What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[YPestis25]

Just finished Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Can't recommend it enough. Certainly more manageable than my attempts at The Brothers Karamazov.

[YPestis25]

Reading Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark currently. It's an engrossing survey of Prussian history, though I'm worried with law school starting back up in a few days my ability to read for fun is going to diminish.

[YPestis25]

Reading Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark currently. It's an engrossing survey of Prussian history, though I'm worried with law school starting back up in a few days my ability to read for fun is going to diminish.

Excellent book btw.

Anyway, just finished trawling through Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People. Probably one of the worst books I’ve ever read about the Putin regime - so unsurprisingly it got rave reviews in the Western press. Now rereading War and Peace to cleanse myself.

I am very much enjoying it. Would also recommend Clark's Sleepwalkers which is a look at the outbreak of the First World War if you haven't read it.

[YPestis25]

Reading The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan. Very engrossing so far, and much easier of a read than Metternich by Wolfram Seiman, which I've been slogging through for a while.

[YPestis25]

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 - Historiographically a bit dated, but quite well researched.

[YPestis25]

Just finished Streams of gold, rivers of blood : The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade by Anthony Kaldellis. Interesting take on the collapse of the Byzantine state between 1025 and 1081. The author rejects the consensus about the feudalization of the Byzantine state, and instead blames the collapse much more fully on external factors, and the ever present succession crises in the Roman Empire. He also provides some insight into Roussel de Bailleul, who established a short lived Norman rump state in northern Anatolia which Kaldellis argues helped to break Byzantine power on the peninsula.

Would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in the period, and it's a concise work on an understudied period.

[YPestis25]

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 - Historiographically a bit dated, but quite well researched.

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 - Historiographically a bit dated, but quite well researched.

I really want to read that one but I haven't found an ebook version yet.

I'm currently finishing "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848" and "The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815".

Beautiful books, both of them.

It was enjoyable. I was lucky enough to live near a library that had it. I will say it focuses on the statesmen alone perhaps a bit much compared to the other economic, political and military considerations that drove them, and unfortunately engages in the old dismissal of the Habsburg Monarchy as sclerotic and falling apart for the entire 19th century, but it is still a good read.