The bookshelf

Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War. The must-read of the season for European-history nerds. At 800+ pages, less readable than Wedgwood's 1938 classic, but promises to cover the second half of the war in detail, which she rather slid through as tedious. N.b. -- do not buy copy with missing endpaper maps.

John Keay, China: A History. If anyone can make a one-volume survey of Chinese history into more than One Damn Dynasty After Another, it should be Keay. Just put the late Han to rest.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In my lit-theory days, I never could take this book quite seriously enough to pick it up; I mentally categorize it as leading a "second wave" of theory that put Foucault et al. together into a radically subversive mix and, well, jumped the shark. (See here.) So I was delighted to visit the bookstore the other day and find a new paperback reprint -- in Penguin Classics. Too damn funny not to own a copy, and it dovetails nicely with my new resolve to read theory and philosophy for their fictional value.