Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Hello, everyone!  Sorry about today’s lateness but frankly, here in the USA, it’s been a weird and distressing couple of days. But let’s move past that for a few minutes as we talk about this weeks finds. All books this time around, some of them I’m highlighting for some seriously lovely covers

I’m a sucker for a good medieval or Roman mystery (gimme a Brother Cadfael or a Marcus Didius Falco and I’m happy). So finding this series of medieval mysteries was a pleasant surprise!  Gimme a detective named Sir Baldwin Furnshill and I’m even happier

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Slowly but surely, I've been working my way through the Hugo and Nebula-winning novels.  But weirdly, I still haven't read one novel by Lois McMaster Bujold. So yes, I picked this up for my project, but I also picked it up for this wonderful goofy cover.  Baen does a lot of military science fiction (I've been slowly going through David Weber's Honor Harrington book, published through them) and I hope this will be good.

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This is going to be a re-read for me, one of the finest histories of the last 20 years on a level with The Hemingses of Monticello.  This is a fantastic history of what is now called The Great Migration, as Black Americans escaped the apartheid of the US South from 1915 to around 1970 and moved north and west.  Seen from the perspective of five families and their descendants, it's a fabulous history that is nearly 600 pages and feels like 200 for how smoothly it flows.  Wilkerson recently came out with a book about class in the USA, Caste, and I'm really looking forward to that as well.

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Have you seen the excellent Kubrick movie, Spartacus?  Great movie, right?  Well then, you really need to check out this great little history about the real Spartacus, Thracian slave who changed the destiny of the Roman Republic.  It's such an interesting little hardcover volume about that rare moment of a slave rebellion, one among many, that almost destroyed the Roman Republic unlike so many others.  Aldo Schiavone (who is an Italian historian and law professor) is great at explaining the historical background and how it really was as compared to our cultural understanding and presenting it in a very interesting and entertaining way (and full credit to translator Jeremy Carden).

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This is going to be a reread for me.  I still cannot believe that somehow, somehow, Margaret Atwood managed to write a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale that centered around Aunt Lydia and made it work.  Like serious, who pulls that off?  Well, Margaret Atwood.