What Are You Reading? Aug 31, 2011

Just finished

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. This is the second book in the series started by Old Man's War. It's not as good as the first, and reads too much like nonfiction.

I gave up on this one

Now reading

Charming Proofs. A book of beautiful (or charming) proofs in mathematics, nearly all of which require no advanced math.

God's Arbiters:Americans and the Phillippines: 1898-1902 by Susan K. Harris. I am only a few pages into this book, but it looks good. It is an advance copy sent to me by the publisher, with rather fortuitous timing since Cryptonomicon deals a lot with the Phillippines, and Mr. Speaker deals with the same time period, and I just finished The War Lovers, which is about the other part of the Spanish American war - the part that was fought in Cuba.

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich. It's what the subtitle says. The good, ,the bad, and the ugly of the papacy. Norwich writes very well, and strikes a b nice balance. However, the book is marred because there is too much to cover in the space allotted, and it's impossible to write a history of the papacy that doesn't include a lot of European history. I'm not that familiar with European history between (say) 500 and 1500, and I daresay I am not alone. This makes portions of the book hard to follow.

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell. Darrow was a great man, but he was not without flaws. This book covers the heroism and the flaws, and also captures the times in which Darrow lived (with not inconsequential parallels to the present)

Just started
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. Historical fiction and the start of a trilogy about the 20th century. This one centers on WWI and the Russian Revolution, and mostly takes place in Wales, Buffalo, NY, Petrograd, and the trenches. Follett does this sort of thing very well, using scenes to give the reader a good sense of time and place. Plus there's romance, sex, betrayal, crime ..... Good stuff.