The Junior Officers' Reading Club
| Author | Patrick Hennessey |
|---|---|
Publication date | 2009 |
| Media type | Hardback |
| ISBN | 978-0-14-103926-8 |
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.
The author joined the army after completing an English degree at Oxford University.[1] He rose to the rank of captain before leaving the service to become a barrister.[2]
Reading list
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 0-14-144208-5 |
| Dispatches | Michael Herr | ISBN 978-0-330-25573-8 |
| Chickenhawk | Robert Mason | ISBN 0-552-12419-2 |
| Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession | Andrew Cockburn | ISBN 1-85984-422-7 |
| The Utility of Force | Rupert Smith | ISBN 0-14-102044-X |
| On War | Carl von Clausewitz | ISBN 1-85326-482-2 |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | ISBN 0-09-947046-2 |
| Ice Cold in Alex | Christopher Landon | ISBN 978-0-304-36625-5 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | ISBN 1-85326-733-3 |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | ISBN 0-09-946969-3 |
| Kingdom of Fear | Hunter S. Thompson | ISBN 0-14-101422-9 |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | ISBN 0-14-118286-5 |
| The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West | ISBN 0-14-102365-1 |
| The Rules of Attraction | Bret Easton Ellis | ISBN 0-330-53634-6 |
| Glamorama | Bret Easton Ellis | ISBN 0-330-44799-8 |
| Vile Bodies | Evelyn Waugh | ISBN 0-14-118287-3 |
| Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne | ISBN 1-85326-291-9 |