I've been on a reading tear lately. I finally completed the book on pandemics and viruses and other epidemic-type diseases. It was an extremely readable tome - 500+ pages. I learned a lot about SARS, Ebola, AIDS, as well as the various flus we have had, like the Hong Kong, H1N1, and of course, the 1918 Spanish Flu. I recommend it to one and all. It's called Spillover by David Quammen.
I also finished next month's book club selection: Educated by Tara Westover. She wrote about growing up in a Survivalist's family in Idaho, working in her father's junkyard and being homeschooled after a fashion, and helping her mother with her midwifery and essential oil business.
She ends up going to BYU, Cambridge, Harvard and ends with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. But her life was not easy. In fact, she is so brutally honest that I did not enjoy the book from that standpoint. She was so brutally honest. I kept yelling at her to "Do the right thing", and she wouldn't. But it is worth reading. It ends well.
The last book I completed this month was In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Cantor. It was about the Black Death, in 1348 England primarily, and it's after-effects on England and Europe as a whole. It was short, interesting, and not a difficult read.
Currently, I am reading three nonfiction books about the 1876 Presidential election, our nation's first election that had an electoral question about it; a story of a young boy who becomes a physicist so he can build a time travel machine to go back and keep his father alive who died when he (the boy)was ten; and small tome about the history of an old - 1851 - English rectory, room by room, and discussing everything and anything that could reasonably be connected to it.
My fiction book is about a Russian count imprisoned in a plush Moscow hotel in 1922 and cannot leave it. I know the book goes to 1958. It was a bestseller last year.
More about all of these in the days to come.
