-climax which makes perfect sense in his universe's logic and influences the following story. The Mule and Search by the Foundation have shocking twists, more in the former than in the latter. Search by the Foundation is also one of the most engaging segments to read with good themes like freedom and paranoia.
So this first sequel ends with a climatic standoff forcing the protagonist to take a difficult decision. I hated his choice, though.

Right now I'm reading Jünger's Storm of Steel. I expected to immediately find him entering loaded enemy trenches and killing tommies in close combat with a bayonet, but so far it's 1917 and he hasn't done that yet. But he has experienced combat and exchanged small arms fire with the enemy aswell as withstood machine gun fire and several intimidating artillery barrages, barely evading death on several occasions and seeing most of his comrades die.
It's not a book of nonstop war and drama. It alternates between a little bit of everything: banal details of day-to-day life, sightseeing in the beautiful scenery and having small talk. It's what makes it realistic, as life, even in war, is also like that. A lot of his descriptions of emotion or the scenery use flowery metaphors: an empty road in the night feels like a cemetery, sudden noisy danger is like a cuckoo clock, flares are fireworks, sneaking near enemy lines at night makes one simultaneously feel like huntsman and prey.

I've found one passage endearing:

In the bed next to mine lay a sergeant who had lost a leg, and was fighting a bad case of blood poisoning. Mad periods of fever alternated with cold shivering. His temperature chart performed leaps like a
wild mustang. The doctors tried to keep him alive on champagne and camphor, but the needle seemed to be pointing unmistakably to death. What was strange, though, was that, having been delirious for the past few days, at the hour of his death he was once more completely lucid, and made some arrangements for what was to be done afterwards. For instance, he had the sister read him his favourite chapter from the Bible, then he took his leave of us all, by asking our forgiveness for having kept us up at night so often with his fever attacks. At the end, he whispered in a voice to which he tried to give a humorous inflection: 'Ey, Fritz, have yer got a bit of bread for me?' and, a few minutes later, he was dead. That last sentence was a reference to our male nurse, Fritz, an elderly man, whose accent we sometimes imitated, and we were profoundly moved by it because it showed the dying man's wish to cheer us up.