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To be read...
Mar. 11th, 2008 08:50 amI have gone a little *ahem* insane in my book purchasing and book-borrowing in the last few weeks.
I went ahead and ordered "The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug grade" by Alfred W. McCoy, as my dad apparently knew him in college and dated his sister (who, dad tells me, became a banker in the Cayman islands... I'm not sure how much credence I give all this, as dad also thought Mr. McCoy was long dead, whereas Google tells me he's alive and well and teaching at U-W Madison, but what the hey... my dad really does know Oliver Stone, I've seen him call him up... the beauties of an Ivy League education in all its brick towered glory, right?)
I also got a little crazy in the stacks at work and walked out with "Cavaliers and Roundheads" (english Civil War) and "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1700s social history). From the OTHER library I got the Cambridge European Economic History volume, the one that focuses on the 1600s-1700s. Also the first volume of a history of the Bank of England.
Lest I sound too intelligent, the fact of the matter is that I also took home a ton of genre novels that I've been pounding through while ignoring all the hard history books - so I've read another Elizabeth Hoyt book (The Leopard Prince), two Suzanne Brockmann books (I got interested in her after reading her eloquent essay about her son online... so far I find the books well-engineered and entertaining, but not exactly aimed at my particular mental sub-demographic), and I re-read Laura Kinsale's "Shadowheart" after spending the night before reading "For My Lady's Heart."
I've got Lauren Henderson's "Kiss Me, Kill Me" on the pile, though the title keeps making me think of the manga, which I haven't picked up yet. I love Ms. Henderson's Sam Jones mystery series passionately, and hope this will be similar (with allowances for its being YA).
I'm reading "The Secret History of the American Empire" in small sections, no more than one country/region's worth at a time, as it is somewhat depressing in large gulps.
For light pre-sleep reading I've got "Sex with the Queen" which I'm enjoying more than "Sex with Kings" because I haven't already read as many of the anecdotes (after your third book about famous courtesans you start to get a lot of repeat research... I have heard about Lola Montez soooooo many times now).
I've got about 80 pages left in my overview of the 1600s textbook, after which I will *finally* be done with my run of "early modern overview" books. (did a 1500s one, a 1700s one, and now this 1600s one). The books I bought in Vermont while visiting my mom finally showed up a few weeks ago so I have three more books on social/literary history of the 1600s piled there too.
My mom says it's starting to get to the point where I've acquired something like a college minor's equivalent of 1600s history knowledge. Having that kind of perspective sitting undigested in my gullet is starting to make me a very bad person to have conversations about politics/economics/globalization with.
Especially globalization or international trade. It is just a bad idea to bring this topic up around me now because I open my mouth and all sorts of pellets of undigested data come forcibly out. This combined with the big wonk of African history I waded through and the Latin American and Chinese political history classes I took in college has overall made me a sort of... prickly human when speaking about these things? It's not that I get all Marxist or socialist or anything, but... I am far too conscious of the forces and history behind some of this stuff now, and it is not fun for those around me (or for me, either, but I think, like having a bad cold, that it's one of those things that society asks us to keep to ourselves.)
I went ahead and ordered "The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug grade" by Alfred W. McCoy, as my dad apparently knew him in college and dated his sister (who, dad tells me, became a banker in the Cayman islands... I'm not sure how much credence I give all this, as dad also thought Mr. McCoy was long dead, whereas Google tells me he's alive and well and teaching at U-W Madison, but what the hey... my dad really does know Oliver Stone, I've seen him call him up... the beauties of an Ivy League education in all its brick towered glory, right?)
I also got a little crazy in the stacks at work and walked out with "Cavaliers and Roundheads" (english Civil War) and "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1700s social history). From the OTHER library I got the Cambridge European Economic History volume, the one that focuses on the 1600s-1700s. Also the first volume of a history of the Bank of England.
Lest I sound too intelligent, the fact of the matter is that I also took home a ton of genre novels that I've been pounding through while ignoring all the hard history books - so I've read another Elizabeth Hoyt book (The Leopard Prince), two Suzanne Brockmann books (I got interested in her after reading her eloquent essay about her son online... so far I find the books well-engineered and entertaining, but not exactly aimed at my particular mental sub-demographic), and I re-read Laura Kinsale's "Shadowheart" after spending the night before reading "For My Lady's Heart."
I've got Lauren Henderson's "Kiss Me, Kill Me" on the pile, though the title keeps making me think of the manga, which I haven't picked up yet. I love Ms. Henderson's Sam Jones mystery series passionately, and hope this will be similar (with allowances for its being YA).
I'm reading "The Secret History of the American Empire" in small sections, no more than one country/region's worth at a time, as it is somewhat depressing in large gulps.
For light pre-sleep reading I've got "Sex with the Queen" which I'm enjoying more than "Sex with Kings" because I haven't already read as many of the anecdotes (after your third book about famous courtesans you start to get a lot of repeat research... I have heard about Lola Montez soooooo many times now).
I've got about 80 pages left in my overview of the 1600s textbook, after which I will *finally* be done with my run of "early modern overview" books. (did a 1500s one, a 1700s one, and now this 1600s one). The books I bought in Vermont while visiting my mom finally showed up a few weeks ago so I have three more books on social/literary history of the 1600s piled there too.
My mom says it's starting to get to the point where I've acquired something like a college minor's equivalent of 1600s history knowledge. Having that kind of perspective sitting undigested in my gullet is starting to make me a very bad person to have conversations about politics/economics/globalization with.
Especially globalization or international trade. It is just a bad idea to bring this topic up around me now because I open my mouth and all sorts of pellets of undigested data come forcibly out. This combined with the big wonk of African history I waded through and the Latin American and Chinese political history classes I took in college has overall made me a sort of... prickly human when speaking about these things? It's not that I get all Marxist or socialist or anything, but... I am far too conscious of the forces and history behind some of this stuff now, and it is not fun for those around me (or for me, either, but I think, like having a bad cold, that it's one of those things that society asks us to keep to ourselves.)
