Challenge: Books I Keep Meaning To Read

Right, so, the usual bit of context: Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. Hit their homepage to see the current week's responses, and add a link to your own if you're so inclined.

This week's challenge is Books I Keep Meaning To Read But Haven't.

Gentle Readers, that is literally my entire TBR Pile.

Still, that answer seems like a bit of a cop-out, so let's see if I can be a bit more specific. Because there are books that I feel like I put off, even though (I also feel like) they're the sort of books I should be reading just to keep my brain processing new information and making new connections. Which is to say, a lot of them are history or reference books. For example:

Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams - a study of the way that slavery financed the Industrial Revolution.

The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty - race, cooking, and the history of southern food in the United States.

Creature of Empire by Virginia DeJohn Anderson - domesticated animals in early America, and their effects on our history.

The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - a fantasy series in one of the classic Dungeons and Dragons settings. I started this but never finished it, but all the gamers I know remember it very fondly. I'd like to go back to it at some point.

The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme by John Keegan - Another one that I had purchased and started, but meant to come back to. This book attempts to capture the experience of actually being on these historical battlefields - not the grand sweeps of strategy, but the experience of individual soldiers trying to do the job. (Also, a tip of the hat to Patrick M. Prescott, who reminded me about the book.)

Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England by Keith Thomas - basically looking at the shift away from folk beliefs in the face of organized religion and science.