I'm as fickle as can be but my current craze in non-fiction is polar exploration (as anyone who has glanced at The Terror thread can tell).

In fiction I generally read lots of thrillers and literary fiction but I can be fickle there as well.

I read mostly fiction and mostly mysteries but not horror or thrillers of the very bloody variety. That isn't to say that I only read cozies, but I don't like the ultra- descriptive, crazed-killer books.

It made me feel better about my reading habits when I read once (maybe on this site) that people who like mysteries are intelligent and like to solve puzzles as well as having a strong sense of right and justice. It made my husband feel better, too, as he claims to worry about how many ways I know to murder someone.

Rarely non-fiction. Mostly mysteries (thanks carolyn, nice to know I am thought to be intelligent!). Humorous ones for preference too. Any good amusing novel (Kate Fenton, do get cracking on another one) and sometimes an RP recommendation of a book I would not read normally.

lemonhead, please share some of the titles of the domestic/social history you've read. A few years ago I read quite a lot of it myself, things along the lines of Wagon Wheel Kitchens and Inside the Victorian Home and Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years.... I bet I rival you in undomesticity so it's funny that we both find it intriguing.

I like history above any other sort of reading, but it's such a broad subject that I never have a chance of getting very deep into any one part. Right now I'm in an Australian-history phase; before that it was The Little Ice Age and climates of prehistory. I will forever be fascinated with the history of food, diseases in history, and historical true crime. I adore reading in anthropology -- particularly archaeology, linguistics, forensics, genetics and of 'the great human diasporas' (Cavalli-Sforza). Hmm, geology, geophysics, topography, cartography, some biography, diaries, letters and journals...well, I've probably made my point that I'm a gadfly.

Fiction: I will read just about anything except pure fantasy and science fiction. Oh, yeah, I loathe dystopian literature, although I think I've read more than I ever wanted of it.

I think I am a fickle reader and tend to be rather eclectic. However, if I had to sum up my interest in one word, it would be HISTORY. Time was when my favorite period to read about was the Middle Ages. Now, I'm finding a new fascination with American History, specifically books that deal with the opening up of the American West and the role of Native Americans in this. Two works that I really enjoyed were Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower" (the settling of New England, with social history of the Indian tribes prior to this) and Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage" (the Lewis & Clark Expedition and the role of Sacajawea). Those are only a few -- I'm interested in almost anything about the "pioneer" days.

My second favorite period would be social history of the British Isles. I think fondly of "Larkrise to Candleford", which describes the English villages and the Enclosure Act and its impact upon rural life. How people lived in the "olden days" in the UK fascinates me, but the detail has to be compelling for me to stick with the work.

Lastly, I am a lover of biographies and memoirs. One of the best I've ever read was about poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay. (no time to look up specific author). Also enjoyed "Zelda" by Milford.

Frieda, actually my reading taste pretty much parallels your own....

No time to write more, must rush off to Univ. class, now.

Nonfiction: exploration and adventure (polar especially), biography, and lots of other things--historical topics (broadly), medical and scientific topics (broadly). All kinds of things appeal to me; I'm a shameless dabbler.

Fiction: literary fiction, rarely a mystery or thriller. I don't care for fantasy or science fiction.

woodnymph--Milford also wrote Savage Beauty about Edna St. Vincent Millay. I wonder if that's the one you read. I like her biographies.

I do get on reading kicks, too. For a while (when I was weeding the 800s at my library) I was reading collections of essays. Jonathan Lethem, David Sedaris, George Orwell. Good stuff. Now I just have pregnancy brain and can't even seem to finish a sappy Nora Roberts book. Hopefully, this nesting phase will pass soon and I'll feel like reading again!

I'll read almost anything scifi or fantasy, but a particular interest is stories based on folklore or mythology. I've read more Arthurian novels than I can count, and I've come nowhere near to drying up the well.

Another interest, related, is fantasy based on history and anthropology...semi-medieval European or Japanese novels will always attract my interest. Or even straight historical novels.

I'm a dabbler, fickle, moody... probably hopelessly middlebrow in my tastes, so I jump all over the place.

This is what I wrote about myself on my LT profile page:
I read a little in most major fiction categories  but literary, classics, historical, fantasy and science fiction are primarily what I gravitate toward. For non-fiction, I enjoy history, bios of historical figures, travel literature, and the occasional natural history or popular science selection. Topics of special interest to me are mythology, folklore, archaeology, and anthropology, though I really havenÂt scratched more than the bare surface in most of those categories, and I bear no specialized knowledge of any particular subject. My guilty pleasures are adventure novels, and one of my first loves was the Gothic.

I can also elaborate on what I don't like. I generally don't like chicklit or contemporary issue-of-the-day fiction (because they are so often heavy-handed and the issues sensationalized) or self-help (way too gimmicky). I don't often read bestsellers (exception being if it's a favorite author or I'm being persuaded by a book club to read).

Mostly, I'm driven by moods rather than a need to conquer a subject.

On non-fiction, my major interest at the moment is evolution. So books like Shubin's Your Inner Fish and Dawkins' book The Greatest Show on Earth are recent reads, and I have a couple more in the pipeline - hoping for Christmas presents!

So that no-one can accuse me of being one-sided, I do possess a copy of Evolution - the Fossils Still Say No! by Duane Gish. It's fascinating to read this - if you didn't know much about it, you'd believe that the fossil record was massively incomplete and there was no evidence at all for what creationists call "macro-evolution". Fortunately, I have a copy of Prothero's wonderful book Evolution - What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters which not only is a beautiful and erudite book in its own right, but also takes the time to go through large parts of Gish's book, pointing out the misleading items, deliberate omissions and downright dishonesty there.

Sorry - rant over.

I mostly read fiction, although I am often lead to non-fiction from novels and through recommendations here (Undaunted Courage by Ambrose being one of the latter).
I generally read historical fiction, crime and thrillers, and contemporary fiction, and stay away from sci-fi and fantasy, but I am not so terribly set in my ways. I do read a fair number of new releases in my job in a book shop, so as to appear erudite to the customers *g*

When I was a teenager, my mother ( a non-reader type-A+ dynammo) said to me, "You are always with a book. You cannot read everything!" My response was, "Why not?" That is still my attitude. I want to read and read and read and learn and enjoy. My non-fiction topics of interest come and go wherever the wind blows. If I read a fiction or mystery book that mentions a topic that piques my interest, off I go. Reading Into Thin Air sent me on a Mount Everest binge, reading Morris Bishop's Life in the Middle Ages and the mysteries of Ellis Peters sent me on a Middle Ages tangent that persists to this day - and I read those books over 20 years ago. I used to worry about flitting from topic to topic like a butterfly goes from flower to flower. But like the butterfly, I get nectar from every book so now I just sit down and enjoy myself. Some topics that have piqued my interest: The Middle Ages, lives of servants and women in history, explorers, travel, Mount Everest, the Martial Arts, sharks, history of Australia, the UK and the USA, bios of ordinary people who led ordinary lives and King Tut.

For fiction topics, anything is fair game except sci-fi, fantasy, hard core horror and romance.

You have all expanded my reading in ways I never thought possible. You have all opened new avenues of thought, new questions to answer, new topics to read about. I've been here at RP forever and I look forward to spending many more years reading along with all of you.

PAM

I have a great interest in the natural world and read lots of nonfiction about animals, trees, oceans. Lately I have been working my way through Bernd Heinrich's many works. Two standouts are Summer World and Winter World, where the author presents close-ups of the animal life in New England in different seasons, from insects to mammals to birds. As a scientist, he writes without sentimentality but with great reverence for all creatures and the environment they live in. He also has written several books about birds that I highly recommend.

At the risk of sounding negative, it is easier to list things I never read - chick-lit, anything involving middle and upper middle class women moaning about their "problems," dysfunctional families, sex abuse, child abuse, animal abuse. This actually eliminates a huge amount of contemporary work. Since I also can't read anything unless it is very well-written, the field really narrows. I immediately put down anything written in the first person unless I already know the author is capable of pulling it off or it has been recommended by someone I trust.

Lately I have had an interest in reading local authors, as New England has many, many fine writers producing good work. Stewart O'Nan comes to mind right away.

Also, I like books about people changing their lives, taking a chance, i.e. moving from the city to the country, going on a pilgrimage, going back to school, etc.

Phaedosia, yes, that's the Millay biography I liked. It made the poet come alive on its pages, IMHO.

I, too, have done a lot of reading about Arthurian themes, one of my favorites, since girlhood, medieval romance, courtly love, etc. etc.

I should probably state the sort of reading material I do not care for: most self-help books, most dystopian novels,and most chick-lit (unless the latter is uproariously funny). There seems to be a "new" category appearing on the shelves of our local public library: "Christian novels." I don't think these would be my cup of tea, either....

After reading all your noble aims and ambitions and the amount of cross-referencing you all seem to do, I must admit that I almost never follow-up a book by studying the 'subject' further. Perhaps this is because what I read usually includes subjects I already know something about. I have quite a good general knowledge of a few topics, so would probably not choose to read a book about Quantum Mechanics (for eg) because I know nothing about it and life is way too short to start learning about it now. Also I don't always trust the information I might find in a novel, so doubt that I am really 'learning' anything.
I enjoy some travel books, biographies, autobiographies, social history and 'good quality' fiction. I almost never read mysteries, romances, SF, horror, humour, or the 'light-weight' stuff that folk read 'on the beach' or, as Siobhan says, stuff about sexual/child/abuse . . . plenty of that in the papers and on TV.

I am pretty much an omnivorous reader, except I don't care for porn, extreme horror, mis-lit or tech-head sci-fi.

I especially like:
-in non-fiction: travelogues and history (including biographies of historical figures)
-in fiction: mysteries, historical novels, fantasies and romances

frieda -

Sorry for the delay: here are some of the books I have read which may be of interest to you since some of our likes overlap:

* A Sweet Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier: 1800-1922 - ed. Susan Cummins Miller
* Sarah Plain and Tall - Patricia McLaughlin
* Goodbye Picadilly: British war brides - Jenel Virden
* Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America 1830-1940 - ?
* Mrs Mike - Benedict/Freeman
* The Sand in my Shoes (WAAF Diary) - Joan Rice
* Nella Last's War: Diary of Housewide #49
* Innocents Abroad: British Child Evacuees in Australia - Edward Stokes
* These is my Words - Nancy Turner
* Bachelor Girls: The Secret History of Single Women in the twentieth Century - Beby Israel
* The Fifties: A Women's Oral History - Brett Haney
* Plain Tales from the Raj - Ed. Charles Allen
* The Life of an Ordinary Woman - Anne Ellis
* HerStory: Women Who Changed the World - ed. Ruth Ashley and Deborah Gore Owen
* West w the Night - Beryl Markham

History of Medicine:
* The Great Influenza - John Barry
* Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam

And there is one more - can't think of the title - about how middle class Victorian wives lived with only one servant and it obviously wasn't enough before this age of Conveniences... Will try to get the title for you...

Hope this helps. Do you have any for me? :-)

Lemon, I notice that you read about events around the Second World War. Have you come across any book that deals with problems where a person was declared dead or MIA then turned up after the war to find the wife or husband had remarried? What was the legal situation?

lemonhead, it certainly does help. Thank you!

I started thinking about the domestic/social history books I've read and realized that at least half of them are collections of diaries and letters. Maybe something I've read will strike a chord with you. And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest Since 1855 - Linda Mack Schloff
Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail (several volumes covering the years from 1840 through the 1870s, if I remember correctly) - edited by Kenneth Holmes
The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible - Carolyn Johnston Pouncy
Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity - Amy Bentley
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West - Lesley Poling-Kempes
"Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America - Glenna Matthews
Letters of a Woman Homesteader - Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Life as We Have Known It: By Co-operative Working Women - edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies
Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries, 1788-1840 - Dale Spender
A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century - Tania Bayard
Never Done: The History of American Housework - Susan Strasser
Nothing to Do But Stay - Carrie Young (a tribute to the author's mother who began homesteading a farm in North Dakota in 1904)
Pioneer Women: Letters from the Kansas Frontier - Joanna L. Stratton
Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier - Linda Peavy
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece - edited by Jane Jacobs
Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front - Judy Barrett Litoff, et al
Tomboy Bride: A Woman's Personal Account of Life in the Mining Camps of the West - Harriet Fish Backus
War Time Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology of Women's Writings, 1937-1945 - Dorothy Sheridan
Women of the West - Cathy Luchetti (a pictorial history -- thoroughly fascinating, I think)
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey - Lillian Schlissel

Diseases in History Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History - James S. Olson
The Colony: The Harrowing Story of the Exiles of Moloka'i - John Tayman
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - Steven Johnson
Limeys: The Conquest of Scurvy - David I. Harvie
The Malaria Capers: More Tales of Parasites and People, Research and Reality - Robert S. Desowitz
Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times - Arno Karlen
Napoleon's Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory - Arno Karlen
Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown - James C. Mohr
The Plague and I - Betty MacDonald (very funny account of MacDonald's treatment for tuberculosis in the 1930s)

These lists are really helpful and sound like just my cup of tea, minus all the diseases! ;-)

I forgot to mention a category that interests me greatly. I suppose it might be labeled cultural history of the British Isles. I am thinking of David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed." I found it an exhausting but fascinating study of the various strands of cultural groups coming from the British Isles that settled America, e.g. the Scots-Irish in the South, especially in Appalachia, and the Puritan element in New England. As I recall, the author dealt with 4 different threads and how these 4 cultures influenced the mores and social customs in the early days of America.

Had time to go through my bookcases last night and came up with these, most of which I haven't read yet, but are, of course on the TBR pile.... :-)

* The Model Wife: Nineteenth Century Style - Rona Randall
* Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England - Judith Flanders
* Womenfolks: Growing up in the South - Shirley Abbott
* Workhouse: The People, the places, the life behind doors - Simon Fowler
* We wouldn't have missed it for the world: The Women's Land Army in Bedfordshire (UK) 1939-1950 - Stuart Antrobus
* Ingenious Women: From tincture of saffron to flying machines - Deborah Jaffe (book of women who invented things, but are generally unheralded)

History of Med:
* Spike Island: Memory of a Military Hospital - Philip Howe (about a big military hospital where Nightingale practised etc)
* Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine - Roy Porter
* The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the birth of Modern Surgery - Wendy Moore
* The Great Mortality (plague) - John Kelly

I think that's it for now. I am going to go to the library to see what I can find, because, frankly, I *need* some more books. (Not really, but trying to rationalize it)...

Freida - thanks for the great list. I will go through it with care and add it to the ever-growing TBR pile.

Annpan - sorry - haven't ever read anything factual about the situation you mention where a person goes to war, is presumed dead and then comes back to find things changed...

I will do a search for you and see what I can come up with. I have some time today.

liz

Martin Z said:

>On non-fiction, my major interest at the moment is evolution.

Have you read Stephen Jay Gould's monumental tome on the subject? As a fan of his I own it, but every time I think about reading it I think about carrying it around and opt for a paperback. If you've read it, I'd be curious to hear your opinion. (I personally liked Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, but that was a while ago...)

Oh dear, I've already jotted down a dozen new books from this thread ...

Like lots of us at RP, my reading interests are all over the place. I do my very best to avoid stories about dysfunctional families and books with horrific violence -- particularly against children -- in them.

My greatest leap from fiction to non was after reading The DaVinci Code. I went on to read dozens of books pertaining to the history of the Catholic church and the role of women in historical Christianity (I found Karen Armstrong because of Dan Brown - go figure!) as well as books on Druids and pre-Christian religions, which in turn has led me to books about the Roman occupation of Britain. I still find the history of Christianity fascinating and have a pile of books still to get through.

I've found that my favorite types of books have changed by the decade. In my teens and twenties I loved sci-fi and fantasy. In my thirties I read mainly romance novels (I had small children, what can I say?). In my forties I've jumped into all sorts of more literary (and not) fiction and lots of non-fiction, but my current favorite genre is memoirs, from the Mayle books to Nella Lasts War to Marcus Aurelius (in small doses - he has a tendency to repeat himself and it puts me to sleep). I'm also very interested in general/amateur-reader-friendly science books like Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish.

Martin & Balrog, have you read about Ardi?

Here is a link that might be useful: Ardipithecus ramidus fossils

Liz, Thank you. Because of eye problems I cannot spend a lot of time on my laptop, even though a kind stranger has donated me a newer and bigger-screened one. My computer-savvy man who sorts me out put programs and my personal items into it as a gift. Their generosity is overwhelming. Anyway, please do not go to a lot of trouble, this was a random thought after I read an article about women who were released from camps after WW2 and had to resume their previous lives.

I go through phases. Right now I am just finishing a period of reading about alternative building methods. I may come back to it; sometimes these interests cycle in and out repeatedly. Right now I am reading about costume history.

And I'm always reading about gardens and plants.

sheri, "The DaVinci Code" sent me on a similar trajectory in my reading interests. I picked up books on Gnosticism, The cult of the Virgin in the Middle Ages, the Merovingians vs. the Carolingians, and the history of the Catholic Church. It was a fascinating journey for me....

Woodnymph, in addition to Karen Armstrong, I found the Thomas Cahill books (How the Irish Saved Civilization,, etc.), Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels and so much more because of The DaVinci Code. I still have a pile of books waiting for me and it is definitely a fascinating journey!

Reluctant to post until I thought about this for a while, I'm forced to admit I'm a float-with-the-wind dilettante. Frieda's in depth explorations of what interests her are far beyond my attention span. A little taste satisfies me because by then I'm off on another tangent. (Centrifugal force is powerful in my life.) Eventually I return to a subject from another angle. Over a lifetime patterns do show up.
Mythology and religion (the stories, not the theology)
English history (even before I did the family genealogy) and I, too, enjoyed Albion's Seed. I come from both the Puritans who began in the North and the Scots-Irish who settled in the Southern Highlands, a.k.a. Appalachia.
The Crusades
The History of Science
Anthropology - I'm fascinated by the movement of peoples, of language, and of cultures. Special focus on Native American and Mediterranean cultures.
Archaeology
Genetics
Disease
Physics, in most of its manifestations

balrog1954 (Blimey, I hope you're more friendly than the original Balrog!)

I've read and enjoyed Dennett's book (though it got a little hard near the end...!), but I'm ashamed to say that I've not read anything by Stephen Jay Gould. He's one of the greats of evolution, but it's never been clear to me where to start with his writing. You mention his "monumental tome", but which book is that? Or any other recommendations?

AnnPann -

I did a little digging for you, and although I didn't find any specific sites referring to that situation, I found some books that might address it:

Australia-focused home front books:

S.J. Butlin and C.B. Schedvin, War Economy 1942Â1945, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1997

Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime, 1939-1945. Australia: Oxford UP, 1990.

Saunders, Kay. War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland, 1938-1948 (1993)

The Home Front Volume I by Nancy M. Taylor NZ official history (1986)

The Home Front Volume II by Nancy M. Taylor NZ official history (1986)

Political and External Affairs by Frederick Lloyd Whitfeld (1958) NZ official history

Britain:
Calder, Angus . The People's War: Britain 1939-45 (1969)

Harris, Carol (2000). Women at War 1939-1945: The Home Front. Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Limited. ISBN 0-7509-2536-1.

Marwick, Arthur (1976). The Home Front: The British and the Second World War.

Rose, Sonya O. (2003) Which People's War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945

Misc:

Costello, John. Love, Sex, and War: Changing Values, 1939-1945 1985. US title: Virtue under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes

Noakes, Jeremy ed., The Civilian in War: The Home Front in Europe, Japan and the U.S.A. in World War II Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1992.

Then below is a link to an interesting site about a community in London with oral histories etc (won't hurt your eyes).... Might be relevant...

Here is a link that might be useful: Hidden Histories: East Community Heritage (London)

This is my first time here in quite awhile and I think I hit the jackpot. I am typically a fiction reader, but at the end of the summer I began to work on my family tree. I subsequently became absorbed in reading about the immigration of Germans especially to Wisconsin in the mid 1800s when my German ancestry came here and settled. My gg-grandmother was Welsh and came in the late 1840s. My reading just took a dramatic jump to wanting to read of accounts of what life would have been like then, both in Germany and Wales as well as the US. Most of my readings have been non-fiction but would love to put my hands on period appropriate historical fiction as well. I see that there is a long list above that I'll now have to explore. Thanks! wig

Liz, Thank you for the list. I shall check it out with our State library. They hold a heap of books that I can access.

MartinZ: For the monumental tome, see link below.

For other Gould recommendations, I'd go with his early collections of essays from Natural History magazine: Ever Since Darwin; The Panda's Thumb; Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. After that, anything goes.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Has anyone here read Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors? It's NF about what DNA analysis is revealing about our prehistory. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in evolution, genetics, archaeology and anthropology as it crosses all these fields.

Thanks Balrog. But fourteen hundred pages?? Now that's a book that's crying out to be converted to an e-book!

In non-fiction I stick to natural history and books about epidemics/pandemics. I've tried reading some history, but can never seem to stay interested.

In fiction, I love mysteries, fantasy, and some literary fiction.

Annpann -

Thought of you today when I started reading "Strangers in the House: Women's Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War" by Julie Summers, a NF about how families reacted when they were all brought back together again after WWII.

I remember you asking about this, and thought you might be interested in digging out this book if you can find it. I had to do an ILL and it came all the way from NC so I don't know how easy it is to find...