Top Ten Books on My Spring TBR List

I am linking up with the Broke and the Bookish for a top ten Tuesday. I'm going to pick nonfiction and heavy or long fiction on my shelves or waiting for me at the library to try to jump start some motivation. Five of these I've had from the library at least once already. I tend to read all my easy stuff first and drag my feet on the more intellectual or at least longer works. I tend to have something easy and something hard going at the same time for balance.

1. Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference by John D. Inazu (I started this earlier this year but could not renew; it is smallish and not as academic, still intellectual, as his book on the freedom of assembly which I also recommend.)

2. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution by Forrest McDonald

3. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry by Philip D. Morgan (This is part of my self-made American history course.)

4. Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert

5. A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani (I'm proud of myself; I pulled this off the shelf while browsing instead of relying on my meticulously accumulated list. I found another in the same area which I want to read as a supplement also.)

6. The Brothers Karamazov

7. Dombey and Son

8. The Old Curiosity Shop

9. Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough (I pulled this off the shelf too, a special display, but . . . a biography, cringe. I'm NOT a biography person for a variety of reasons, but one every no and again shouldn't kill me or my brain.)

10. Something by C.S. Lewis (I have a collection of C.S. Lewis works staring me down. The titles I'm interested in are Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, and The Abolition of Man. I've started Mere Christianity before. I think I might just aim for ONE of this list and see where that takes me. I'm not into philosophical "reasoning"; I prefer logic, cause and effect, critical thinking, facts. As far as theology, it better be in the Bible, I've no interest in speculation. I could be reading history or economics for study. I put down Chesterton, he has great quotes and great points, but I thought a lot of what he had to say meandering, romantic, illogical nonsense. Make your point and support it or have done. If I get that from Lewis, see ya.)

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