My Reading List

My lovely wife Val often comments, sometimes strongly, on the books I read, calling them my "happy books."
I have always been a nonfiction book fan more than fiction, not because I dislike fiction (Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Henrik Ibsen are among my favorites), but because I am a major history fan. I am intrigued and fascinated with what people do to other people, what they create and why, in the macro and micro.
To give you examples, the book I just finished reading was "Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule," by Karel C. Berkhoff, and I am currently reading "Bloody Sunday: Massacre in Northern Ireland, the Eyewitness Accounts," by Don Mullan.
Before these two books, I read a work of fiction, "Celebration," by Harry Crews, which was OK but rather predictable.
It's not that I do not enjoy fiction, as the authors I listed above show, but for me, with so many factual, historical events having occurred that I know little or nothing about, and my need for not only detail but analysis, I seek out this route to reality first.