words

i finished my first book of 2020: Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019), basically from the fifteenth through the mid-19th centuries in the run-up to the "scramble for africa" that began in the 1880s --- i won't think about slavery in quite the same way as i did ---

i don't think that i've memorialized my 2019 reading list yet, asterisks for must-reads:

***Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztec (2019)

Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius, A Life (2009)

Serhii Plookhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015)

Alistair Moffat, The British: A Genetic Journey (2013)

Stuart McHardy, A New History of the Picts (2010)

Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (2010)

Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (2000)

Lars C Adams, Breaking the House of Pumunkey: The Final Powhatan War and the Fall of an American Empire (2017)

David La Vere, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for North Carolina (2013)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (2018)

William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (2008)

Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)

***Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey across the American Divide (2019)

David W Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History (2002)

Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (2018)

Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (2019)

***Carrie Gibson, El  Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (2019)

***Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (2019)

Anthony Doyle, Standing Peachtree: A Cold Case of Native Provenance (2011)

George McDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers (2008)

Charles River Editors, The Rise of Constantinople: The Ancient History of the City . . . (2018)

***B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (1983)

***Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)

Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times (2018)

Charles River Editors, Petra: The History of the Rose City (2016)

James Roman, Chronicles of Old Los Angeles (2015)

i would go nuts if i couldn't read