the covids have set us back in a number of ways, all of it made way worse by trump's politicization of the whole mess early on — i've had my vaccinations and booster, unlike the 40-fkn-% who haven't gotten anything, which itself tells us nothing new about the mouth-breathers who are always all around us at any time and anywhere (read defoe's
) — i haven't been on a areoplane or even gone anywhere out of state since august 2019 and only one soccer match and virtually no eating out during that time — but we started up our 106 supper club again, i've met a couple of friends for lunch at manuels, and i see robt a few times a week — to be honest, i've enjoyed the enforced solitude
but i'm glad i have the beagle, who wants nothing more than to be right where i am, which can get annoying sometime since i typically don't like clingy things — also too i know this juggler who is always wanting to show me his wares, as it were, and that is good, too, except that he also triggers those clingy issues, along with a number of others i didn't even know i have --- i continue to work on all of that
throughout i have not felt particularly productive, so i've been thrown into that briar patch of reading, with the dog curled up beside me, if not trying to get in my lap — the list below is in more or less the reverse order in which i read them — clearly i am a fairly indiscriminate reader, as long as it's history — i tried to pick a "best of" but could not, so the * system will have to suffice — i'm glad my eyes still work
in addition to the items listed below (which do not include all of those which i have started but not been called upon to complete), i re-read three volumes of ackroyd's history of england, and started a fourth, reading more or less continuously, unlike the brief fits and starts when i read them to begin with, which makes for a better experience — also too the john quincy adams bio, which was one of the best of the year, mentioned that he was in the habit of reading the bible through each year — so i started to re-read the bible (i read it once in my early years) and actually got through genesis and a little bit of exodus, but got tired of the incest, violence, genocide, and what not and had to quit — maybe i'll take up proverbs
Dan Jones, The
Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
(2014)
Ian Mortimer, Henry
V: The Warrior King of 1415 (2017)
Helen Carr, The
Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster (2021)
Ian Mortimer, Henry
IV: The Righteous King (2014)
Katheryn Warner, Richard
II: A True King’s Fall (2017)
*Ian Mortimer, Edward
III: The Perfect King (2018)
Marc Morris,
King John, Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England: The Road to Magna Carta
(2016)
*Kathryn Warner, Edward
II: The Unconventional King (2017)
Catherine Arnold, Pandemic
1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History
(2018)
**Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)
Michael Lewis, The
Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016)
**John T. Ellisor,
The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing
Frontier (2010)
***Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the
Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020)
*Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, eds. The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture,
Politics (2004)
***Emily Carr, Klee
Wyck (1941)
Roland Ennos, The
Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
(2020)
Peter Ackroyd, The
History of England, Vol. VI: Innovation (2021)
Edward J Watts, The
Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity (2020)
***William J.
Cooper, The Lost Founding Father: John
Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (2017)
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (2021)
*Tom Nichols, The
Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it
Matters (2017)
Tom Nichols, Our
Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within
on Modern Democracy (2021)
Michael Lewis, Panic!:
The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (2009)
**Michael Lewis, The
Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021)
***Nancy Marie Brown, Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and
the Woman Who Made Them (2015)
*Benny Morris, Righteous
Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (2001)
Erin Stewart Mauldin, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and
Emancipation in the Cotton South (2018)
***Eric Foner, The
Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
(2019)
***Martin Padgett, A
Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution
(2021)
James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated by James Stuart, FRS and
FSA, and Nicholas Revett, Painters and Architects (2007)
David Cannadine, Westminster
Abbey: A Church in History (2019)
Victor Hugo, Les
Miserables
John Goff, Salem's
Witch House: A Touchstone to Antiquity (2009)
*William Cronon, Nature’s
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
***Mark Peterson,
The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865
(2019)
***Neil Price, Children
of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (2020)
Peter Frankopan, The
Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015)
***Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (2020)
**William Cronon, Changes
in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)
Graham Bush, Old
London, Photographed by Henry Dixon and Alfred and John Bool for the Society
for Photographing Relics of Old London
Wick Griswold, A
History of the Connecticut River (2012)
William Wood,
New Englands Prospect: A True, Lively, and Experimental Description of That
Part of America, Commonly Called New England (1635)
William Henry Carpenter, The History of Connecticut: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present
Time (2018 reprint)