A Burgeoning Library

Before the rest of my post, I would like to say thank-you to Noel of Garage-gamer. After asking about books on Napoleonic uniforms he kindly and generously gave me a copy of Uniforms of the Peninsular War, despite me being a complete stranger on a message board. Jolly stand-up chap.

Since deciding on learning about the Napoleonic period, I've gathered together about half a dozen books on the subject. Currently, I have:

• The Campaigns of Napoleon, Chandler
• The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, Rothenberg
• Napoleon, Cronin
• A Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars, Chandler
• Uniforms of the Peninsular Wars, Haythornthwaite

I've read through The Art of Warfare twice, and Campaigns and Napoleon are both in a state of being read.

I'm finding Campaigns a fairly hard read; it's very information-dense, which I'm finding means often the minutiae obscures the ebb and flow of the campaign it describes. However, I can't fault it on being thorough, so I shall plough through it.

Napoleon, on the other hand, is a more general biograph, filled with the sort of biographical details that make interesting reading. It has a lot of anecdotes about Napoleon, some of which I'm not sure whether I need to take with a pinch of salt, but in general I'm finding a good read.

The Dictionary has been consulted once or twice, but only over small things. It also seems more focussed on personalities than some of the more technical aspects of war (it has no entry for brigade or battalion, when I wanted to check what sort of size these were).