Good reading list for 2012. Lots of variety and I learned a lot. Fun to look back and see which ones were for school, pleasure, and my own research (42% were for school!)
1. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
2. Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins
3. Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins *yes, I am admitting to reading all of these books. Perfect fun read after finishing my first Masters.
4. Becoming Free, Remaining Free & Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862 – Judith Schafer
5. Brothels, Depravity & Abandoned Women – Judith Schafer (2nd time reading)
6. Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History – Jack K. Williams
7. The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age – Virginia A. McConnell
8. Different Seasons – Stephen King
9. My First Thirty Years – Gertrude Beasley
10. New Orleans in the Gilded Age – Joy Jackson
11. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption – Laura Hillenbrand
12. Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait – Michael Grecco
13. Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself – Harriet Ann Jacob
14. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
15. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (lost count how many times I have read this)
16. American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee – Karen Abbot
17. The Tales of Beedle the Bard – J.K. Rowling
18. Motives of Honor, Pleasure, & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763– Lorena Walsh
19. Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls (been reading this since the fourth grade)
20. To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian – Stephen Ambrose
21. Tobacco & Slaves – Allan Kulikoff
22. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation & Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 – Joyce Chaplin
23. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina – S. Max Edelson
24. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston – Maurie McInnis
25. Maus I: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History – Art Spiegelman
26. James Henry Hammond – Drew Gilpin Faust
27. Creating an Old South – Edward E. Baptist
28. The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest Mississippi, 1770-1860 – John Hebron Moore
29. Being a Historian – James M. Bonner
30. Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil – John Berendt
31. The World the Slaveholders Made – Eugene D. Genovese
32. The Sugar Masters, Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860 – Richard Follett
33. Confederate Reckoning: Power & Politics in the Civil War South – Stephanie McCurry
34. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household – Thavolia Glymph
35. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Ninettenth-Century South – William Kauffman
36. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery – Rebecca J. Scott
37. Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans – Joan Gravey & Mary Lou Widner
38. Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children… and Other Streets of New Orleans! – John Churchill Chase
39. The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War – Drew Gilpin Faust
40. New Orleans: Facts and Legends – Raymond J. Martinez & Jack D.L. Holmes
I can’t wait for good reads in 2013! Over winter break I took out one of my old bookcases in my office/guest room and installed floor-to-ceiling shelves. They are just for my history and research books, although there are a couple top shelves that are beckoning to me to fill. Will probably make a few trips to the attic and bring down some long lost friends…