Bibliography, September 2020

BOTM: J. Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses (1981)

D. Cook, The New Wilderness (2020)
A. Doshi, Burnt Sugar  (2020)

E. John, Me (2019)

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014) 
M. Morris, A great and terrible king: Edward I and the forging of modern Britain (2010) 
V.T. Nguyen, The refugees (2017)

E. Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division  (2020)
D. Stuart, Shuggie Bain (2020)
B. Taylor, Real Life (2020)

Rock solid list (except for Shafak, which was facile). The fiction was no more than solid, but some of the non-fiction was very good indeed. Elton John's autobiography was deliriously enjoyable, and generous in his descriptions of most people in it. MacGregor was elegant and insightful about Germany. 

Elsewhere, I'm catching up on British medieval history, and my favourite this month was from one of my favourite historians. John Gillingham's work on Richard I is pretty much solely responsible for my strong performance in my English medieval history paper in finals, and I'm forever grateful for his deployment of charter statistics to understand Richard's reign. He shows the same trademark ability to count, and brilliance to look for data, in his account of the Wars of the Roses. I found his opening chapters on the nature of the wars, and their peculiar character as battle-seeking campaigns, highly convincing; and I loved his use of city wall-tax rates as evidence. The rest of the book, on the events of the wars themselves, was done well, and made a complicated saga relatively easy to follow. It's also not very long.