What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[The Mikado]

The Struggle For the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class by Anna Clark.

[The Mikado]

Well, I guess I'm not the only person that recently read E. P. Thompson. 

Fantastic book.  It took me two months. 

[The Mikado]

Just finished several in the past week, including De Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution and (a truly fantastic book) The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It by David Bell (2007).  Highly recommended.

[The Mikado]

Currently there's Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

What

[The Mikado]

And everyone who bought it would immediately regret having done so.

I've only ever had to read a 9 page excerpt.

It's the equivalent of smashing a brick into your head.

[The Mikado]

I finished The Brothers Karamazov earlier this week, in terms of pleasure reading.

In terms of not-so-pleasure reading, I'm working my way through Dagmar Herzog's Sex After Fascism, which examines the myths and perceptions arising re: sexuality in the Nazi era and how they affected the development of sexuality in both West and East Germany postwar.

[The Mikado]

I finished The Brothers Karamazov earlier this week, in terms of pleasure reading.

thoughts?

Short version is that it's one of the most powerful books I've ever read and that Dostoyevsky's insight into the human mind is really only matched by Shakespeare and Goethe among authors I've read.  Long version would be full of spoilers.

[The Mikado]

Which Hobsbawm book?  I'm quite fond of Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.

[The Mikado]

I have Crime and Punishment and The Secret History as summer reading for AP Literature. Thoughts on these?

Crime and Punishment is one of the most amazing books I've ever had the pleasure to read (though, now that I've read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment needed a bit of a demotion).  IMO, Dostoyevsky ranks with Goethe and Shakespeare on my very short list of authors who truly understand and can vividly depict the inner workings of the human mind.

[The Mikado]

In the Garden of Beasts- Erik Larson

Highly recommended book with insight from the perspective of Ambassador Dodd and his family into the early Third Reich...

I had that book recommended to me elsewhere recently, will consider checking that out.

I've read many, many, many books lately, but at the moment I'm almost done with Tim Blanning's 700-page The Pursuit of Glory, a history of Europe 1648-1815.  It's...amazingly detailed, to the point of having a 30 page chapter on changes in gardening and hunting.

[The Mikado]

I read my first fiction in half a year, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. 

[The Mikado]

I just read The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene as well as Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.

Now I'm going to do Heart of Darkness.

The amazing thing about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad's English really isn't all that good and the book can get a bit tough despite being barely 60 pages long, but it's still one of the most compelling stories you'll ever read.

[The Mikado]

Recently finished From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple (one of my favorite authors...the book's a travelogue through the former realms of the Byzantine Empire examining the remnants of Eastern Christendom in what was once their stronghold and is now the stronghold of Islam) and Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary (a rather surface-level intro-y book that made me mad at some points but still had new information for me, specifically about late Medieval Islamic thinkers...I didn't have as solid a grasp on Islam in the 12th and 13th century eras before reading that book).

Currently reading Crusades: A History by Jonathan Riley-Smith.  I have become very, very interested in the Crusades, and this book is amazing in its intricate detail.  I just finished a section explaining the diet on a typical day in a Hospitaller hospital.  There was another great section talking about how the various Christian sects of the east interacted with the Franks, right down to multiple tiny Armenian churches, which is a topic I hadn't really seen explored before. 

[The Mikado]

The third Mazower book I've read.  Drier than Dark Continent and Salonika: City of Ghosts, but a good read nonetheless.

[The Mikado]

Margaret MacMillan is meticulously detailed and a pleasure to read, as always. Paris 1919 was one of my favorite history books ever, and this one is...not quite up to that standard, but is damned solid.