Death in the Air by Agatha Christie

Listened to this on audio while running. Not her best... the method of the murder is unnecessarily elaborate and the motive a little convoluted.

The Great Debate - Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin

This is an interesting introduction to the thought of Burke and Paine, in the form of a series of contrasting views between the two men. They did, in fact, meet each other and explicitly respond to each other's thought. Levin shows how the Right and Left, not just in Europe but here in America as well, owes their origins to the two different interpretations of Enlightenment liberalism given by Burke and Paine.

We Were There at The Battle of the Bulge by David Shepherd

This is an (older) children's book that I remember from my youth. I happened to stumble across it while surfing Amazon and figured - why not pick it up for a couple of bucks? It's just as good as I remember and a great way to introduce kids to military history. I also have We Were There at the Battle of Gettysburg somewhere that I got many years ago... I can't remember if I ever got around to reading it to the kids.

Fatherless America by David Blankenhorn

Found this for a couple of bucks while browsing in the used bookstore. A classic from the 1990's, Blankenhorn uses the characters of the Old Father, New Father, Deadbeat Dad, Visiting Father and others to explain the crisis in fatherhood (which has only become much worse since then). He does an excellent job showing how all the various "new" fathers fail to provide the family what only real fathers can.

The Republic by Plato

Have you done your annual re-reading of The Republic?

The Prince by Machiavelli

Finally got around to reading this classic. A short read and well worth the time.

Nietzsche by Walter Kaufmann

I generally try to read great philosophers first before reading secondary literature, so I don't read the greats through the lens of lesser minds. There is a reason the great philosophers are great, right? I've read some of Nietzsche - Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals - but have to admit I never quite got what he was getting at, certainly not the way Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript made immediate sense to me.  That's been cleared up for me by Kaufmann's book - which I found in a used book store for $1.99 a few months ago. It still gives me a thrill to browse used book stores for such cheap treasures.