What are you reading now and what was the last book you finished?
I had been jumping back-and-forth between two books that I basically finished at the same time. One was The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism (BOOK | KINDLE) by Mark Zwonitzer, and that was a GREAT read. John Hay has always been a fascinating figure and Mark Twain was Mark Twain, so I really got into it. I also enjoy that era of American history of post-Reconstruction/the Gilded Age/early-Progressive Era. It's a great book full of some very captivating characters. If I was able to time travel one of the main things I'd want to do is hang out with Henry Adams and John Hay and gossip about the wealthy and powerful of turn-of-the-century America.
The other book that I recently finished was Brian Titley's Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa. It's a much more obscure story, but no less interesting. It tells the story of Jean-Bédel Bokassa who became dictator of the Central African Republic in the 1960s after overthrowing his cousin, the President. Bokassa eventually declared himself Emperor and his cartoonish eccentricities and belief that he was a modern-day Napoleon would be funny if not for the fact that he was a murderous tyrant accused of cannibalism, feeding his opponents to lions, and personally torturing children. Titley doesn't simply rely on the colorful rumors and wild allegations, however, and wrote a balanced and well-researched biography that shoots down the myths and tells the whole story of Bokassa.
As for what I'm currently reading, I've tried many times over the years to read the unabridged version of Richard Francis Burton's notorious undercover pilgrimage to the Islamic holy sites at Mecca and Medina which was originally published in 1855. Since it's been in the public domain for a long time, I had previously downloaded it from archive.org, but just couldn't get into reading it on my laptop or Kindle. So, I finally just decided to try it the old-fashioned way and bought the Cambridge Library Collection of Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, which was published in three paperback volumes in 2012. I'm only a few chapters into the first volume, but I'm glad that I bought the print copies because I feel like I'll finally be able to get through it this way.
