New Llama Reading Delights

Recently, the Missus let me join one of those history book clubs. She has no intention of actually letting me purchase the regular-price monthly offerings. Rather, she let me do it because the club was doing one of those five books for a dollar introductory promos.

Anyway, my selection arrived yesterday and I am looking forward to getting into them. Here's the list:

Benjamin Franklin, An American Life - Walter Isaacson

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow

Cicero - Anthony Everitt

Personal Memoirs - Ulysses S. Grant

Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss

[Insert Homer Simpson-like sounds of drooling.]

Can I be really, really pedantic about one thing? The dust jacket of Everitt's biography of Cicero features a photograph of the Colosseum in Rome. The trouble with this is that construction of the Colosseum was started by the Emperor Vespasian and completed by his son Titus in A.D. 80, almost 125 years after Cicero died. The reason I object to this is that it reenforces the popular tendancy to lump all of Roman history into one vague mass. This is not right. The Rome of the end of the Republican Era - as witnessed by Cicero - was very different from the Rome of the post-Julio-Claudian Emperors, politically, socially and even architecturally.

Doesn't mean I'm not eager to read the book. I'm just saying.