I was going to give each book its own post this year; however, I'll never catch up that way. So here I go with quick drive-by reviews. Ask me if you want to know more.

9. Path of Gods by Snorri KristjanssonThe final volume of Snorri's Viking age trilogy. It's been fun watching Snorri develop as a writer through the series. The first book was just ( Read more... )

59. The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World by John HaywoodYou might be thinking this sounds a bit basic for me. However, the take-away from my two visits to the Celts exhibition was that any knowledge I had was 20 years out of date. This was on sale at the Edinburgh exhibition and it's full of lovely colour illustrations and interesting maps so I ( Read more... )

45. The Empire Stops here: A Journey along the Frontiers of the Roman World by Philip ParkerI meant to read this when it came out, forgot about it, and then stumbled across it in the library recently ( Read more... )

I am so far behind on this, I can't even remember much about most of the books from the last six weeks.

28 Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A MitchellAfter a really unpromising introduction that led me to order a bunch of other non-fiction titles from the library, eventually I came back to this book to give it a chance ( Read more... )

22. The Origins of European Dissent by RI Moore
I've been putting this off till I am un-brain-fogged enough to discuss the ideas within. Not going to happen ( Read more... )

15 The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W AnthonyIn which Anthony puts forth his theory that Proto-Indo-European was spoken by nomads on the Pontic-Caspian steppes between roughly 4500 and 2500 BCE, and that they were the first people to domesticate horses (not the ( Read more... )

12. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary BeardI have very little interest in ancient Rome itself but a lot of interest in matters around the periphery (both temporally and spatially), and my knowledge of the core history of the Roman Empire was probably 20 years out of date, so when this came out I decided that a one-volume history for the ( Read more... )

37. World Without End - the Global Empire of Philip II by Hugh Thomas

Oh dear, I can't believe I read the whole thing.

I have fond memories of his earlier works, The Slave Trade and The Conquest of Mexico. The first volume of this series, Rivers of Gold, is dense but informative. Volume two was pretty painful, as was this (but was shorter). It ( Read more... )

16. Loyal Till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion by Blake Stonechild and Bill WaiserArguably, the only interesting thing that ever happened in Saskatchewan is the Riel rebellion (although if you nerd for labour history there's the Bienfait miners' strike).[1][2] In school we were taught that the rebellion was an uprising of the Metis[4] ( Read more... )

13. England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381 by Juliet Barker

What am I doing reading about the late medieval period when my interests have been creeping steadily back to the migration age, you may ask. Barker was pimping it out on Start the Week a while ago and the library had it, so I thought why not ( Read more... )