I got a practically mint condition of Arthur Ryder's 1930 edition (second printing) of the Bhagavad-Gita off of AbeBooks for a mere $25. It is really wonderful. Ryder was J. Robert Oppenheimer's Sanskrit teacher at UC Berkeley. One can view it online but there's something about having an original copy.

Here's Ryder's version of the portion that Oppenheimer translated as "I am become death, destroyer of worlds":

THE BLESSED ONE [Krishna] SAID:

Death I am, and my present task

Destruction. View in me

the active slayer of these men;

For though you fail and flee,

These captains of the hostile hosts

Shall die, shall cease to be.

Arise, on fame, on victory,

On kingly joys intent!

They are already slain by me;

Be you the instrument.

Which, when quoted at length, really makes clear that this is a statement about the inevitability of death — the individual soldier is just the instrument of fate.

Just started reading Fagles' translation of The Illiad, pleasantly surprised by the fact that I'm actually finding it a joy to read.

I got Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, at last. I've been meaning to read it for some time, but only yesterday got around to actually going to the used bookstore and picking up a copy. It's pretty compelling so far, and it's always nice to read regular old fiction instead of academic stuff.

Also, Old Bailey Online is incredible. It contains records of criminal cases from London's main court from the 17th century through 1913; you start to find really fascinating stuff when you get into longer cases where people have to describe their lives or a series of events. It's a small but pretty amazing window into people's daily lives.

I've been reading a lot recently about the Nazi Economy and rearmament from 1933-1939. It was initially sparked by relatives into conspiracy theories claiming, "Jews Zionists financed Hitler so that they would have international sympathy so they could establish Israel, blah blah blah." That's obviously insane and I'm not wasting my time trying to refute someone with a mindset like that, but it did make me realize that I didn't know much about how the pre-war financing of the Nazi war machine was accomplished beyond a vague notion that Schacht was a clever fellow who did clever banking things. What are the best books/articles to help me understand this? I do have access to JSTOR, and I've been reading random articles on there. I'm especially interested not only in the internal economy, but what role international finance played and how much of an impact it had.

I've been reading about space and place, eventually I'm going transition to nature and landscape. So far I've read Cresswell, Introduction to Place, Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, currently reading Lefebreve, The Production of Space. Been spicing things up with some Deleuze and Guattari here and there. Funny I study history, but as soon as I get a chance, I stop reading it...

So recently I got History of the Goths by Wolfram from my grandpa, and I just wanted to know what the current opinion on it is. Is it still credible and a worthwhile read, or are there other better books on the matter?

Does anyone have a good introductory (preferably lay-readable) book on Eastern Roman/Byzantine history? I've been fascinated since I played Age of Empires 2 in middle school but haven't been able to find much in the way of a broad picture.

I'm looking for some good biographies on the Roman emperors Vespasian, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. I greatly enjoyed Adrian Goldsworthy's "Caesar: Life of a Colossus" and "Augustus: First Emperor of Rome". Their chronological structure and general readability made them very fun reads. If there was something similar for the three I mentioned, that would be awesome. Any suggestions?

Lawrence In Arabia, Scott Anderson, 2013. It's a good read.

The raison d'etre of this new Lawrence study is Anderson gives about 1/2 the book to Lawrence's contemporaries: intelligence men and similar from Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia (now Saudi), Palestine (or the early Israel to-be zionist movement), France and US, and all of their interactions with Lawrence. This makes for some high intrigue as each man all ready has several historical studies published on them.

Anderson claims to have access to newly declassified information, but does not identify as such in the book. I assume it's details of numerous intelligence and diplomatic letters and telegraphs in various government archives, these feature prominently throughout the book.

Overall Anderson does an excellent job of making the huge cast of characters identifiable and understandable, and doing the same for the spaghetti like momentous geopolitical history being developed in such a very short time.

Anderson is rarely critical of Lawrence, perhaps only in pointing out his probable treasonous behaviour in revealing Sykes-Picot to Faisel when only about a dozen highly placed persons were in the know. Anderson is critical of almost every other character, with a few notable exceptions such as General Allenby and Prince Faisel, Mark Sykes is presented as a bit of a buffoon. Anderson develops an interesting, both critical and realistic complementary, profile on Djemal Pasha, something I thought would be hard to do but that's my bias being born and grown up in the area he regularly executed prisoners.

The book has two flaws, one minor, one major.

A minor flaw is Anderson goes into excessive detail over way too many pages on the gross incompetence of British Generals everywhere in WW1 theaters; he details the disastrous British Indian armies stalemate defeats at Baghdad and Qut, including going into lengthy, superfluous detail on Lawrence's role in ransoming the incompetent generals with gold to the Ottomans.

A major flaw is Anderson's writing style: completely readable except that every section ends with a Hollywood hook "Lawrence didn't know the letter arrived 3 days prior was to change everything..." It keeps the complex, often changing subject flowing, but every damn section and chapter ends with this little portentous hook: we are being played with.

Does anyone know any good books on kabuki courtesan plays in the first half of the 18th century and/or Nakamura Tomijuro I?

I'm traveling through Denmark and Sweden right now studying Viking Age beads as indicators of trade. I want to know when the viking raids witnessed in the West really could be connected to the slave trade attested in the East, and beads as an indicator of exchange help build a more robust picture than many studies which rely mostly on coins or precious metals (which certainly can't give a full picture of a non-monetary economy).

At any rate, I'm learning just how important it is to talk to people, and I've been fairly overwhelmed by how generous researchers, curators, and contractors have been with their time, books(!), knowledge, food, and coffee. I'm also learning how to pitch my topic, which takes a bit of finesse. Archaeologists tend to be skeptical because I want to use glass beads to study slavery. Historians tend to be skeptical because I want to use archaeology at all (and one funding reviewer told me that using archaeology to study history wasn't really interdisciplinary!).

So wish me luck as I continue, and if anyone knows of Swedes I should contact when I head back that way in the next couple days, I'm certainly taking recommendations!