"Dear friend,

Do you enjoy holidays with your family? I don‘t mean your mom and dad family, but your uncle and aunt and cousin family? Personally, I do. There are several reasons for this.

First, I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other. Second, the fights are always the same."

One of my introductions to history was the Horrible History series. They were written in a fun, jaunty tone. You learned not only who did what, but how amazing, odd, and how gross people could be, to our modern eyes. This book reminds me a lot of those books.

Herman's writing feels like an excited friend telling you all about something over a drink. Her work is clearly well-researched though, and she makes the past lively and very human.

New books! 3 from Books Inc. in Mountain View, and one from a friend. Which to start once I finish my current book (the wonderful Memory Called Empire) ? 🤔 #bookhaul

For me, the conflict is always the tension between nostalgia and the present. If we live in nostalgia, we will strangle the possibility for a future. But without it, we don‘t have stories; we don‘t have people preserving a culture before it slips away into an elusive memory, a kind of oblivion.