Currently Reading: The Historical Non-Fiction Edition

I've just finished The Mistresses of Henry VIII by Kelly Hart and started The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune: The Life of Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk by David Head.

GothicAngel, did you see Beard has a prog on tomorrow about Caligula?

SpinningWheel said:

GothicAngel, did you see Beard has a prog on tomorrow about Caligula?

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I had read on her blog about it, but didn't realise it was on TV so soon. Thanks for the tip off.

Managed to finish "Edward I - A Great and Terrible King" by Marc Morris.

Really really good account on an important English king.

Hip-Hop-a-potamus said:

I just finished "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann about explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925.

Seriously fascinating.

But if you ever had any desire to visit the Amazon (even as much as it's changed in 90-something years), this will disavow you of your travel plans right quick.

Despite the piranhas and funky fish that try to swim up your privates and use spikes to stay embedded inside, I still thought it sounded interesting. I just thought "I won't go in the water."

But flies biting you and laying larvae under your skin with maggots emerging sometime later? Protozoa being deposited around your face so that it begins basically rotting off? COUNT ME OUT!!

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Loved that book! Read that one on my adventure binge--I love historical non-fiction about men/women who go off into the wilderness/unknown/forbidden. Skeletons on the Zahara is another good one, along with River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey and Into Africa: the Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone. Over the Edge of the World about Magellan's circumnavigation is also great. Recently finished Endurance about Shackleton's ordeal in Antarctica. These made me want to write a thriller-adventure like Theroux's The Mosquito Coast.

I'm in the middle of Wind, Sand, and Stars by St. Exupery. After I read Beryl Markham's West with the Night, I wanted to stay with the pilot/adventurer biographies. I want to find a good one about Howard Hughes.

As for the books pertaining to my fiction writing:

Mayor's The Poison King about Mithridates VI started my whole love affair with the Persian-Greek King who fought Sulla and Pompey. I'm re-reading it for the third time.

Barrett's Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire

Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. A perennial favorite, even though I write mainly stories set in the late republic/early empire.

Adkins and Adkins's Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, though lately I've been consulting a copy of Mary Johnston's Roman Life I got from the library and Dupont's Daily Life in Ancient Rome. The latter gives a good rundown on the Roman mindset, the citizen as compared to other people in that world, i.e. women, slaves, plebs, equites and tradesmen.

So many books, so little time...

I'm reading a book called Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart. It's about her maternal family's history in Barbados in the context of the sugar boom and the slave trade in the West Indies.

Just finished Yokohama Yankee by Leslie Helm

Finished "The Wooden World - An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy" by N.A.M. Rodger and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea - Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750" by Marcus Rediker.

Now reading "Daily Life in the Age of Sail" by Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo.

I have to say, all very interesting and pretty much what I was looking for to get into the theme.

Stating the obvious: I'm also half way through "Master and Commander" and am in awe of Patrick O'Brian. Even if the setting is 80 years past the period my story is in, he pours barrels of useful information and details.

mayqueen said:

I don't know if this exactly counts or not, but I'm reading Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic for a book group in my department. It's more philosophy than straight history, but I love medical history, so of course I love it.

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I'm reading The Rejection of Continental Drift -- a lot of science having a hard time from say 1850 to 1970:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243408.The_Rejection_of_Continental_Drift

Josephus' The Jewish Wars
Daily Life In Palestine at the Time of Christ (Henri Daniel Rops)
The Story of the Jews (Simon Schama)

Just finished the Naval History of the Civil War by Bern Anderson. I don't particularly care about the Civil War, but I wanted to read something very different from what I normally read, and it was quite interesting.

"The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840-1900"
Mouton, Candy

apparently the sequel to my Age of Sail WIP, will be a western

Just started The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

Sunflowerrei said:

Just started The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

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And you will not be disappointed! One of the best history books out there.

And further news on the WWI front (puns intended, of course. Why else use them?) I recently finished Frederick Palmer's My Year of the War and My Second Year of the War. The first one was really informative about life in the trenches, and how various aspects of the war worked. It's made my WIP much more realistic and consistent. The second book was more literary and "pretty" but not nearly so informative and focuses mostly on the Somme. I suspect the first book was successful enough to spur the second one, he just didn't have very much new to say.

I just started Napoleon: Man of War, Man of Peace by Timothy Wilson-Smith. The only biography my library had of Napoleon.

If you want more Napoleon, there's about 15 gazillion other biographies out there - interlibrary loan may be your new best friend!

A book that's high on my TBR list is "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo" by Tom Reiss, a biography of Alexandre Dumas's father, a great general of the French Revolution, a colorful hero, and no friend of Napoleon

benbenberi said:

If you want more Napoleon, there's about 15 gazillion other biographies out there - interlibrary loan may be your new best friend!

A book that's high on my TBR list is "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo" by Tom Reiss, a biography of Alexandre Dumas's father, a great general of the French Revolution, a colorful hero, and no friend of Napoleon

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Yes, I am going to the library in the next county this week because they have several biographies on Napoleon as well as many more in their interlibrary loan program. My local library is just a small country one.

The Black Count has been on my TBR list for a while now. If you read it first you'll have to let me know how it is.

I'm currently reading The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire.
It has a chapter on Babylonia during the reign of Nabonidus so it's exactly what I was looking for as I wanted to find out what he'd done to make the priests and people hate him so much.

About 70 pages into Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring

ishtar'sgate said:

I'm currently reading The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire.
It has a chapter on Babylonia during the reign of Nabonidus so it's exactly what I was looking for as I wanted to find out what he'd done to make the priests and people hate him so much.

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Wow! Sounds fantastic. I'm reading Coe on the decypherment of Mayan Heiroglypics and how Thompson held up the process for about 50 years. I've ordered Thompson's book (which I found wonderfully nutty back in the 1970s) which is now in the "Forgotten Books" series.

Currently reading some World War II propaganda, titled "French Canada in Transition" by Everett Cherrington Hughes. Found it in the remains of my grandmother's library. It is an interesting insight into English Canadian view or the messaging thereof of French Canadian intransigence in the Second Conscription Crisis and as a consequence the Grand Noirceur that followed.

I'm reading 'Home' by Francis Pryor. I'm really enjoying it (nice chatty style) and it's making me want to write something set in prehistory. (But I won't in the foreseeable future. Too much new research.)