The Rusty Battle Axe: Books

House Book Club 1
The first set of books selected by my wife and I. We usually discuss them over dinner out.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (read)
The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (read)
When God Looked the Other Way by Wesley Adamczyk (read)
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (read)
Sweet and Low: A Family Story by Rich Cohen (read)
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman (read)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (read)
Half a Life by Darin Strauss (read)
Wonderful Fool by Shusaku Endo (read)
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky by Ken Dornstein (read)
Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman (read)

House Book Club 2
The second set of books selected by my wife and I. We usually discuss them over a date-night dinner.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (read)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (read)
Any Human Heart by William Boyd (read)
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (read)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (read)
The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (read)
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (read)
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (read)
So Big by Edna Ferber (read)
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (read)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (read)
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (read)
The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy (read)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (read)
London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets by Peter Ackroyd
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Classics 1: Ancient Greek Classics
I grabbed this from an Oxford University Press blog post, A reading list of Ancient Greek classics. I did put the books in chronological order of when they were believed to have been written.

The Iliad by Homer (read)
The Histories by Herodotus
Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra by Sophocles
The Trojan Women and Other Plays by Euripides
Republic by Plato
Poetics by Aristotle (read)
Jason and the Golden Fleece by Apollonius of Rhodes
Greek Lives by Plutarch

Gamer Reading List
The following list is taken from 10 Books Every Gamer Should Read.

Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo (read)
Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft (read)
Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama
The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (read)
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien (read)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (read)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (read)

French Enlightenment Reading List

A friend of mine, an expert in the field, put together this little reading list for me.

Enlightenment in France by Frederick Artz (read)
Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes [prelude]
Letters on England by Francois Voltaire
Man a Machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie
D'Alembert's Dream by Denis Diderot
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment by Ernst Cassirer

Norman Cantor's "Short List" on Medieval History
Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages has a couple of very nice recommended reading lists. These lists are now just a tad dated, but still very helpful. Here is Cantor's Short List (in the approximate chronological sequence of subject):

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown (read)
Rome, Profile of a City, 312-1308 by Richard Krautheimer (read)
Early Growth of the European Economy by George Duby (read)
Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riche (read)
Feudal Society by Marc Bloch
A Short History of the Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith (read)
The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern
Thomas Becket by Frank Barlow
The Evolution of Medieval Thought by David Knowles (read)
On the Medieval Origin of the Modern State by Joseph Strayer (read)
Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages by Jeffrey Richards
Montaillou by E. LeRoy Ladurie
Chaucer by Donald Howard

Blog Posts on World War 2 Books

Here are my blog posts on books about World War 2:

Other Book-Related Blog Posts

My blog posts with other lists of books and such:

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