- The new Horus Heresy novel "Fear to Tread" about how the Blood Angels (guys who are basically a giant Captain America, in Iron Man's armor, with guns that shoot exploding bullets, but Vampires, and there's hundreds of thousands of them. In space. Except not as awesome as it sounds) turn evil. I'm almost halfway through that. It's kind of disappointing, being set up so easily to make the heroes fall. They are going to be tempted by space demons with a cure for their propensity to snap and turn into mindless blood-lusting psychos, and instead are going to end up enslaved by the Evil Space Demon Gods and ALL be mindless blood-lusting demon-possessed psychos.

I'm starting to get impatient with repeated variations on this theme and would greatly prefer they just skip to the end of the series and feature Horus killing the Emperor. It's a lot of okay action novels, but all the authors have literary pretensions. That just annoys and distracts readers like me and still won't appeal to the snobs.

- 1984. I first tried to read it in the titular year, having seen it on the family bookshelf since I was old enough to read the spines, and I remembered the Peanuts comic strip on New Year's Day had Snoopy commenting on "all the George Orwell jokes we'll have to hear in 1984." I made the connection and decided to read the book to see what Orwell was talking about so I could get those jokes when I heard them. That went about as well as you can expect it to go for a seven year old. I did wonder if my parents shared Winston's fear of televisions, as we never had one when I was growing up, but that's about all I could get out of my first attempt. I thought about reading it again as a teenager, but it was assigned for summer reading, and assigning anything was a good way to make me not read it, so that plan went out the window.

Still, it's amazing how much stuff is coming back as I read it, with things I picked up, heard used in other contexts and am now rediscovering as I re-read with comprehension.

- The Penguin Atlas European historical series. I had a copy of the Medieval period book, which I used back when I taught that period of history, but it fell apart. I started wondering about that book again, looked it up online, and found out about a bunch of other Atlases in the series by the same author and acquired them all. I love the sometimes wry or ironic spin the author uses when summing up decades of international politics to explain border changes, which might not be the best or most informative way to discuss the events, but is highly amusing when you already have the facts down.

- The Glory of Christendom, by Warren Carroll. Third of (eventually)six volumes in his history of Christendom, it's absolutely magnificent. While not always as accurate in his perspective or position as I'd like, Carroll's philosophical approach to history is as close to my own as any historian I have ever read. He tells the events as a story, focusing on human choices and ideas, rather than breaking it down into bite-sized chunks under headers and separating ideas from events and trends, and from people. Chopping up history like that is something like psychoanalysis through vivisection. History is nothing more and nothing less than a story about people, and the attempt to be all pseudo-scientifically dispassionate does not work. People who try are simply deceiving themselves and their audience about the prejudices guiding their rendition of the tale. Carroll doesn't bother to hide his position and perspective behind an affectation of objectivity, so you always know EXACTLY where he's coming from and can weigh his beliefs and views against your own, and just maybe filter out a better grasp of events and the hows and whys than the typical text book. The series is relatively illustration-free, and my latest re-read, was actually what inspired me to go looking for a new copy of the Penguin Atlas. I love maps, especially the kind that delineate what and who goes where. Topography, demographics etc, only interest me as they affect why the lines are the way they are. I'm the same way about floor plans. My mother or brothers can flip through an architecural digest looking at all the pictures of houses, and I just skim right to the floor plans. So with that kind of mindset, Carroll's all-but-unillustrated work can be a little frustrating and I started wanting a visual complement, hence the rediscovery of the Penguin series.