This might be interesting. The Reader was good.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/bernard-schlink-the-wo...

Might make a good Festivus present for someone.
Do you want my address?

Not many people can afford them but then who's got the time to read everything that looks interesting.
Keep a list, they will soon turn up 2nd hand. People don't keep books anymore, they spoil the decor.

This sounds interesting:

Helen Simonson's new novel The Summer Before the War
In a small town in England in 1914 it was a golden year which was, of course, about to be shadowed by the war. Amidst the hierarchies and local politics, a young woman arrives in town to be the new Latin teacher, and the town is set on its ear.

SPQR by Mary Beard.
A new 600 page Roman history covering the period 63BC to 212AD.
You may have seen Ms Beard, a Cambridge (?) academic presenting TV docos.
She says her book doesn't deal with the fall of Rome - in fact it doesn't get up to that - but why it grew from an Italian village to a huge empire.

Getting my next Festivus wish list organised.

"A perfidious distortion of history" by Jurgen Tampke.

The conventional wisdom, I think, has always been that the Versailles Treaty put such harsh reparations terms on Germany that the German economy was crippled, which in turn weakened the Weimar Republic and led to the rise of Hitler.

This German author, who was for a time Prof of History at UNSW, argues otherwise.

The books in this thread are not necessarily books I will read myself. I might want to but I know I won't get round to it. I just select ones I hear about that might be of interest.

However . . .

"Cotter": Richard Begbie. This is one that might go on my Xmas list. It's the story of the Irish convict Garrett Cotter who became a big squatter in the region between Yass & Cooma in NSW.
You will have heard of the Cotter Dam which is on the Cotter River.
This is Miles Franklin country and I wonder if there are shades of this bloke in "All That Swagger".

Another historical Australian book . . .
"A Wife's Heart": Kerrie Davies

This is about the dark side of Henry Lawson. We know his good side, all the great short stories of Australian life in the late 1900s.
But the other side is the drunk and the wife beater, what his wife went through and the destitution he came to.

Another Australian historical period & its events feature in "The Woolgrower's Companion".

"Joy Rhoades takes the familiar story of a woman on the land in Australia in the Second World War, facing hardship and loneliness, and turns it on its head.

There are Italian Prisoners of War, Aboriginal workers, Soldier Settlers, and a deeply stratified society."

The Islam in Islamic Terrorism, Ibn Warraq

. . .in the words of the Islamic fundamentalists (or, more exactly, revivalists) themselves, what really motivates Islamic terrorists today, and what has motivated them since the time of the Kharijites in the first century of Islam: the belief in the need to recover the pristine Islam of the time of Muhammad, by removing all innovations (bid’a), the further belief that it is the duty of Muslims to wage Jihad against all Unbelievers until Islam everywhere dominates, and to bring about the resurrection of the caliphate, and the imposition of Islamic Law, or Sharia, all over the globe.

Ibn Warraq’s The Islam In Islamic Terrorism is a brilliant series of reported echoes down the corridors of Islam, where the same complaints about bid’a, the same insistence on regulating every area of a Believer’s life, the same refusal to allow freedom of religion or thought, the same duties of violent Jihad and Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, the same demands for a return to the same pristine Islam of Muhammad, the same virulent antisemitism, the same quotes from the Koran and Hadith, the same hatred of Infidels, the same insistence that “we love death more than you love life,” the same call for bloodshed and Muslim martyrdom, the same dreary fanaticism, are thoroughly described and dissected, and above all the various violent manifestations of this revivalism over the centuries are linked to one another, as Ibn Warraq brings to bear the massive research he has been conducting over many years, in primary and secondary sources, and here deploys to splendid effect.

Ibn Warraq has performed a service for all those who are at last ready to look beyond the present platitudes about socioeconomic and other putative “root causes” of Islamic terrorism — Israel, the Crusades, European colonialism, American foreign policy, all held up for dissection and dismissal one after the other. He cites the studies that reveal Muslim terrorists to be both better off economically, and better educated, than the average Muslim. Most of the terrorist leaders have received solid educations in Islam, giving the lie to those apologists who claim that only those “ignorant of the true Islam” become terrorists.