Last week I finished The Northern Crusades, and I much liked it. Two books which would be excellent complements are Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 and God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. I’ve gone back to Wonderful Life, and again find myself annoyed by Stephen Jay Gould’s pompous and self-aggrandizing tendencies. But I do find when he goes straight to the descriptive science, such as anatomy which I am not familiar with, he is far less insufferable. Though I’m reading Wonderful Life partly to get to its rebuttal, Crucible of Creation. When I can’t handle Gould I’ve been going through Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Years ago I enjoyed his The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, and since I’m a big reader I figured his more recent book would be of interest to me. Finally, I’ve put Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830 in my stack. I read volume 1, but never finished volume 2.
Any books you are reading?
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