Ha! We who grew up in the 80s learned this on the show Airwolf! I have no idea why anyone reads Jane Eyre without watching Airwolf first …

I had the same experience with David Macauley! He even drew me a little castle 😁 I’m glad Peck wrote back to you, he’s a wonderful writer.

Does your author not have any contact information on their author bio, Amazon page or webpage? Usually they have a way there they prefer to be contacted.

I have the same approach to classics! No one had warned me Madame Bovary was incredibly funny as well as a social satire. I went in expecting to have to work at it and loved every second.

I heard so much about Lonesome Dove and slogged through it. It was as sour, hateful, and misogynistic as any book I’ve ever read. I got to that miserable ending and actually threw the book across the room and left a dent in the wall, I was so angry I had read it. I can’t imagine what your opinion would have to be of women to enjoy that book, but I keep hearing guys telling me it’s the best thing ever written. Ugh.

I hd despised Dickens in high school but was stuck on a long bus trip and had nothing but a Tale of Two Cities. Wow, that is not like his other books! Loved every minute of it, cried at the end.

My first two years of graduate school I really didn’t read much fiction, I was simply burned out on reading after I finished my 500 pages a week of academic reading. Instead, I decided to set myself a goal of “learning” about old movies, so it gave me an excuse to watch a lot of old movies. I would suggest not beating yourself up about it. Your mind is telling you that it needs a break from books, and that’s pretty common in uni!

Alternate suggestion is – especially if you like genre fiction like science fiction or fantasy – there are some amazing novellas being published as books right now and those are very bite-sized. Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds, Barnhill’s The Crane Husband are all great books ~120 pp.

Short stories are also an amazing literary form 😏

Great suggestions here – for something a little different I’d recommend Passing Strange by Martha Sandweiss. It’s about Clarence White, who was an elite guy, friend of Roosevelt, head of the US geological survey, blonde and blue eyed, who was living a double life in which he had a Black family who believed that he was a Pullman pullman and that’s why he was gone for long periods of time, and he kept it going for decades. It’s a fascinating biography!

He’s a wonderful writer! When I encountered him, I didn’t know history could be written that way & it really opened my eyes.

I just finished Malcolm Gaskill’s Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World. It’s the story of the witch hunt in Springfield Massachusetts in 1651, but it starts with the founding of the plantation and it’s an incredible exploration of what life was actually like there in the 1600s. He perfectly captures the hothouse atmosphere of exhaustion, boredom, anxiety and gossip that led to the witch accusations, but I also don’t think I’ve gotten a better portrait of what life was like for the Puritans.

It really well written too, and sometimes unexpectedly funny. Somehow I did not expect >!the most damning accusation to be based on a pudding!<

depends on when you’re looking at— four quick recommendations :)

if you’re interested in just before the 20th century, Victorian America: Transformation ls in Everyday Life 1876-1915 is fascinating and has everything you want, while the murder of Helen Jewett is a nonfiction exploration of a famous murder case and has a lot of day-to-day information.

If you’re interested in colonial, Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is all about the daily life of a colonial midwife, mostly her diary. I just finished Malcolm Gaskill’s Ruin of All Witches which is about the witchhunt in 1651 Springfield Massachusetts and it is absolutely packed with information about daily life, what people did, what their lives were like, what they eat, all the stuff you sound interested in!

I really enjoyed James Rives’ Religion in the Roman Empire, which is academic but very well-organized & readable.

Hi! Thomas Segrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis looks at how and why Black migrants from the South became concentrated in the Northern inner cities and what led to the 1960s and 70s riots in cities like Detroit… It’s a great overview of the politics and economics of segregation in the 20th century in the north. If you’re interested in segregation in the south, you really still can’t do better than Woodward’s classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which is also incredibly readable (it was written in the 50s, so it’s a little old-fashioned, but Woodward was trying to combat the argument of the south that segregation was natural and had always existed, and instead to explain its history).

Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New Right is also a great book, she looks at the emergence of the new right from Goldwater through the southern strategy to Reagan, although she focuses more on the sort of grassroots side of it.

McGirr and Segrue are both academic writers, but very readable imo.

Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Coughlin, Long, and the Great Depression was written for a popular audience and has a lot on Huey Long’s run for president versus FDR. Overall it’s really good, although I think he isn’t really fair to the Irish-Americans, but that’s probably partly because my grandparents were Irish-Anerican and they despised Coughlin.

Sublime is the perfect word!

We read it in high school! I sometimes think of it when I’m being cheap about something… don’t be like Trina!

But I always thought it’s weird that of his books, McTeague is the only one that blames the individual more than it does capitalism – he mainly critiqued capitalism but somehow that’s not the famous book. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy but…

Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. Personally I think it’s a lot better than Gatsby, but it’s been forgotten.

Frank Norris’ McTeague is still read, but I love his book Vandover and the Brute. It’s a sort of fantasy story about social Darwinism in action where a pampered, wealthy man begins devolving as he loses his housing and begins to spiral down through worse and worse living conditions, eventually >!becoming a werewolf!<

King Leopold’s Soliloquy is amazing, and no one reads it. Twain was objecting to the same Belgian policies in the Congo with the Soliloquy that Joseph Conrad was criticizing in Heart of Darkness, which also makes it interesting.

Historian here, I would agree that it’s not going to be as simple as looking at ethnicity. You also need to look at region and particularly at economic competition. For example, there were Irish immigrants and free Blacks in antebellum New York City who shared neighborhoods, saloons, and intermixed culture (where tap dancing comes from), but you can also find wealthy Blacks hiring the Irish as servants in Boston and looking down on them, and you can also find virulent, ugly racism in Irish-American communities made visible in the Boston Busing Crisis, for instance.

I just finished Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance by Plokhy. I loved it! It focuses on the American airbases in Poltava in what is now Ukraine, which were originally established so that the British and Americans could do bombing runs straight across Germany and land in Ukraine to refuel. Stalin wasn’t thrilled about it but he ended up giving in.

Most of the Americans who were sent to staff the airbases were picked because they spoke Russian (although they were screened for anti-Soviet sentiment). The Soviets, of course, immediately assumed all these guys were spies (they weren’t). Drama ensued.

It should’ve been a relatively small moment in the larger war but he makes a really strong argument that it had outsized influence, >!partly because Harriman was involved, partly because a lot of the Americans (and Soviets) who worked at Poltava were posted to Berlin after the war, and partly because near the end of the war Poltava became central to the disputes over what was going to happen to the American POWs who were being freed from German camps by the Red Army!<

I also really liked the way that he got into the Soviet archives to follow up on how the locals around Poltava, especially the woman who dated American GIs, were treated in the Cold War. I felt like that easily could’ve been overlooked and I’m glad that he included that really personal level as well as the overarching strategic and political impact.

Highly recommend!

You know a lot more than I do, obviously, but I have the impression that in German writers actually can create words on a pretty regular basis, which I would think would make reading in it an incredibly interesting experience that isn’t comparable to English.

Publishing companies have needed to do that in order for them and the authors to survive. Obviously the e-book should be much, much cheaper, but there’s also a point below which they can’t go and still pay the people who work at the publishing house and the author. It might be worth looking for books that are out of copyright? Standardebooks is a great site.

Another really good option is getting a library card for a library in the US and checking out e-books— NYC Public Library allows you to do this without being a resident of New York. If it’s a popular e-book, you might end up being on hold for it, but it’s free!

I hope you don’t mind me saying that I have the opposite experience. Reading in my second language, French, which I learned in high school, remains really satisfying to me – I know that it’s a chance to read something that would never be the same in translation, and I also am a little bit proud of myself for reading in another language 😏 It’s definitely a different experience than reading in my native language— but different, not worse. For me.

Hi, your spoiler alerts aren’t working. Personally I think it’s clear they’re supposed to be there, & I’m sure folks see it,, but I just ran into this a few days ago and can now tell you that the problem is correct punctuation… If you put a period at the end of the section before the exclamation point, It doesn’t read it as a spoiler. Just fyi :)

There are some really good environmental history books that have sections on Yellowstone, looking at how the land was being used before the national park was created – they look at Native American use and also local white use., and how those uses were criminalized. Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature and Mark Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks are both really great.

I know that when Harvard University was founded back in the 1600s it had a traditional curriculum, and that did not include history. There was a huge emphasis on classics though, however, which would’ve included Greek and Latin, and probably also some discussion of Greek and Roman history – they would’ve read Caesar and Livy so talking about that –and understanding Plato and the philosophers.

A lot of historical discussion would probably also occur in different religion classes or religious settings. Christian theologians, for example, would be expected to have some knowledge of the reformation and Luther, while Catholic seminarians were taught about the history of the church, Reformation and Counterreformation etc.

>!Thank you! :) !<