On Today’s Bookshelf (XVI)

It hasn’t been very long since my last On Today’s Bookshelf (XV) was published, just two months. But it seems that I have had the (mis)fortune (depending on one’s perspective) to discover a lot of books that interest me. And so I have been spending money acquiring yet more books for my ever-growing to-be-read pile. Fortunately, many of them are in ebook form, although if I read a nonfiction book in ebook form and find I really enjoy it, I tend to buy a hardcover version for my library. (It would be so much better for me if publishers bundled the ebook with hardcover version for just a few dollars more than the hardcover alone. I’d always buy the bundle.)

I admit that I get a great deal of pleasure from sitting in my library and looking at the hardcovers on the shelves, remembering the books as my eyes slide over the spines. As much as I like the convenience of ebooks, ebooks fail to evoke in me the sensory pleasure (or the memories) that print books bring forth. Scrolling through a list of ebooks just doesn’t provide the same degree of pleasure I get from sitting in my library surrounded by print books.

Books are the armchair way to experience the world in which we live. Few of us have the resources, whether it be financial or time or something else, to spend years traveling our world and participating in discovery. Consequently, we rely on others to do the legwork and to share their experiences and gained knowledge. Books are a guilt-free addiction. Editing fills part of my craving; the rest of my craving is fulfilled by the books I acquire and read. Alas, there isn’t enough time to sate that craving and so I keep on acquiring.

Here is a list of some of the books that I am reading (or have acquired and added to my to-be-read pile in the two months since On Today’s Bookshelf XV was published) either in hardcover or in ebook form. I have already started On Today’s Bookshelf XVII.

Nonfiction –

• Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 by Michael S. Bryant
• Confronting the Good Death: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953 by Michael S. Bryant
• Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity by Prue Shaw
• A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War by Isabel V. Hull
• Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle
• Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
• The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
• What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa by David E. Murphy
• Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre
• God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy
• 1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See by Bruce Chadwick
• Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire
• Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister by Robert Hutchinson
• House of Treason: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Dynasty by Robert Hutchinson
• The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
• Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII by David Loades
• Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force by John L. Allen
• Vienna 1814 by David King
• The Destructive War by Charles Royster
• The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 by Lisa Tetrault
• The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 by Frederick Brown
• How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust by Dan McMillan
• Heretic Queen: Queen Elizabeth and the Wars of Religion by Susan Ronald
• Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway
• 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
• The Last Alchemist, Iain McCalman

Fiction –

• The Inventor’s Secret by Andrea Cremer
• Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson
• The Dark Citadel Trilogy (3 books): The Dark Citadel, The Free Kingdoms, and The Golden Griffin by Michael Wallace
• The Mapmaker’s Daughter by Laurel Corona
• Paris by Edward Rutherford
• The Legend of Oescienne: The Awakening (Book 3) by Jenna Elizabeth Johnson (I previously bought and read book 1: The Finding and book 2: The Beginning)
• Last Rituals (Thóra Gudmundsdóttir Series #1) by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
• Power Down by Ben Coes
• The Soul Forge by Andrew Lashway
• The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent
• Blood Money by David Ignatius
• Stone Cold by Joel Goldman
• Natchez Burning by Greg Iles
• The Increment by David Ignatius
• In the Hall of the Dragon King by Stephen Lawhead
• Agency Rules by Khalid Muhammed
• The Scavenger’s Daughters by Kay Bratt
• Promise of Blood and The Crimson Campaign (Books 1 & 2 of the Powder Mage Trilogy) by Brian McClellan
• The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman
• Mirror Sight (Book 5 of the Green Rider series) by Kristen Britain
• The Tattered Sword and The Huntsman’s Amulet (Books 1 & 2 of The Society of the Sword series) by Duncan Hamilton
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• The Night Birds by Thomas Maltman

As you can see from the lists, nonfiction and fiction are about equal. Interestingly, for the past 6 or so months, the majority of my reading has been fiction, which should have meant that fiction would greatly outnumber nonfiction. But I know that it won’t be long before I return to nonfiction to the near exclusion of fiction. More importantly, most of the nonfiction I acquire in hardcover, whereas the fiction is largely acquired in ebook format.

A goodly number of the nonfiction books I acquired I discovered from reviews or ads in the New York Review of Books. One of the things I like about the NYRB is that the book reviews almost always not only discuss the book being reviewed, but other books relevant to an understanding of the subject matter. Thus the reviews act as leads for me to acquire other, older books.

Am I the only editor whose TBR pile keeps growing and who cannot stop buying books? What are you reading/stockpiling? I know I ask that question with regularity, but it would be nice if more of you listed books you are buying/reading in the comments — it would expose the rest of us to books and authors we haven’t read.

Richard Adin, An American Editor