Category: Reading (page 1 of 10)

Read in 2015

Nonfiction
  • The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson
  • Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum
  • The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Roger Chartier
  • Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, George Chauncey
  • Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Kathleen Brown
  • Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Timothy Burke
  • History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, Paul Cohen
  • The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz
  • Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, Bill Niven
  • A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alistair Horne
  • A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold-War Era, Matthew Connelly
  • Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, Jon Coleman

Thoughts: Horne’s A Savage War of Peace is a huge, challenging book, but it’s deftly written and it reads like a novel. It reminds me a lot of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, actually (admittedly a memoir, not a novel, but with all the pacing, suspense, and drama of a novel). I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed it, because (like Catalonia) it is a tragedy, but as a historical study it’s magnificent. Highly recommended.

Again, I can’t help but notice how male-dominated this list is. These are seminal works in their fields; I wonder how different the reading list would look if professors made a conscious effort to choose seminal works (predominantly) by female historians.

Fiction

Asterisks link to a full review.

  • Clash of Eagles*, Alan Smale
  • The Emissary, Kristal Shaff
  • The Winner’s Curse*, Marie Rutkoski
  • The Whitefire Crossing, Courtney Schafer
  • The Tainted City, Courtney Schafer
  • The Labyrinth of Flame, Courtney Schafer
  • Cruel Beauty, Rosamund Hodge
  • A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner

Thoughts: The Whitefire Crossing had been on my to-read list for a couple years before I finally read it this fall. I can’t believe I put it off so long—I raced through it, and upon finishing I wanted the second book so badly that I ordered it through my university library the next day; and then I wanted the third book so badly that I bought it the day it was released (December 1st), and finished all six hundred pages of it in two days. I did something very similar with A Conspiracy of Kings, which for some reason I didn’t read at the same time I read the rest of the series a couple years ago. That wrong was righted in the space of about three hours, and I think Conspiracy may now actually be my favorite of the series.

I was also very glad to read a superb stand-alone fantasy, Rosamund Hodge’s Cruel Beauty, which like The Winner’s Curse has Roman overtones and is thus automatic Amanda-bait. A Greco-Roman-inspired retelling of Beauty and the Beast? Yes, please, and thank you. My friend Louise has said that the book reminds her of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces—by far Lewis’s best work, I think—and I happily agree.

TTT: Summer reading and to-read

Top Ten TuesdayMost of my summer reading has been and will be made up by various Latin curricula and supplements, in preparation for next school year. I recently found an 1897 printing of De Bello Gallico, and I’ll be brushing up on it myself before I hope to use it with students. I’m also currently reading Greg Woolf’s Rome, an excellent, accessible history, and rereading Ruth Downie’s Semper Fidelis, which is probably my favorite of the Ruso series. To finish off, I have Pierce Brown’s Red Rising out from the library, and Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See waiting on Kindle.

TTT: Books I’ll never read

Top Ten TuesdayThis is a challenging topic, because I have fairly eclectic tastes, and because I thought it would be boring to list what seem to me to be the obvious choices—I have no inclination to pick up Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, and I assume I never will. So it came down to trying to find books that I will never read for reasons other than their utter lack of literary merit. Here are three series that I have avoided:

The Redwall series, by Brian Jacques. I missed the window of opportunity for this one, as I didn’t know about it until I was much past the age of being at all interested in animal fantasy.

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin. This may not be entirely fair, as I did try to read the first book of the series (A Game of Thrones). Though I’ve been told repeatedly that the series gets much better as it goes on, I honestly did not find anything to distinguish this from every other medieval fantasy I’ve read (and there have been quite a few)—at least not in ways significant or compelling enough to hold my interest.

The sequels to Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn. Though I am aware that Nightingale Floor is only the first book in (I think) a five-book cycle, I have always thought of it as a standalone. The story seems perfectly complete and any sequels extraneous. Also (spoiler warning) my favorite character doesn’t survive this one.

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