Random books from dougwood57's library

India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond by Shashi Tharoor

Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal

Four to Score (A Stephanie Plum Novel) by Janet Evanovich

Black Reconstruction in America by W. E. B. Dubois

Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan

The Second World War by John Keegan

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

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Member: dougwood57

Library725 books — see library

Reviews183 reviews — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Tagshistory (214), fiction (177), historical fiction (134), American history (105), TBR (78), adventure (46), war (44), literature (39), crime (38), classic (36) — see all tags

Groups18th-19th Century Britain, American Civil War, American History, Ancient History, Asian Fiction & Non-Fiction, Baker Street and Beyond, BritWit, Cheeseheads of Wisconsin (COW), Contemporary Fiction, Crime, Thriller & Mystery — show all groups

Favorite authorsJohn Le Carre, Bernard Cornwell, George MacDonald Fraser, A. B. Guthrie, John Keegan, Larry McMurtry, James M. McPherson, Edmund Sears Morgan, John Mortimer, Patrick O'Brian (Shared favorites)

About me The current picture is my 3x-great-grandfather Ellis Branson (or is 4 times great?). I enjoy reading, reading, reading history, historical fiction, British historical fiction and humor, some crime novels, spy stories, and books about the Old West.

Right now I'm reading The Last Empress by Anchee Min, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj by David Gilmour, and Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi.

About my library On ratings. My average rating for the books in my library is currently 3.99, which may seem high. Maybe I'm an easy grader, but I don't think so. I'm not evaluating a random set of books; if I was, then I might expect a bell curve distribution.

But my library is not random, of course, it's mine and and I ought to be able to select books that I am going to enjoy or find worthwhile or even both. As times passes I find myself getting pickier in what I read. After all there's less time available than there are books to read.

Homepagehttp://mononadoug.blogspot.com/

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Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers

LocationMonona, Wisconsin

Emaildougwood57charter.net

Account typepublic, lifetime

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/dougwood57 (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dougwood57 (library)

Member sinceMay 7, 2006

Comments from other LibraryThing-ers

(Leave a comment.)

Don't mention it.

P.S. You have good taste.

posted by MyLoveForAugustus at 10:58 pm (EST) on Oct 2, 2007

Oops, looks like you have it already. My bad.

posted by MyLoveForAugustus at 12:05 am (EST) on Sep 28, 2007

I didn't know if you'd see the post in the ancient history group, so I thought I would message you just in case:

The best book I have read so far (and I have read MANY Augustus books) was Augustus: A Novel by John Edward Williams.

You don't have to be a scholar of Rome to enjoy it. It is written in epistolary form. It is a series of fictional letters from different people who lived during Augustus' time along with memoir and journal excerpts. It was such an interesting way to learn even more about what people may have been like as well as Augustus. Also, John Williams' writing was beautiful; almost every letter contained a poetic passage.

posted by MyLoveForAugustus at 12:02 am (EST) on Sep 28, 2007

I have to thank you ever so much about the information regarding Manil Suri. I bought "The Death of Vishnu" shortly after having been published. I have therefore waited for a long time. I will buy "The age of Shiva" right now. Once again, thank you.
Girkner

posted by Girkner at 8:16 am (EST) on Aug 17, 2007

Hi Dougwood57--I'm an HTML dummy, but I found the instructions here easy to follow: http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=7662#74950

I hope this helps!

posted by DoctorRobert at 3:54 pm (EST) on May 30, 2007

dougwood57:

Thanks for your comment, and in response, I think P.G. Wodehouse is great!

I like all his characters, Wooster, Jeeves, Psmith, Mr.Mulliner, the Drones Club, etc....

While I can't say that I've read them all, I can say that I've read them *most*...

Glad to hear that you're a Biggins fan too... He doesn't get enough (or any) good press....

You may already know but it bears repeating that McBooks Press is reprinting all the Biggins' novels - including his last book, Tomorrow the World.

That's important as Tomorrow the World was printed in an infinitesmally small print run in the UK... It's a great book, but used copies (if you can find one) run into the hundreds of dollars!

Thanks, again for the comment.

mbahawk

posted by mbahawk at 8:07 pm (EST) on Feb 14, 2007

Doug, The Year of Three Battles was the first book I read by McLynn, but I thought it was quite good. He mentioned different interpretations of persons and events, and his take on things seemed thorough and extremely knowledgeable. My reaction to the works I mentioned stand in contrast to another book I recently got and read from the History Book Club, titled (I think) Queen Emma and the Vikings. That one, written by a non historian, was simplistic and poorly written, with a weak grasp of basic grammar and usage in several places and with a very simplistic take on the history. Dreadful and of no credit to the HBC.

posted by laceyvail at 8:16 am (EST) on Feb 5, 2007

Hi Dougwood, I don't know what I was thinking when I posted to you, but somehow I forgot that I also read Bryher's The Fourteenth of October, a novel about the conquest. The characters, like all of Bryher's, are unimportant folk, living on the edge of the events, but facing great changes in their world.

posted by laceyvail at 6:25 am (EST) on Jan 31, 2007

I'm intrigued by your determination to read simultaneously a non-fiction book and a fiction book on the same subject. Although I often read more than one book at a time, usually one of them is really light--a good thriller or mystery--and another a work of history or a more demanding novel. I did, however, spend most of last Christmas in 11th century England: I read 1066, The Year of Three Battles by Frank McLynn; Harold II, The Doomed Saxon King; and reread Howarth's 1066, the Year of the Conquest.

posted by laceyvail at 4:36 pm (EST) on Jan 29, 2007

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