Weekend Reading

I made the mistake of starting too many books without finishing them recently. So, I took the time this last weekend between the reunion & hanging out with my parents to check these off the To-Do list.

Thermopylae: The Battle For The West by Ernle Bradford: A good short read on the context of the battle. Only a few chapters of the book focus on the battle itself. Very good at providing the time, place and culture for the persons involved and excellent at citing contrasting historical sources and how their slightly differing stories go. Enjoyable and quick history read.

An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit): A very good read. Covered a wide variety of topics with the main theme being how modern technology is democratizing and individualizing parts of society. The endnotes alone are worth a look for his sources are varied and interesting. Excellent read.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer: HOLY COW. This took forever to read. Not because it was bad, just long and very heavy on the footnotes. Do not read this book if you have a latent fear of statistics, charts or maps! However, it was exceedingly interesting. All four folkways described were clearly drawn out and the final section discussing how they interplayed with one another throughout American history was an excellent conclusion. Long but definitely worth it.

I also moved 1634: The Baltic War up on my To-Read list. This is one of my favorite current series and yet another testament to the awesomeness of Baen books. It's moving up because my father said it was good (and we tend to agree on books like this).