Adam Williams’ Summer Reading

In Italy this summer I will have with me a bagful of homework for my new novel on mediaeval Spain, including such exotica as the Penguin The Poem of the Cid, books on alchemy and astrology, Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, other collections of Arab and Hebrew poetry, and the newly published God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215 by David Devering Lewis – but there will still be a little space at the bottom of the bag for more self indulgent reading. I have purchased Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944-45 by James Holland (the fighting that took place near where I live still haunts people’s memories so it will be good to know the historical background); The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer about the mad Russian, Ungern Von Sternberg, and his mayhem in Mongolia in the 1920s; The Roads to Modernity by Gertrude Himmelfarb about the 18th Century Enlightenment; Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut (his posthumous essays); and, to keep my toe in China, Return to Dragon Mountain by Jonathan Spence, the memoirs of a Ming Dynasty scholar who sees his world destroyed when China is conquered by the Manchus.