The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars is a 2009 book by Patrick Hennessey, a former officer in the Grenadier Guards.
It charts his military career, from training at Sandhurst through several campaigns including Iraq and Afghanistan, and vividly describes not only the frenetic violence of a soldier's life, but the periods of stifling and (sometimes) comic boredom, living inside an institution in a state of flux: an Army caught between a world that needs it and a society that no longer understands it.
It received good reviews from the broadsheet press, and is generally considered to be more cerebral than the many other brash titles about the War on Terror that clutter the bestseller shelves.
The book has a considerable following amongst serving officers in the British Army.
Patrick Hennessey attended Berkhamsted School.
ISBN 978-0-141-03926-8
A version of the book published by Penguin Books with a new Afterword in 2010 details the books that were read in "The Junior Officers' Reading Club". The list is as follows:
| TITLE | AUTHOR | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| The Marsh Arabs | Wilfred Thesiger | ISBN 0141442085 |
| Dispatches | Michael Herr | ISBN 9780330255738 |
| Chickenhawk | Robert Mason | ISBN 0552124192 |
| Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession | Andrew Cockburn | ISBN 1859844227 |
| The Utility of Force | Rupert Smith | ISBN 014102044X |
| On War | Carl Von Clausewitz | ISBN 1853264822 |
| Catch 22 | Joseph Heller | ISBN 0099470462 |
| Ice Cold in Alex | Christopher Landon | ISBN 9780304366255 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | ISBN 1853267333 |
| Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes | ISBN 0099469693 |
| Kingdom of Fear | Hunter S Thompson | ISBN 0141014229 |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | ISBN 0141182865 |
| The Day of the Locust | Nathaniel West | ISBN 0141023651 |
| The Rules of Attraction | Bret Easton Ellis | ISBN 0330536346 |
| Glamorama | Bret Easton Ellis | ISBN 0330447998 |
| Vile Bodies | Evelyn Waugh | ISBN 0141182873 |
| Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne | ISBN 1853262919 |
ISBN 978-0-141-03926-8