on reading

I read eleven books this past July, a spattering of fiction and nonfiction. In the first category I include Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Gold, Sharpe’s Escape, and Sharpe’s Fury; Agatha Christie’s first novel in her Poirot series; and an excellent science-fiction novel about the future colonization of Mars. In the latter category of nonfiction I include four  books on French early modern history (with focuses on the French Religious Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, and the French Revolutionary Wars). Rounding off the list was the rather heady The All or Nothing Marriage and a book postulating that UFO sightings and abductions are demonic in origin. The Best Book of the Month goes to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and in its honor I post a handful of web-grabbed artwork of our (hypothetical) future colonization of Mars: