Among the non-fictional/non-medical books I keep meaning to read are Swamp Doctor: The Diary of a Union Surgeon in the Virginia and North Carolina Marshes and The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. The first is the Civil War diary of Dr. William Mervale Smith of the 85th New York Volunteer Infantry. The good doctor has a soul that is often "depressed and weighed down," as well it might be, for an upstate New Yorker transported to the swamps of the South. His entries are short on medical details, but long on complaints about the Army hierarchy and army life in general. Most interesting sampled piece so far: an appendix contains the complete written examination he had to take to become an Army surgeon, including his answers. (This question was puzzling: "Name the roots and grains from which alcoholic drinks are distilled in various parts of the world." He knew some, but not all. Left out the potato and sugar cane, but then he wasn't much of a drinker.) The second is a look at the life of an English village as reflected in the accounting books of its priest. It doesn't sound very interesting, but the story begins when the village - and its priest - were completely Catholic under Henry VIII and ends fifty-four years later completely Protestant under Elizabeth I. In between, they lost their monastery (no great loss, the parish church got the fancy windows), had to hide their valuable vestments so the Crown wouldn't take them, rebelled and lost their church bells, switched back to Catholicism during the reign of Mary and then found their Protestant inner selves again on Elizabeth's accession. Best slice so far: for some reason, the village didn't build a cucking stool for punishing women scolds until after the Reformation, even though the chairs were common in England throughout the Middle Ages. The author speculates that the absence of devotion to Mary and to Saint Sidwell, a local woman saint, eroded respect for women in the village, but perhaps women were somehow embolded by the Reformation, making the chair more of a necessity.

The best books in our house belong to my husband. Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fisher is eminently browsable and chock full of wonderful nuggets of information. The introduction alone, a lesson in the art history of the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware painting, is worth the price of the book. And the chapter on the Hessian mercenaries was absorbing, too. My husband's current bedtime reading is Napoleon After Waterloo: England and the St. Helena Decision, which confines itself to the time that Napoleon spent onboard the British warship The Bellephron awaiting his fate. Best slice so far: the lengths the Admiralty went to avoid British lawyers and advocates bent on enforcing habeus corpus for the benefit of Bonaparte. My husband's fictional reading includes two historical novels by politicians, given to him as a wry gift so he could compare their story telling abilities. One is The Hornet's Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War by Jimmy Carter. It doesn't have any good bits and pieces to report. It reads, well, like Jimmy Carter talks -didactic and boring. My husband, a die-hard liberal, agrees. He hasn't been able to get past the first chapter. The other book is Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, by Newt Gingrich, a fantasy of Gettysburg in which the South wins. Maybe it's because Gingrich has a background in history, or maybe it's because he hired a professional writer to help him, but it's a tale told better by far than former President Carter's.